right so even as early as b4 i built my car i realized that all this gasification stuff is absolutely one of the funnest hobbys of mine we can all agree there are better ways to get down the road and i realized along time ago that the most efficient wood gas vehicle would simply be a all electric plug in b/c you dont have to bring the gasifyer with you now obviously this would not work for say going across country but there have been cars build buy people im not talking buy a manufacture but back yard people like us that have go 1000 miles or more on batterys now it would be so simple charge the battery off the gasifyer at home and then just drive the e-car they way it was designed to be used i personally have never gone over 300 miles in one day 280 a couple of times but i admit i dont go far and dont like to so this would be the best solution for my needs instead of making some poor engine have to work its ass off and pushing the mechanical limits just so i can climb a hill is stupid my conditions just dont fit a gasifiers design obviously i have proved it can be done but hey letts face it there are better ways so now i have been looking into converting me beetle to electric and making my gasifyer a power station as it will still be needed in the proses…opinions?..any one got a motor for sale? lol
I don’t know about most efficient, but simply the easiest, and you can use your woodgas system with multiple vehicles. You also aren’t screwed if you have a sudden life change and don’t have time for it. The cheapest way is to convert an old car to woodgas. 
I have seen electric conversion kits for old bugs. Well here this is one, these guys aren’t the cheapest but it was the first link I pulled up.
https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=40&products_id=168
Hopefully Xoie you are aware of Rey Menke’s extensive stationary charcoal making and grid tied electrical generating down in Texas.
He has both an older 1st generation Nissan Leaf; and now a used Tesla he does home recharge on a mix of his home PV solar and charcoal gas electricty.
Look up his members avatar-listing and read back his posts. He publishes numbers.
For California mountains you, this may truly be a way to go.
Electrified road vehicles are the current darling accepted future.
Sometime it is nice to go with the flow. Do your winds-spitting woodgas-making back out of sight making recharging power.
Regards
Steve unruh
Hi Steve… Personally, I am awaiting a fuel cell that can take our wood gas straight into it and electricity out,now that would be the cats meow…I just do not understand why they can’t produce one…???
What are you meaning by “fuel cell”? Many systems we have convert wood to electricity…Just need explanation of terms. thanks. billy
we are hoping to start a project soon to tie back to the grid to erase our power bill and possibly sell some power tot he co op…
Billy North,
One of my neighbors has figured out a low cost Do-It-Yourself way to set up solar panels to feed into the grid. I think he now has about 317 used 245 watt solar panels working with used Enphase M215 Microinverters feeding into three grid-tied smart meters, and a Tesla Powerwall. The cable connecting the inverter to the 240 volt line has not experienced the price drops of the other components. The normal cable is a single phase Engage in either Portrait or Landscape connector spacing, but three phase cables are available for about half the price of the single phase, so 1/3rd of the cables will not work unless some of the wiring is swapped around. The panels are mounted on the ground leaning against a 30’ section of oil field pipe. Three of these can be threaded together for a 90’ “Hitching Rail”.
Solar tax credits cannot be claimed for used panels or inverters, but might be claimed for some of the wiring and disconnect switches, etc.
Even so, the payback is less than 4 years. Details are on his blog located here: Willie: May 2019
I am in the process of getting a rail of panels working, but instead of pounding oil well pipe into the ground, I cut heavy duty fence posts in half, and drilled post holes with my tractor, and then fastened the panels and Microinverters to the rails. I used some heavy duty steel studs to hold the inverter to the rear of the panel as shown here:
Besides these panels, I have 25 others on top of pergolas, on single axis tracking, and on two heavy duty welded up ground mounts, but the Hitching Rail is absolutely the cheapest. The panels could be almost flat for the month of June, but the angle keeps animals from walking on the panels, although I do plan to decrease the tilt. (I’m at 29° N. Latitude.)
Hi Billy… A fuel cell is a device that takes in a gasious compounds like natural gas, and hydrogen that thru a quasi chemical reaction converts those fuels into elelctricity, silently and also produce a fair amount of heat, there are 5 main types of fuel cells, the Solid Oxide fuel cell, the molten carbonate fuel cell, the proton membrane fuel cell, the phosphoric acid fuel cell and the alkaline fuel cell… There are a few others but these are the main types… The one huge advantage they have over a combustion engine is that they operate silently and are not mechanical and they do produce lots of power that hopefully one day soon we will be able to put our wood gas into it and get household electricity out… Wood gas has lots of compounds and it may be possible to use a catalyst to help crack the woodgas… The largest problem so far is that fuel cells are pretty finicky about the type of gas put into them… But regardless for us it will be a godsend when we can use our woodgas directly into a fuel cell, at best they are about 80% efficient meaning 80% electricity and 20% heat which can be turned into hot water for our homes too, all produced silently…
Thanks for the education…
I am looking to use woodgas/combustion engine to make power generation system for the house. Mostly as a means of perfecting the idea for use in the African bush to power wood working shops, sawmill, etc…I would also like to knock out my power bill in the process and have a teaching model for our campus…but you’re talking baout something else.
You already mentioned the problem, but isn’t woodgas made of so many different molecules and gases. Each of them is going to react somewhat differently in a chemical reaction that it seems (to my limited understanding) that it will be much more difficult than a homogenous gas , say O2, . Is that a fair assessment?
I forgot to mention that in order to sell power to your power company, you will have to sign an agreement with your provider. They will want a master shut-off switch, and a drawing of your system showing UL numbers. These numbers are on the inverters, meaning you will need to purchase some of the inverters in order to get the numbers. Once an Engineer approves your drawings, you build the system, and then they drive out to inspect it. After a completed/passed inspection, they will install the metering to measure what you use and what you export to them. If a woodgas powered generation system were to add a few kWh to that meter, it probably wouldn’t be noticed, but I don’t believe you will have much luck getting a signed agreement without UL approved equipment. PV is like a water leak! It really adds up, and is very quiet. Standing over an internal combustion engine/generator running on woodgas is fun …for a while…
Yes Billy you are right that woodgas is made up of lots of compounds, we are only interested in the ones that burn and the last time i checked 02 does not burn… It definately helps combustion but it by it’self does not burn… The largest advantage of a fuel cell is no noise, what you are proposing is a large generator that will make tons of noise and in time you will have to dissasemble that engine to get all of the tars out of the valve assemblies whereas a fuel cell will burn all of those compounds after it has been split up…After you have been around a hammering combustion engine all day you will rethink your current position…
Sure. I am in favor of quieter operation. I just don’t know enough about fuel cells to know what’s what. Just learnign here. Don’t really have a position on the subject.
As for using it for power sales…that would only be a side benefit if at all. Mostly I am looking to develop a sysstem that can produce local power in the African bush and be fueled by local people with minimal technology in order to help develop some light industry for economic development. If I used it here, it would be for show and tell, and maybe an interface to reduce power costs.
I do agree that interacting with the power company is difficult and requires some specialized equipment. With the cost of power so low, it probably is not worth the investment. But I do have some friends around here that produce power different ways and put it on the grid pretty easily. I am not sure the power company knows much about it. They don’t sell power, just wipe out their power bill, and then pay the connection fee and use the grid as a buffer/battery. Some with solar, some with water wheels, etc…
This is the direction I am going and the current development is geared toward that goal There are already Solid Oxide Fuel Cells that can input our gas directly with the sulfur removed.
The SOFC are nearing 80% conversions, so if this holds true with producer gas this nearly 4 times the efficiency gain over the little ICE engines we are currently using today. So with that said, indeed the fuel cells will come with a hefty price tag, however with our technology we can shed a lot of the controls and management. However we will need more advanced filtering, possibly implementing refrigerated coolers and will need to pressurize the gas in that process to make sure we are squeezing anything in suspension out. (moisture’s and tars) The gas will then need the sulfur removed to prevent poisoning of the cells.
The drawback is most of the cells have a cycle life much like batteries. But with our tech we can run 25/7 with this technology and simply run at a lower output, saving cost. Just a small set up making 1000 to 1500 watts round the clock would be plenty to run your typical home off grid.
Think about that. this is continuous heat and hot water plus 1500 watts electric round the clock at 80% efficiency!! This = very small low consumption gassier system!!
So this is where Im going with next generation systems. They will use Hydrogen plasma reactors with very little natural aspiration to cut down the Nox input air. This again will reduce the size of the gasifier. The steam produced from the fuel cell will be input back into the gasificaiton process for steam reforming again making the system smaller. Could potentially see a very powerful CHP system smaller than typical dish washer. 
LOL. Duh! of course. haha, bad example…ever have to laugh at yourself? I must have been asleep or something…Maybe it’s the vicodin.
Or maybe that CBD oil is having more affect than I thought.
Excellent idea Matt, With the practicality that have we should be able to overcome a lot of the costs involved in the production of the current solid oxide cell… In other words a practical cheap cell without the fancy pedigrees of expensive coatings…What can I do to help…??
I think with the elimination of the ICE and generator head plus eliminating those controls, The SOFC in a lower output the cost could potentially be the same. The systems would work differently as the ICE version runs in charge cycles (requires lots of controls to do this) vs the fuel cell runs full time. At the end of the day they will both produce similar energy output.
Im am currently working on design and further concepts plus getting some cost from a supplier to present a proposal in front of investors. This next level of development will be long term unlike my previous development process where I needed to get it out asap. This will be done in the shadows with progress updates to keep interest in this development. But ultimately this is where we need to go. A very clean, compact system, that is nearly silent in operation, that is very simple to use. There will be pumps and things running so it wont be perfectly silent but a huge improvement over a noisy engine running. This may also be installed in home like a pellet stove. So imagine a mini version of the FPS about the size of a dish washer 
I am going to need financial aid, an SOFC, and other components. So any help getting any of this is what I need. I have contacted a supplier for a quote on a small cell. This is for a proposed cost of this completed development.
This proposed system running at 1500 watts is the equivalent of a 4500 watt solar install. Thats with the solar system getting a full 8 hours of sun for energy harvesting.
If you are interested in SOFC and other fuel cell technologies this is a great place to start.
For the chiller unit, I plan to borrow technology from refrigerators equipped on RV’s that use propane for evap. We can use our process gas for this to make the system very efficient. So a working Fridge would be nice!!. lol
Here is a good read at removing NOx from atmospheric air. If you can remove this from your intake air; your gas output energy density should increase. Think along the lines of turbo’s the more air fuel you can cram into your engines cylinders the more power you get. Get rid of that 70+% NOx and you get more bang.
http://www.h2o2.com/industrial/applications.aspx?pid=101&name=Nitrogen-Oxides-Abatement
propane is an excellent refrigerant… I have recharged the working fluid of about a dozen old refers using just a small amount about 1/4 of a pint of liquid propane and when you fire the fridge back up it actually gets colder then the standard refrigerants…In the case that you are refering to using an older propane fired rv fridge to chill the woodgas is an excellent idea but even that can be refined further by just making a small ammonia chiller and if done right you could steal heat from the woodgas to vaporize the ammonia…
Yes that is exactly how my fridge works. It uses an ammonia refrigerant the LP is for a fired burner. So in this case we will use a portion of the producer gas in its place for the evap process. Very efficient!! This is the missing piece in advanced gasification. This gas needs to be chilled well bellow ambient temperatures in ordered to be filtered properly.
EDIT: I missed the very last portion of your last post, yes!!! that is a great idea!!