I agree with Sean; charcoal would be best for you. I don’t know what you heat your house with or are going to heat your shop with, but if it is wood you will be making char that could be used in the gasifier.
If you build a wood gasifier, one other trick you can keep in mind is; have a tank for condensate to be emptied into and run your hot gas through the tank to help keep the condensate from freezing and also it will help cool the gas. TomC
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Welcome Abraham ,
What size generator are you wanting to run and for how many hours a day ?
Now i don’t live in a ice cold climate like you do , but i do live in a part of the country that because i am half way up a mountain does get chilly in winter times , and so i have 2 indoor wood burning fires in my house and i get most the fuel i need to run my 8Kva generator on Charcoal for roughly 4 hours a day charging up battery banks and power equipment like saws ect , all i do is put fresh wood into the fire’s wait till they need more wood and then take out the hot coals into a sealed container before reloading the fires with wood again and do that roughly once every hour each fire , keeping you and the house warm and a bonus off shoot is free motor fuel .
Dave
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Hi again cold climate Abraham,
Here is another far interior cold dry North woodgasifier guy: Byron Gagne
There once was a guy from central coastal Alaska who posted up. You know wet’n cold.
Haven’t heard from him in a long time.
And some of the central Canadian fellows who are cold-dry too.
Arvid Olson (tritowns), Terry Lavictoire, and Gary Tait.
Search for their works using the magnifying glass search tool in the top of page bar.
Me? Naw. Just cold and wet. Wet and cool. And at times just wet, wet and above 50F having to shed off the wools to keep from steaming.
Regards
Steve Unruh
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Thanks. I will check that out. May be better for a generator. I have a 6800 watt generator right now but want a larger one eventually.
Id also like a truck converted too of course.
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I use heating oil mainly right now. And pellets. Havent used exclusively wood for a few years. But we have plenty up here. Thanks for the advice
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You will probably want two anyway. Char is better for small engines… Check out @Matt 's thread He does a bit of work with generators and gasifiers.
Somewhere in there he discusses this, which he is/was using in his shop.
Which I wouldn’t use it in a house, but it is one of the few that are continuous and you can utilize the heat.
He also did some work at one point with using it as a backup generator for offgrid.
Personally, I would use solar/battery and charge the batteries with it, then run the generator through the solar inverter. It can get tedious trying to run the generator 24/7 and making/processing fuel and such especially if you don’t through the winter.
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You lose a noticeable amount of your wattage output with a woodgas or chargas powered genset. So that means either oversize the unit, and account for the losses or use methods that don’t need a direct pull on the generator. Sean made a good suggestion of using the generator to charge a battery bank, or making your own battery charger with a Permanent Magnet Alternator or Generator. You can still use the genset for really demanding things that would stress out an inverter, like power tools for example.
Matt uses a 9000W generator on charcoal and can still run his power tools in the shop.
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Right on. Thanks for all the good input.
We are dry and cold up here.
Charging batteries is what zi had in mind or like you said use the genset for the high power thing when needed. We are not off grid up here at this point so my idea was also to have the set up mainly on standby for when the power goes out. Which is fairly frequently in the winter.
The other book i ordered (petersons gasifier bible) just came in the mail. So now I have a lot more reading to catch up on
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By the way if you go lithium, make sure you get ones with Low Temp as well as High Temp cutoff protections.
Can mean the difference between a 20 year long battery bank and a 2 year long one, lithium doesn’t like to be charged below freezing. But since they don’t offgas you can store them in the house.
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Good advice. I do plan on going with lithium batteries. I a ways out on that. A friend of mine has built his own battery bank set up for solar. Very nice set up i will pretty much be copying.
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I also have an old short school bus im turning i to a camper that would be awesome to go camping on wood power. But its has a 7.3 diesel in it. So that might not happen. I know you can convert diesels but less info out there on it
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Can a guy use straight coal in a charcoal gasifier? Seems like this is straight forward answer but maybe theres unforeseen issues im not thinking of. Theres a coal mine couple hours south of me. Pretty cheap coal.
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On the coal topic, l wuld say no. First of all, if its a updraft we are talking about, its a big no. If its downdraft, l think mixing coal with charcoal might work but not ideal.
Two reasons. First, coal has a large mineral content that will form loads of ash and cause problems. Culd work if diluted with low ash charcoal.
Second, sulfur. If the coal has high sulfur content this will drasticly shorten the life of an engine and certainly the gasifier.
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Just out of curiosity and because you seem to have a knowledge of such things, Do you think that coke could be used as a gasifier fuel? Admittedly it would be foolish to go through the process of making it for such a use.
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I wouldn’t do it, beyond what @KristijanL said, you also have heavy metals like mercury, lead and a number of others that basically turn your ash into toxic waste, and also get into your air, engine surfaces, etc.
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It is maybe a little easier to run a diesel on woodgas than a spark ignited engine. You just put a throttle upstream of the woodgas inlet. The only issue seems to be that diesels were never intended to have vacuum in the intake manifold, so they usually don’t have valve stem seals. This causes them to use a lot of oil, because the now vacuum in the manifold sucks oil down the valve stems.
Rindert
http://forum.driveonwood.com/t/converting-diesels-to-woodgas/
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Right on. Ill do some research on it. I know ive seen some youtube videos on Diesel engines running wood gas. Just havent found much how-to on it. A wood powered camper bus up here would be amazing
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On the inverse, you could see if someone wants to trade your 7.3 for an equivalent gasoline engine.
Depending on the compression of your engine if it’s over 17:1 that’s the highest that woodgas can tolerate on average. I want to get my hands on a diesel that is beyond it’s service life on diesel and add spark ignition for a woodgas only vehicle.
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I’ve thought about that. But why the “beyond it’s service life part”?
I’ve sort of changed my thinking over time to. My ideal wg engine would just be an engine built for natural gas.
Rindert
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When I say beyond it’s service life I mean it has an insufferably low compression for diesel. Something sold off for cheap because they wouldn’t want to get it resleeved or rebuilt.
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