JO, I don t want to disturb Matt’s topic to much, but 1 m3 oil is about 1000 m3 gas. So 1 liter diesel equals 1 m3 gas.
Atmos is doing great, only a little to small. I found a way to lite the little thing without smoke. Fill it once more and the buffer (2,5 m3/600 gal) is full again. That is doable, we would need about 4000 kg/8800 lbs wood. Even less if I fix an extra heat exchanger in the exhaust. Parts are bought, only need time to fix it. Gasses leave 250 C/480 F, that must be below dew point for the latent heat. Funny, a condensing woodboiler.
Here in NL, solar power is very nice organized but suffering from it’s own succes. All the electricity that is generated in summer, we can use for free in wintertime. The grid is our battery. Now, all good things come to an end, and that is going to disappear.
Another thing is that the government is subsidizing electric vehicles. A deal we couldnot resist and bought one last year.
These two things together makes me think I need a CHP for the wintertime. Calculation about produced heat and electricity come together very nicely. There is one minor detail. Modern society is very very energy-hungry…
Welcome to the darkside. I kind of wish I had the rotary chunker for branches like the I think rebak. Or this is the same principle. Just to get more density then trying to throw branches in. I’m too cheap to get one though… lol It would greatly improve the automation part.
Too much cost its not marketable. Need to find away to make a typical pellet or wood stove produce fuel grade charcoal for free. Then we have a viable product. processor cost is eliminated, and your power is now looked at as a free byproduct of the system for just heating your home. That you are going to anyways.
If I buy a chipper that is what I am getting but I have to get the pto on the tractor working first. swears But I agree it is a niche product and hard to market especially at that price.
that isn’t the hard part. throw a coffee can with holes in it. The hard part is getting a continuous flow of fuel -and- not creating a mess or getting char dust all over the place.
There will be a pellet fueled version based on current reactor technology. The grate will be active and designed to control the output of the char pellet production. If you want more heat for what you putting in, you can turn it down. If you want more charpellets you simply turn it up.
I made a simple charcoal crusher. It’s just a 3 inch ID pipe eight inches long cut in half. I welded a plate on to that so it looks like a big J I took another piece of 2 and a half inch OD pipe and welded a few rows of half inch all thread around on that. I centered a three quarter inch rod in the smaller pipe and made a plywood box to mount the J onto. The rotating pipe is just installed in holes drilled in the side of the plywood box with a hand crank attached. There is a sheet metal diverter plate that keeps the charcoal directed to the grinding area. I put a chute on the bottom that just feeds into a five gallon bucket. It will grind five gallons of char in a couple minutes. Then I sift the stuff in the bucket through different size screens for different applications. Mostly garden char. Simple, cheap and works well.
If you hit reply, in the top of the reply box there are 12 or so icons. The sixth one from the right looks like a picture. click on that, and it will take you to the upload box. Then you can “choose files” to upload. Get the photo you want into your computer, or directly from your phone. I will have to try it again to make sure I described that correctly.
Off topic comment on Garry’s post #1130 above. If you want to use biochar without a compost pile, don’t forget to inoculate the biochar or it will suck up nutrients the first year in the garden. Urine is full of nitrogen and a great inoculant. A bucket full of charcoal fines is a great odor-free urinal for the shop.
No just steam no pressure, water drip on something that will flash it. Like engine exhaust. You dont even need to flash you can simply drip directly into the nozzle.
I would like to pressurize the steam to produce a venturi effect on the air entering the nozzle (to compensate, a little, for the pressure drop of the gasifier)
here is my source of inspiration. We can see in this drawing a nozzle for the water vapor in the axis of the air nozzle
if the steam jet enters the nozzle at high speed, the air is sucked in by the venturi effect
this configuration pressurizes, slightly, the air in the generator and reduces the pressure differential between the inlet and the outlet of the gasifier . What do you think ?
Excellent idea. This suggestion caused me to close the circle on the humanure toilet concept. Ground charcoal added to the organic cover material will greatly enhance the whole system. Odour control will be enhanced. Though not much of an issue in the original system, this will offer enhanced odour control. And there could be no simpler or sounder way to pre inoculate/ pre charge biochar and deal with the human waste problem.
JO, I reported on yesterday’s tests in the DOW Driving Habits thread. Everything so far has checked out OK. Next is a cleanout and nozzle inspection sometime in the next few weeks. Some have questioned how much flex exhaust may leak. I use that between my cyclone and filter, so I thought I would ask Matt about his alternative. I’ll report the rest of the story later. Thanks for asking.
