O.K. DougMacC a rural retreat, hunting camp, sustenance farm all power needs out the same.
IF your current gen-set is diesel fueled engine you will want to keep it and go to other fuels forums running these on vegetable oils and waste motor lubricating oils. www.microcogen.info A gen set’s only as good as your available fuel supply. Even 500-1000 gallon storage tanks will get used up. Scrounge/grown fuels as the best. Barter-able fuels the next best. You really do not want a generator fuel that will compete with more-guns keeping themselves rolling, controlling and looting types. Yugoslavia in the 90’s. Africa in Somalia.
Now IF your current genset is gasoline or propane fueled then it is easy: sell or trade it off for an old stout as hell Onan or Lincoln motor driven welder/generator. As minimum pass on any of these with a single cylinder aircooled engine. Go for the ones with an opposed twin cylinder engine, or even a four cylinder water cooled engine. Many have now woodgas converted these engine types
Then you can stick or TIG weld good on spec pump fuel ( a very good out-there capability); generate well on woodgas fuel. These are built hell for stout as commercial rated and will generate solid with excellent deep well pump capability unlike too many can-hardly/just-can’t-do-it consumer gen-sets. You can find these engine welder generators for $500 to $1500 USD used. Engines are DIY re-storable. Pass on any NOT able to weld or generate. Those parts are $$$$ and you need excellent electrical diagnostic skills.
DougMacC for a verbal with pictures another overall engine gasiifer systems explanation read Dutch John’s too:
www.woodgas.nl
the English language Microgasifiers section first. Then the general auto vehicle section. For now gloss over his maths and his constructions techniques. Focus on his wood fuel requirements (quantity, sizing, shaping, dryness); tars, soots and ashes explanations.
Different fellows with their different systems clearly getting the equivalent of from needed 16 to 30 pounds of course chipped/screened; or sized chunked up, DRYED wood fuel needed for each and every US gallon of gasoline you would want to replace.
Yes some doing this with pine wood. Some now doing this with oak wood. As TomC says some doing this with wood charcoal.
You are asking to learn woodgasification at the right time before the needs-must.
WRONG time is after the grid power has collapsed! Be no Net info access then as Katrina proved. The events that would pull down the grid power will have wet soaked, jumbled mixed all potential wood fuels to almost impossible to for no previous experencde able to engine use.
In the last 12 months I have has 9 “event” grid power outages.
I test exercise my Onan/Kohler engine welder/generator system at least 1/2 an hour a week to keep it verified able to use. (Ha! Ha! And sound train my wife and the nearest neighbors) And in that same 12 months have cut, split, dried stored and used up 16,000 pounds of fuel wood. Benn doing that for 45 years.
The bad time to learn to use any skill or tool like a gun, fire building/maintaining, from scratch cooking, sewing, true will eat out of it gardening and livestock’ing is after the event/fact in a then needs-must situation.
The FEMA gasifier system was a very compromised for after the event/facts throw-it-together, use-one short period, and damn the engine consequences system. It will force you quick to become an engine teardown and repair mechanic with next event usage.
Like 95% of the youtube gasifier systems presentations; ALL so far of the info/commercial’s laden channel/TV smoke gasification show it is easy to engine Ohh-Rah do. . . once. Good, long term use woodgasification is a whole different critter.
StephenA I like much your colored dots gasification graphics on your system. I hope others look this over too.
REgards
Steve Unruh