i was wondering how you make charcoal in a stove?
i have a guess load it up until you get a coal bed then keep adding wood then do a complete shut off of the air
i do have an alleged air tight stove but that is questionable when it runs me out of the house sometimes lol
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Finally got this one running. Cant upload picture now. But I got the idea even a simple fire or hookway retort was to difficult for me. Just saw the gassing for the first time in my life! Nice! This system needs some work and then the next step.
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You could get little tins or metal containers and put them in with the fire perhaps below or beside it, you want at least a small hole or series of holes so the gasses can come out.
By little I mean relatively. Like a 30 cal ammo can sized container filled with wood chunks.
Or you could shovel the coals out and put the coals in an airtight container to snuff it out.
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Ryan this is how i make most of my daily needs .
During my winter times if i am stuck at home and cant get over to Brian’s yard to burn off junked pallets i will make my daily charcoal at home in the wood burning fire , the best and i do mean the best source of house heating charcoal fuel wood for me is hardwood pallets , i have a company 20km away that strip and repair old Chep pallets they pull them them apart and replace the runners and boards most of these old pallets are Australian hardwoods and boy they burn hot but they also burn pretty fast as they are small lumps of wood and so all i do is load the fire up and maybe an hour or so later its time to reload the fire as now i have little or no flame just coals , i open the door and put a saucepan inside the fire and using the small long handled shovel i fill my saucepans up and put a lid on it and then do the same with another pot i sit both pots on the hearth and reload the fire up making sure i have left plenty of coals there so the wood ignites again pretty fast , i then take pans out side and empty into a steel drum to cool off , i can get as much as 75litres a day if i really need too and that’s more than enough for my daily need , plus its all very well burnt charcoal never any brands so no tar no impurity’s apart from a lot of ash from the paint that was on the pallets and that is got rid off when i grind down my fuel anyway oh and all the nails i use a hand held magnate that takes care of all that easily as i grind up , i can take as much as a 100 kgs back to the scrap yard some winters .
Dave
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for myself i have many acres when the ice storm took down many trees and a lot of pine so lots of limbs right now i have been heating and cooking on the scraps no grid tie right now it broke my line so if been doing a mini pit burn i got the hang of making biochar/charcoal then quenching outside but people on here said moisture is an issue and charcoal by this method takes a while to dry i could “bake” it in a fairly air tight container is this nessisary or if i bake it will i just open it up to ash? i have a good amount for my first try at running an engine on charcoal
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If you have two barrels, you could make a TLUD that doesn’t make a ton of smoke. Drill or punch some holes around the bottom edge of the side, and take the other barrel and cut the bottom and top away. Pack the bottom drum as much as you can with the limbs and light it at the top. Put some rebar or what I use is square tubing and put the open ended barrel on top, it acts like an afterburner. It normally takes me maybe an hour to get down to coals and then I push off the afterburner, cover the holes at the bottom with sand and I put a lid on top of the barrel to snuff it out. I do it at night so I’ll know it’s cooled off when I get up in the morning.
I did this with two barrels that I couldn’t use for gasifiers because they had solid tops, no removable lid.
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Best way if you have a fire pit is when your charcoal is going to be used for engine grade is once you see coals then shovel the coals into a drum and loosely place the lid to allow to cool down , do not throw water onto the coals you will not get it dry enuff unless you place in the hot sun or bake it , try not to seal down the lid too tight other wise it will implode as it cools down .
Dave
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Moisture in char can be a problem for updraft gasifiers. In my experience, once it is wet, drying it is a real pain unless you can put it somewhere warm and dry all winter, or leave it out in the sun all summer. I posted some pictures of a pit that I used for making biochar in Kristijans Kursk 2.0 thread. Basically, I found that a pit can very easily be quenched just by sprinking water on the top layer and with a little tamping, that prevents the warm coals below from relighting. It would have to be sifted, but I think it would be entirely doable to make bone-dry, engine-grade char in a pit.
And as Dave just said, you can also smother it. I find that those steel garbage cans work great, as they are tight enough to put out a fire, but not so tight as to make a vacuum.
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i will have to bake what i made so far i dont mind because after i can collect more char from the fire i have a lot of wood to burn i might dig a deep hole with my backhoe then i can smoother it better but as many trees that are down and i cut firewood anyway 55 gallon drum for me isnt as easy to get with my limitations and location im in an area where people nab up scrap and use drums i had to beg the rusted well pressure tank off my hoarder neighbor lol but its big enough to bake a good batch im only running a generator with it the open pit it heats my hot water who can complain about a near boiling bathtub full of hot water from cleaning up the yard/wood cutting/splitting/milling/firewood scrap plus the multitude of broken pine/trees from the ice storm the amount i have on the acres is more than one person can deal with i might even be able to make a mini charcoal device for cutting the grass getting gasoline isnt easy as i cant drive but yeah is there a certain method/temp/time to bake the charcoal?
i know its not the ideal way but its what i have to work with when i can get more tanks/drum i can build something like the one you describe
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Ryan , also look out for a old 3 point link seed broadcaster cone , you should find a rusty one that someone has left in the hedgerow they make a great burn container , that way you wont get your charcoal mixed with earth and clay but any old tank would kind of do , and if you have to buy a couple of old drums with lids it will be worth it to you as they are so useful anyway for all kinds of things .
Dave
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I need to see if I still have an old broadcaster. I coulda sworn I saw one in my woods that we forgot about. Would be great for the pallet wood instead of cutting them down to fit in a barrel
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Nothing really, but for me the first time in real. It appears that the barrel is not tight, gas comes from everywhere. Half a barrel with good charcoal. Offgrid system is functional. I scored an old batt pack from small forklift. Doing great with 4000 W inverter and 2200 W saw. No problems at all. With a little work the hookway will be ok, and it really is smokeless. This the best path for me, if I want to make power whitout to much effort, this is the way. Thanks everyone for sharing knowledge.
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I stumbled across this video tonight. Listen to that roar.
I don’t quite know how its plumbed inside to get the cooked gasses to combust or why it roars like that. The end product is graphite that is pretty darn impressive
It is the same design as the one I posted in making charcoal without smoke, and was told it was essentially a hookway. the only differences are it routes the gas outside, it has wood in the after burner, and the other one had a long snout so they could get it started it with waste oil.
The large pipe goes straight through. Then the circle around it at the top but inside the barrel, collects gas, it routes the gas out through the square stock coming out the side, and back down to the burner area. He put the wood in the bucket at the top I think to help keep a flame and burn off the excess gases to make sure it was smoke free. It is kind of a neat harness for it.
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I wonder what the street value of the white stuff is HA HA HA…
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From what I heard it was actually pretty expensive because it is considered like sacred or used for rituals. Notice how carefully he is packaging it and handling it, you don’t do that with a commodity product.
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I have seen some Japanese hand warmers that you fill with charcoal, I think one of the uses.
I’m going to say what we are all thinking however…
I wonder who it would work in a car…
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I think my dad had one of those for hunting that I remember seeing something like it but he never used it. Quite possibly, it didn’t work well because water could get into it, or it came unlatched one time. Either could’ve easily happened and been enough to shelf it.
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We used to have those handwarmers in Sweden and the rod was made of pressed charcoaldust, it would last for a couple of hours.
That charcoal in the video is really expensive, some fine dining restaurants use it. Binchotan charcoal is hot for hours. The use white oak.
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My Dad used to go to Japan frequently for business. Somewhere I think I have one of these hand warmers. I seem to remember it but ? Things are lost over the decades…
I have some funny pictures someplace too of my father in the 80s wearing a rob that does not quite cover his arse and some wooden clogs too small for his feet at a bath with some friends from work. He said the place was weird, but the food was good and he mentioned two things, the charcoal grills, vending machines with everything in them and nothing was built with the consideration of a man over 6 feet.
I am going to ask my dad if he still has any photo’s from those days in the restaurants and see if we can find those grills…
At some point in the 80s I was up in a gold mine way the hell up the north and I had some Fuji cameras Dad sent me from a vending machine ( He was fascinated with vending machines and everything the Japs did that was automatic or space saving ). So I shot a 24 exposer and dropped the camera in a Fuji film box to develop and when I picked it up they wanted to know where the Camera came from it was nothing they had ever seen, not just film drop off but a whole camera!!!
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