More government dollars at work. $160,000 to research how beneficial bio-char is and how it can be made. Morons like me have been doing this for years without a penny from big brother. Still it’s good to see something sensible being done.
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So on the back of my truck is a Bio-char maker. The Washington State government might pay me to use it to help our forestry management. Right.
Sen. Hawkins feels positive about the direction the state is moving in in regards to forest management and prioritizing wildfires as a concern statewide. House bill 1168, which passed in the last legislative session, provides additional resources for firefighting, as well as commitments to long-term forest management practices.
That makes my truck a “preventive forest fighting vehicle”.
We need about a million in this state alone to help out this fantastic effort.
And our loving state tree huggers can help stop the forest fires that are burning up our trees by supporting more DOW vehicles. Don’t forget it is Carbon neutral and helps the environment in reversing the Green House Effects/ Global Climate Change Effects and Climate Warming. This helps all of these people groups too. WOW, WOW , WOW!!!
I now feel very good when I driving my truck on Washington State roads.
I hope the state government does not think they need to tax me for doing all this good for the trees on state and federal lands.
All kidding aside this could be a big plus for DOW drivers across the dry USA.
Bob
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Hello All,
Thinking. @JocundJake was here, at my place and said that I was getting more charcoal from my TLUD than he would have expected. He also looked at some of my charcoal and said it was engine grade.
So why is my charcoal yield higher than would be expected? The only explanation I can come up with is that the way I do it doesn’t get the wood as hot, and doesn’t drive off as many volatiles as other methods. So maybe, for what we are doing here, low temperature charcoal is good enough. Does this fit with other’s experience?
Rindert
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if you light your charcoal in the open air does it burn with any open yellow flames?
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Hi Don
No, If I burn some in my barbecue it doesn’t make any flames. But it does flavor the meat. I think the flavors come from volatiles.
Rindert
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I tried smothering my fire with a lid, water and a blanket:
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Crappy charcoal.
Very soft, very oily, lots of wood left uncharred.
These problems are probably due to the feedstock.
It was dry but also rotting,punky and of various sizes.
I was able to crush it with one hand and I needed soap to get it clean.
I guess I will sift this mess, for practice.
In the future I will avoid mixing dimensional lumber and tree trimmings.
There are plenty of pallets in the world, ready to be processed into stringers and deck boards.
Tree debris might be better suited for the wood chipper, or in a hugelmound.
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I like the retort within a tlud design shown in some of your videos.
Do you have to add fuel to it until the retort starts off gassing or is the initial charge of fuel enough?
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Good evening William. No, we start the reactor filling the sides and top with scraps and hay and lite it; once it starts we put the lid and chimeny on the big barrel and it starts to burn the wood between the inner barrel and the outer one, you can see it from the outside on the walls of the outer barrel has the heat moves down. When the gases start to flow on the bottom, we help it with a small fire. Normaly we use scrap wood and bamboo for this, because it burns with lots of heat and little smoke (we have lots of it and use it for many things). When the color changes from orange/yellow to blue, there is no more smoke to burn and we retire the coles and close the chimeney hole and the three air intakes at the bottom. It chokes itself, next day it`s cool and dry. No water needed. The hole process takes about 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Very simple.
Big embrace to you
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Thank you very much for taking the time to give such a description.
I am encourage.
I will try this method myself, once I can source the materials.
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My charcoal crusher has been working great, now I just need to set it up on a ramp, build a feed hopper for it, add a big diameter pulley on it and hook one of my 12v motors.
If that doesn’t work out so well I might use Bicycle power.
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Cody,
Are you still using the small electric chipper?
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No it finally died on me. I made a prettty simple crusher using some bar stock and flat bar.
Drilled center holes in the flat bar to accept a 5/8" shaft and had them alternate so only 2 teeth would engage at a time. Right now I’m using an old steering wheel to rotate it.
The grinder itself is set into an angle iron frame and I built a wooden box to make a small compartment to put the Charcoal. Even with just hand strength it bends nails. Not a whole lot of dust from it either especially with hardwood stock.
I originally used it this ways up but I found a lot of the char had to be guided to the teeth.
I turned it the other way up and it works much better. With bigger pieces of char it will take small bites out and eventually work it down.
I should have saved that chipper for making filter media. I might try to copy the blade and anvil design of the chipper to make charcoal. I really liked the flake consistency it made for very dense fuel. 9 pounds per 5 gallons worth even with soft pallet wood.
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So far I haven’t gotten into the tluds or anything other than throwing wood in a barrel and lighting it. I just keep throwing more fuel in as I work at other things in the area but the other day I made a barrel of char. I had a lot of wood left over that I prepared for Jacob North. I made quite a bit more than he needed so I started burning all the little cut off pieces in the fire barrel. Usually I just feed it out of my wood stove fuel. The whole barrel of the cut up stuff burned perfectly and there were no brands when I ground it. Ended up with about 35 gallons of good char from about a two hour burn. I’m not sure I want to do all that cutting to make char from again but it definitely is a reason to seriously think about building a chunker.
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Tom that’s why I like using old/bad lumber for charcoal feed stock. It’s thin and burns to char easier than stove sized logs.
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Funny you mention that Cody , for many years i made all my charcoal from broken Chep pallets that are stripped down and in stillages for anyone that wants firewood i heated my home for years and collected the charcoal from my fire every hour making upwards of 50 liter’s a day of hardwood charcoal as a by product , this season i am using blackwood that was taken down by the storms and a few dead tree’s from the paddock next door , i realized pretty soon that if i want charcoal i had to split them so they were no bigger than 1 inch thick to be able to quickly turn the wood into good charcoal , burns a lot faster and so i have to refill the fire more often , but i don;t mind its a good way of making motor fuel on the side without using my outside kilns ,and . they are needed only when i need large amounts of engine grade for my generators
Dave
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Thought I’d go back to here for relevancy.
Has anyone that runs a TLUD have any success with long but narrow pieces of wood as feed stock?
I usually use pallet wood but I can’t expect that to last forever or frequent enough. I do have loads of trees and junky pest walnuts that I have to dispose of.
Trying to save time I think it would process a lot faster if I cut them to cubit long pieces or about 20"
I’d like to go back to a TLUD so it’ll be done more in batches than constant feeding. It actually takes longer to make a full barrel of charcoal with a constant feed.
I’ve even thought about using one of my 250/300 gallon oil tanks as a giant TLUD. Something I could light early one morning and cap off at the end of the day.
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I have limited experience making charcoal, but have used TLUDs for outdoor heating. Mine have been mainly round 5-gallon (20 l) or 1-gallon (#10 tin can, 4 l) cans. One can for fuel canister, one for combustion/chimney. Both cans the same size for each stove. Secondary air between the cans, with the top chimney can’s bottom cut to form a fan-like shape to swirl the burning gases and increase the time in the chimney. Chunks work well, half to one inch for the small TLUD, maybe 1 to two for the larger.
I do remember your question 
. It has worked pretty well to use sticks cut to the vertical length of the fuel cans, stacked vertically, but not too tightly. These seem to burn down their length just fine, without cutting into chunks. About half inch for the small can, 3/4 to 1 1/4 for the larger is good, according to my fiddling.
No, no, not fiddling. I meant art and experimental science 
.
Kent
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Cody,
Kent’s reply is right on. I have a friend in Rwanda who manufactures TLUD cookstoves and recommends long vertical sticks up to 1-1/2 inches as fuel. Any smaller size sticks works as long as the diameters are consistent – TLUD (Top Lit Up Draft) and (Totally Likes Uniform Dimensions). I make fuel with free wood chips classified between 1" inch and 3/8" screens in a 100 gallon TLUD. The trick here is a variable speed fan (blow drier on cool with simple light dimmer) at the bottom. A little forced air lets you fine-tune a struggling TLUD into clean and efficient charcoal producer.
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I was thinking of doing that with a TLUD actually, I could invert a solid drum and use the 2" bung as my air inlet with a grate and just use one of the bilge blowers.
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