Basically they drop free wood (gas?) at your door.
I would love to get some of your thoughts on whether this would work and be a game changer or if it would fail for reasons a silly little new booty (noob) like myself couldn’t comprehend.
Thank you for reading and again I offer my apologies for my ignorance.
Chips are a very difficult fuel for woodgas, it likes to bridge and stick together in the hopper and that can cause a lot of tar to be generated.
I have used Chip Drop before, they bring you an entire truckload but it is very good for landscaping or No-Till farming which is what I used the chips for.
The chips that show up are long splinters, usually freshly made by a tree service company.
No need for apologies Yohance. Knowing what is available for a fuel source is perhaps the number one question anyone should ask before planning a gasifier build. That and what you intent to produce WG to power. I have no personal experience with that kind of fuel but I know that there is a design called the Drizzler that can use it. The mechanism for metering in the fuel is kind of complicated though.
Welcome to the DOW YohanceS.
As said you are approaching from the right direction: Wood Fuel First.
Many have tried Arborist truck load dumps of “Free”.
The problems for a wood gasifier fuel is these chips are whole tree ALL. Whisker twigs, green needles and leafs, limbs and a percentage of not real wood chips but shredded strands.
It had to be laboriously all of the tonnage mass sorted out. “Classified”
One of the fellows who has worked hard on machine chipped sorting and classifying systems documented here on the DOW is Pete Stanaitis @spaco .
His works found on the topics here of:
Tired of Wood Chip Sorters Yet?
Sorting Wood Chips By Machine?
And in 2023 on the For Sale topic where he was selling his evolved system.
His evolution and pictures of his works and results he put up on his site of
One of his YouTubes here:
All of this should make the points you need to be on a largish Rural property to receive these large truck loads of mixed-all.
Then have the means to distribute out onto your property the reject sorted out 60 to 80%.
Makes great muds abatements. Once a few years rotted-in soil structure improvers.
Guys developing and using clean sorted classified wood chip capable gasifier s have had much better results going out Rural in the winter sap-down and leaf off cutting and hand de-twigging clean limb leaders and then modified chipper machining them.
Greg Manning up in Canada.
Stephen Abbaddesa in NE, USA.
One Swedish fellow who only post up in Swedish.
I have now come to the conclusion that quality and consistency of wood (fuel) for a gasifier is important and I will not be pursuing indiscriminate (trash) whole tree wood chips as a primary fuel source.
It would seem that though it could be done, the labor costs and utter lack of simplicity have concurred the day.
My motivation for pursuing this technology is to bring value to my community post shtf (cme/emp).
To that end i plan on having a vehicle that can drive on wood as well as having the knowledge to explain and build another in the future should my community need me to serve them.
I have had good results following the chipper trucks and asking for some of the branches BEFORE they run them through. Usually they don’t mind if you stay out of their way. You can harvest a pile of branch wood and take it home to your wood chunker. I ran a woodgas truck right in town for several years on nothing but scrounged branch wood. Worked great.
I like the idea of processing wood chunks on sight and leaving any mess (leaves etc…) in the woods. Especially with a chunker like yours Chris, mounted to a trailer.
Or others i have seen that simply set their chunker in a trailer.
Be it gas powered or generator powered for the electriclly driven ones. Either way a person could power thier chunker on charcoal to be less dependent.
You have a very noble purpose. However, it involves other people doing a lot of work, and many of them will not want to. So then, what to do? My answer to this also involves a lot of work from me.
I would look for working people, farmers, tree care people, maybe doomsday prepers, perhaps just people like yourself, especially people who cut and weld steel. SHOW them a working system, and encourage them to build their own. Especially encourage them to be creative and make innovations.
Just waiting for an emergency, and then doing something is not going to work. It takes too long to build and then learn to operate these systems. By the time you will have learned everything the emergency will be past. You have to be the one who is prepared. This way, in the emergency, you will have something they don’t, and they will be jealous. Then maybe a very few will do something.
This is an example of the kind of thinking noble people must do if they want to be effective.
God bless you,
Rindert
