Thrive Off Grid

Like that dash and the seats with center console

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That is cleaner than any vehicle I ever will own, lol.

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Ok fired up the VersiFire for the first time. Petty exciting to see this thing actually work.

Next is to get it to fill both accumulators and switch between them.

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This is outstanding Matt , great work you have done here. I am sure you have it for the market soon.
In 1959 The Seattle gas works closed up it’s operation for good. Theirs ran on coal, but yours runs on wood with a charcoal being produced as a by product for charcoal gasification. And yours is portable.

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If the carbon is used for biochare this is then the first biomass heater with carbon capture. < thats a big deal to the EPA folks :slight_smile:

This is going to change the game for heating with biomass. Current stove tech cant touch this thing.

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Ok here is a follow up from yesturday. I have the core of the code written and it can now run autonomuously and self sustain. However this is the bare bones there are other senerios I will need to add and will have to re structure the code in Switch Cases. Basically different modes of opperation with each having its own code set. This will make the code much faster and stable. That hamburger was fantastic BTW :fire:

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that is sweet! Can you figure out the rate of flow? and then adjust the fan speed to the output? (possibly not unless you use something else to monitor the storage barrels)

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You can make it go wide open

Why would you want to do that, this is the point of the accumulators and that would make complicated. Those acumulators filter the gas as well. Direct gas feed you will never achieve this you have to let the gas cool under presure to really scrubb the gas. They are pre charged and you use a regulator to control output. That blower is capable of suppling gas directly to big block V8.

. That rate is thottled down in the video. However the limitation is the amount of storage. You can increase this in two ways one is to add wieght to the accumulators, this will allow you to compress more gas into them and that will also help squeeze out the moisture and crud. Second is you can simply add on more accumulators or build a larger one. But Im trying to use what is available and practical to obtain. So 55 and 30 gal drum combo it is. We will be heating the shop this year with this unit plus running all gas appliances in the RV. So we will be adding more accumulators.

I also have barbell wieghts on order.

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Yeah this system is the new beginnings of our company. Now that I can see this work, Im pretty sure we can run up to 15 kW generators with this size unit. Plus you will be able to use an LP duel fuel generator. You will simply bypass the regulator as the gas will already be regulated. Other than that we should be able to use the rest of the LP system on the generator. We will experiment with our WEN once I finnish the code.

No more tar, no more engine stalls, no more AFR mixer controller, and gas will be as clean as LP no more soots nothing!

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What’s the plan for storing gas in the accumulators for the winter? Antifreeze in the barrels? I wonder how CO reacts with glycol
 I have never tested that.

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Going to try a few things. Simple heat tape and maybe block heaters along with glycol and or ethanol. The heaters will only be used if the machine goes into standby for a long period of time. Otherwise since its winter and the idea is to heat; then it will be constantly cycleing so I think that will keep it from freezing.

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Might put some insulatiuon around the drums as well.

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I was thinking of a small grill like you had, and then it could be slow enough the fan wouldn’t have to shut off at all. Not direct feed. It would be more complicated and quite possibly not worth it.

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No we want the system to run cycles. Its the whole point, get it hot then let stand and it will dry the fuel in the hopper. Everytime it cycles the gas just gets cleaner and cleaner. Then when the gas gets to the gasometer the whole point is to store that gas under positive presure. This gets the gas even cleaner the tar drops out imediatly.

This machine is working exactly how I imagined it would.

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Installed more stuff on the Chevy today.



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Really really well done Matt , that sure is a hell of a bit or equipment , i hope it makes you your fortune , hope to see more once you have all the code’s written and more tests .

Dave

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So matt, do you have a tentative formula worked out for wieght added = (multiplicatuon factor of) increased gas the 30 gal barrel can hold?
Once the numbers are calculated we will know the sweet spot of the benifit of adding wieght to the barrels vs. Adding another barrel all together.

Is it as simple as double the wieght/ double the gas capacity?

Im thinking one could get away with use a reservoir ontop of the 30 gal barrel and add water to increase gas pressure as well.

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No not yet still waiting on the wieghts to get here. We have roughly 10 lbs of wieght on them now. I have not ran times on the output. But have increased the charge timers. It will be hard to determin as the higher presure also increases the output.

But no reason you cant do both add additional or larger accumulators and still add wieght. The more storage the better. The longer you can let the gas stand while the other accumulator is exhausted the better. As for the gasifier and blower system it dont care. It will hapilly re fire anytime there is a need to re charge.

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Matt this is a new beginning for woodgas production. Not sure if anyone has done this with a smaller scale before. LookIng very good for very clean woodgas like LP gas.
I remember a fews years back when you made a water cleaning system it worked but was very messy to clean.

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Interesting day today. So I grabbed our little WEN and tried hooking up the gas hose from the VersiFire to the LP post regulator. It almost worked!! It did fire but it would not sustain. So ok well that was a failure lets just try shoving the hose in the intake. Well what do you know? It worked?

So I made a tee vavle mixer much like we do with any wood gasifier / engine system and we ran for a good two hours.

So then out of curiousity I grabbed a Q tip to swabb out the fitting where we had the hose attached too. SPOTLESS!! After two hours of run time.

Yeah that is quite something. We did however experience some gas fluctuation from fuel bridging and sticking. So Ill be adding a viborator hoop and a few other things before testing further. The VersiFire can keep up no problem and we are running it at 48 Volt DC. I dont think it would keep up our 450 cc range. However if we switch to AC no problem at all. The only issue I can see is we will need to add gas cooling pre blower system.

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