Yes my experience so far is charcoal is lot more energy dense by weight and is comparable by volume.
Here is another scenario; lets say you are going to run that chipper with a direct wood gasifier. You are way better off using the wood for heat directly to produce charcoal than you are fueling a chipping machine to create raw wood fuel. Roughly 1/8 of the energy of the raw wood going into your gasifier is converted to shaft power to run the chipper. These small engines are hardly 20% efficient and 1/3 of the energy potential is spent in the gasification process to create engine grade fuel the rest is lost in heat.
Another thanks from me too Wayne Keith, so far i havent seen any body building your WOOD gasifier from the plans in your book, have any tar problems,The wood gasifier i built from your book-HAVE WOOD WILL TRAVEL- certenly works well when staying with the dementions in the plans.And my Two WK gasifiers work exceptionally well,with no TAR problems too date since 4 or 5 years ago. No Charco makeing needed, though for small skale generator i would go with charco allso.
Up to now I had not considered that someone would have a problem finding wood for fuel. Even in the city there is always building and demolition going on with scrap wood being thrown away. Where I live there is a lot of orchard agriculture. A lot of cherries. I had a supply of cherry pits given to me once and I burned them for heat in the wood stove. Extremely hot. I’m wondering if olive pits, peach pits or other fruit pits would work as well for Jurrasic’s situation. I’m not to the point where I can do a lot of experimentation and understand what I’m doing but if I can get hold of more cherry pits I’ll mix them into the charcoal like Matt is doing with the sawdust and see what happens.
Koen, Does the 30 % charcoal yield with the retort system include the wood needed to get it started? If not, how would including that wood affect the yield?
I do not think they should have cut down that particular tree . But if the tree stopped a mile down stream after next rain it would not have mattered . Nepal has terraces that took thousands of years to build that are being destroyed due to deforestation due to tourist who want to see terraces
