Thanks for the input guys. I guess I’ll be ordering more ceramic blanket. One thing I’ve been wondering about. Has anybody tried routing their cooling tubes through a water jacket with the water pumped through a radiator? Seems like a fairly easy thing to do and would eliminate a lot of other piping.
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Tom,
There is a thread for water heaters. Might be some ideas you could use.
Rindert
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I’m not sure we are talking about the same thing Steve. I’m talking about surrounding the piping out of the heat exchanger by building a water tight box around the pipes. The gas would never come into contact with any water and the water would never have gas in it. The water in the container would be piped through a car radiator to cool and then back into the tank. My thinking was that if the entire serpentine cooling system in a stationary gasifier like the Ben Peterson design, was encased you would get much cooler gas. May be moot in a vehicle system since there is air movement constantly bleeding heat off the piping but would also benefit a vehicle like my proposed UTV project where there would be no room for much piping and very little air movement puttering around the place a few MPH tops.
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I’ve got a few water heating miles under my belt as well Rindert. Twenty years of heating water in my wood stove to pump through my radiant floors. Actually I’ve just finished building a new heater with which I hope to heat the 600 gallon tank in my greenhouse. Haven’t run it yet because I need to get styrofoam to line the tank before I fill it and because I have failed in two attempts to bend half inch copper tubing into an 11 inch coil to go inside the heater tank. I’ve tried to do it without filling the tubing but even at that diameter I got kinks. Our temps are finally going to drop and I’ll get new tubing and freeze water in it. That will solve the kinking problem. This is kind of an interesting heater. It will heat water two ways and produce charcoal continuously. I’ll post about it when it is functional.
I had intended to make a coil to go around the outside of the heat riser on my Rocket Mass Heater but I was enjoying playing with wood gas builds so much I never got to it. It will have to wait til spring now. When the new heater gets running it will mean that I spend the day feeding it, the Rocket heater and the woodstove in the house. Good thing that ash borer came and killed so many of my trees or I may have trouble feeding them all.
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TomH this was the “Hotwatt” Victory Shop model.
The smallest of three different named models in that year. Each with a different use range purpose.
See . . . no external cooler pipes at all.
The whole base was the cooler/soot-ash dropper.
The models with the optional vertical 9 tube gas heat exchanger this was corner mounted onto this hollow gas flowing base. Water cooling liquid was pumped around these vertical gas tubes in a square cross section vertical upright tower chamber. Looked just like the vertical filtering box in this picture.
My actual owned gasifier war the original many times changed proto type unit of the Mid-range Model named a Victory hearth.
The links I listed in this DOW exchange with that years sales manual have all been non-supported deactivated.
A shame really that BenP’s long term impact in his book systems are really just his Ford ModelA/Falcon/Escort/Focus level of capability. Very, very useable and owners practical.
Gone lost in time will be his his big Lincoln car levels of units. Lost in the memory dust; his Formula One level of units. One 10 bars pressurizing capable for a University. Yes 1500 psi.
Ha! And the N.Z. guy CNC Machining is Fun with his bought out of BenP’s museum CONEX box an early BenP. made carbon steel Woody named unit. An Edsel car type.
The other two owners YouTubing their units, were all earliest ss Offgridder Models.
S.U.
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Some of my own Victory Model hearth pictures buried back here.
Protoptype 5 jet unit. Production unit had a larger internal diameter then needing to use 6 jets.
So that “jets must not be across from each other” . . . utter bullshit. So says Mike LaRosa, and many others now.
Also the production Victory Model hearth had the above jets joint flange move UP ~4 inches/100mm. When hard pulled like with the 240CID (5.0L I-6) Ford Onan generator this too close to jets joint would burn out it’s gasket seal.
Look carefully for the pencil eraser sitting on top of the center-up injection jet. Still a side jetted unit. This center-add was it’s last experimental rendition. BenP and John-John (in the last link picture) flowed in all kinds of gasses. Some of the first gasifed waste plastics were injected here. Not me. I’m 100% tree woods.
The crusty appearance is the inner KaWool exposed once the sacrificial inner combustion shaper tube is pulled out. This described, and new pictured in a post farther down.
This unit also had a second SS enclosed outer KaWool wrap. Still loosing heat said Shop pain-in-the-ass, me.
A third whole outer system insulation wrap then applied. The Optional “performance upgrade” in the book plans unit.
You can scroll up and down in this exchange for other been used hard pictures. Since all of the off-site link are dead now you’d have to read all of my comments for facts and figures and system names in my wording.
So see new DOW guys.
I ain’t no shy woodgas vergin. Or jabber mouthed wanna’be. Sheesh. I cannot even get that word to spell check. Long lost near 50+ years ago.
Steve Unruh
Ha! Ha! And if you want easy entertainment read the whole topic to see SteveU being roasted. But only by the Best. With the best intentions - to draw out more information. Get clarifications.
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I have read though a lot of old threads Steve. It’s obvious that you are a gasifier smartypants. I’m just an old dog trying to learn new tricks. Not much at innovation. I was trained to read blueprints and build what they showed. Having dimensions would be a plus but I can generally build what I see. I first spelled demensions. Should have been dementia-ians
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Tom, I keep finding great threads too, that Steve has started and written with others.
Bob
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Tom,
You might use soft copper. You’ll be able to bend it with your hands, nothing inside. Hard copper tubing can be softened by heating to dull red and letting it air cool. But pita.
That sketch is old. I’ve learned since then. One of the low carbon types of stainless (316L) would last longer than copper, and would be malleable enough. But expensive.
It turns out there is a large scale manufacturer out there that uses that basic idea. A lot of good information here. I’m not selling anything here, just talking about ideas.
Rindert
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Hi Tom, I saw a video where a guy bent copper tubing by filling the tubing coil with water caping it on one end only keep the open end higher than cap off end laying it flat in a freezer. Then bending the coil around some stove piping. Look it up on you tube.
Bob
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Yes, I’ve done it that way Bob. I didn’t think it would be a problem at 11 inch diameter since I’ve done six inches with the frozen water inside. We haven’t had any real freezing weather yet so I couldn’t do the freeze method yet. The weather has been very odd here. We are normally knee deep in snow by now. This week end is going to be our first real snow storm. They have had much more snow down state than here and we are in the snow belt.
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I installed a two inch flanged exhaust pipe to the muffler on this generator because I want to try routing exhaust gas to the gasifier. This gasifier takes it’s air in from a plenum at the base, below the grate. What I don’t know is how much exhaust can replace ambient air to feed the combusion zone. Also since the exhaust gas would be pressurizing the plenum with the engine also providing suction would this lead to overheating or is there no such thing? Would the exhaust pressure tend to prevent the outside air from reaching the grate?
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Haven’t done anything with exhaust gas yet. Today I pulled the carb off the generac Generator to clean it. The gen has run about 20 hours on char gas now. There was no trace of soot in the mouth of the intake manifold. Still needs some work. Last time I ran it I still wasn’t getting enough power to run my inverter welder. Still able to run a 15 amp saw and 11 amp grinder. Now I’m wondering if running a little propane with the char gas would help or screw up the A/F ratio.
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I haven’t done anything with charcoal, but using a welder with charcoal purked my interest. How many amps does your welder pull? What kind and size welder are you using? I will throw in a little bit. Adding exhaust into the reaction only cools the reaction so the nozzle will not melt so quickly. If you need more power, then you add water. Either ‘‘piped’’ into the nozzle area or by drenching the charcoal directly. TomC
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Tom, I thought I read once that CO2 in exhaust would make some CO in a charcoal gasifier reduction zone.
Maybe not much but some?
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Don, you may be right. Like. I admit I haven’t worked with charcoal. Would that produce more heat or take it away? Hmmm. could be it cools the reaction and improves gas? TomC
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I think you are right again Tom!
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Tom and Tom,
I think drenching the charcoal directly only works with a down draft charcoal gasifier like Kristijan’s most recent one.
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Yes, I believe you are correct, I was thinking in turms of an Imbert , TomC
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I don’t think I ever plugged it into the Kilowatt thing to see what it draws Tom. It’s a 160 amp machine. I run mostly 1/8 7018 at about 140 amps on 110v. The generator runs it fine on either 110 or 220 on gasoline but it gets a little squirrelly when you exceed it’s duty cycle. I bought it hoping to run it on my 2000 W inverter/generator so I could carry one in each hand, but that will not run it at all so it’s got to be pulling over 15 amps. I am using a water drip into a reservoir that surrounds the grate similar to Don M’s system.
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