Blockquote: “One more thing I’m curious about: Based on all the information I’ve gathered from you, it seems that for small installations and beginners, charcoal gasification is simpler and less frustrating. The chances of getting discouraged at the start are lower. So I don’t understand why there is so much more information online about wood gasifiers, while there are far fewer resources on charcoal gasification, and it seems less popular.”
Robert if you mean why all of the now current on-popular Internet hyping of woodgas versus charcoal gas . . . that answer is easy.
Internet “popular” is now heavily biased to paying folks who will post up interests. View counts matter for direct paying; and for attracting streaming Ads revenues.
“All natural” “Clean” “Green” wood will be an easier sell than cough, cough, dusty, hands blackening wood charcoal. Plus the appearance of black chunked up wood charcoal is undeniably a carbon fuel. And “popular” says now carbon is BaaaD!
Back in the 1970’s/80’s/90’s woodgas got studied, books and papers written up a lot by those predominately making for-University and for-Governmental organization presentations. The route they felt would lead to greater “biomass” energy adoptation.
Both of these approaches are failures. No matter how many words, moneys, and years invested.
As J.O. and others have said: because of the bulkiness of the base wood fuel stocks and the labor steps needed to raw wood gasification; or the making wood charcoal; then gasify it for shaft power. Wood fuels only IS ever adopted, and Will be daily-use adopted by individuals. Individual insistent, I want-to-make and control my own power users.
And we, us actually users; do break down into generally two approaches. For our own important to us reasons.
We tease and joke with each other at our bests.
Some get entirely too serious with their energy missionary preaching. This is very irritating and annoying.
The Historical fact is that wood for energies gets use boosted in times of wars and economic downturns. When the pre-refined purified easy-use; supplied; gets cut off. When the wheels of our civilizations and cultures go wobbly threatening to fall off. Wood for energies like a wax candle will always produce come-what-may.
Come Hell. Come High water. Or the second coming of Christ. ( Wars are the hell. High water is the natural disasters. And the third are times when the veneer of social civilization peels off and you just must endure through to better times.)
Regards
Steve Unruh
I’ve been trying to build this thing since 1984. Runs on household garbage and produces 1.3 gigawatts of energy. Best I have come up with is a gasifier. Runs on scraps of wood, charred or not. Does not make 1.3 gigawatts but does run lights and equipment when nature gets nasty and most importantly, allows me to give the powers that be the finger.
Using the retort gas to heat the retort is a common practice yes but either way you end with a huge exess of gas. When the pyrolisis starts the proces of carbonising is exothermic so it requires wery litle aditional heat input. You can check my 2.7m3 Kursk kiln and how much exess gas we are talking about… most burn the gas more as a way to not smoke up an entire valley (wich l may or may not have done before ) more thain the need of more heat.
Steve beet me to it. Its marketing and clicks. I too learnt about charcoal gasification relatively late. But in the golden DOW years char and wood gasifiers were evenly matched in use if l remember right.
As for waste gasification. What kind of waste? But generaly a good gasifier, specialy a charcoal downdraft will have no problem with a portion of the fuel as waste. Mr Wayne will need to chim in for exact mileage but l belive he reports you can drive for about 2 miles on a dead cat. Probably depends on the cats size too
Oh, and a member here, wich shall not be named, told me he even once disposed the remains of an ilegaly dispatched aligator in a gasifier
The authorities of a modern society or country are constantly inventing new modern laws with which they control the nation, now under the pretext of a “green transition” they have lured many people to cover their roofs with solar panels and replace wood-burning stoves with heat pumps, the result is expected, electricity prices have jumped, and the network is becoming unreliable. The goal of the authorities is to keep you on your monthly bill, to be in a system where they set prices.
Someone wrote: All in the old authoritarian spirit:
“You have to hit the nation if it doesn’t hit itself!”
Yes, something like that applies to nations of this type. We have to hit our own, so that outsiders are afraid of us, because, what would we do to them if they came around"
In part it has to do with available resources for the country, in part it has to do with air quality and environment. In part, especially with the green movement in the US, they added a bunch of ‘social change’ to push their brand of socialistm and kind of skipped the other reasons. Add the ‘global’ part of global warming, and pretty much everyone fits in the context.
In the US, they have been hammering at the resources and environmental quality issues for 6+ decades. In part you folks are ‘catching up’ to where are laws are, an the EU took some of it a step further.
You are kind of in the gap because a lot of the laws are more appliable to city/surburban life, then they are in the country.
On the bright side, solar is actually cost effective now. It wasn’t ten years ago.
On the downside, you are right, the utilities method of energy production is based literally on a best guess as to what future demand will be and they may not have enough power lines to cover everyone.
Гадаю, що проекти малих двигунів з газогенераторами на дровах (не на деревному вугіллі а на деревині) мають місце в домашньому господарстві. Просто до цього треба підійти з вмілими руками і головою…
I think that projects of small engines with gas generators on firewood (not on charcoal, but on wood) have a place in the household. You just have to approach it with skillful hands and head…
Here in the US I think it is not “the nation”, but big business. Here power companies are slowly dying, because of more and more solar panels.
Here we had a four day outage last spring. There was a lot of wind, so the power company turned of the power because they did not want to start a fire. Remember we had the Marshal Fire here. But then the local power company workers here did not know how to turn it back on safely. So there was a long delay. So then this fall a lot of new solar panels are in the the neighborhood. But the same houses with new solar panels still use natural gas for heat, because it is cheap and extremely reliable. How simple is this?
Rindert
I think the power companies are pretty safe here Rindert. Yesterday we had 3 hours of sun. Today we got another hour. Those are the first sun breakthroughs of our constantly gray skies since the 18th of November. That gets a little depressing.
Hey RindertW. out here mid-West Coast it is a mixed bag with power distribution being pro-actively shut off in winds storms.
The privately owned power companies in California and Oregon have been sued having to pay out multimillions after wildfires spreads.
The Public Power suppliers like we are on do not shut off beforehand, as of yet.
They may have some liability relief as non-profit Publics.
Or maybe because their core of 3-5-7 Commissioners are subject to being all voters, voted in; or voted out.
Many of the PUD’s have gone non-Union. With then much of the repair/restoration/new-lines work now being done by private bid-contractors.
S.U.
That may be true where you are, UP Michigan isn’t it? Here we get more than 300 days of sun per year. And very intense because about a mile above sea level.
Walmart, up here, uses solar hot air panels for heat just because it’s good for their bottom line. If that ever catches on in the residential sector I think big changes are going to happen.
Rindert
I live in the lower peninsula Rindert but the western side just off Lake Michigan. The lake is the reason we get no sun, Not how far north we are. I’d enjoy this area much more if there was at least some winter sun. Summer sun I avoid.
California went on an anti-for profit utility binge and the for profit utilities are going bankrupt. I think the PG&E or Southern edison actually filed for bankruptcy. That is why I also always suspect someone doing something to the transformers to start fires.
Our old house used to be a ways up the hill in the area just burned. During a “Santa Ana Wind Event” we could look out over the valley and watch the flashes as power lines arced and transformers blew. I had, and have, no way of knowing how many arcs and how many transformer deaths, but on an exciting evening you might see a flash every minute or two when it was really blowing hard.
I was guessing a transformer started the Eaton fire, but there’s some alleged evidence, and a lawsuit, based on photos and video of flames at the base of a high-line tower. Time will tell, and maybe the truth.
I’m sorry for not responding, but it’s not because I lost interest, but because I was checking other methods of producing electricity from heat on a small scale.
The wood gas or charcoal gas technique discussed above is undoubtedly the most popular, but I came across something else:
We are talking about the so-called mCHP generator. (micro combined heat and power system). This name covers various solutions, sometimes also wood gas generators, but here I wanted to give an example based on Stirling engines. Take a look for yourself:
Converting energy from wood into electricity using a Stirling engine is even more niche than wood gas generators and it is even more difficult to find any information.
But my research shows that in theory the entire process is less efficient than wood gasification, but the advantage is much greater operational stability and virtually no fuel requirements. It’s just about generating heat. It doesn’t matter if the fuel is garbage, wood, MDF, furniture boards, etc.
I’m curious if any of you have experienced something similar.
) more thain the need of more heat.
