My friends and I are trying to build a small community in a forested region (10-20 houses). We want to use gasifiers to produce electricity and live completely off grid. However ,we are prepared to let go of many comforts - like AC ,electric cooking, electric heating etc… Essentially we need electricity for refrigerators and freezers (all year round), then for laundry machines (occasionally),water heating, power tools (occasionally) , PC, Internet and light (all the time). Does anyone has experience with this?
How the system should be structured to minimize wood consumption? Should we run it all the time , or run gasification occasionally then store energy to batteries (maybe compressed air storage?). Should we burn wood and produce electricity in one central place (plant) or have one gasifier per each house? I should mention that in any case we must burn wood for heating from October to April.
I don’t have experience in that scale, but my gut tells me a central generator would make sense if the houses are close to each other. It also would mean you could have one person or a two person team operate the generator and gasifier. But then you’d want a big generator to supply enough power. I think wood consumption would be lower with one central gasifier.
Welcome Veljko. What country.
This is an interesting plan. Do you already have the people to be involved working together in some way? I’m going to let others venture their opinions on the gasification since I am pretty much a one trick pony and have pretty much settled on some type of updraft charcoal gasifier. I would not put all my eggs into one basket though and would have each household responsible for their own power supply. Battery storage is pretty essential. It is easy to make much more power than you use and storing that energy is the best plan. Go with the smallest generator that will meet your needs. Again no point in wasting fuel and just bleeding off excess power. I look forward to hearing more about your project.
Hello Veljko,
I would recommend that you first consider many simple energy technologies. Some of these might be rocket mass heaters, solar hot air panels, photovoltaic panels with battery storage, green houses, gasifiers… I thought The Hand Sculpted House by Ianto Evans et al was very interesting.
One must accept that some redundancy and loss of efficiency is inevitable in very small systems like the one you describe.
Being independent, in any sense, is very difficult. Many do not succeed. People that do succeed often begin to seem strange to the rest of the world. I had a relative who slowly went mad in the Australian Outback this way. I have another set of relatives who returned from North Dakota very poor. Social considerations are extremely important.
Rindert
A gasifier is not a replacement for solar panels. You use a gasifier to back up the solar panels.
I am a developer and am developing the VersiFire System for on demand home gas supply for direct energy conversion appliances. Water heater, refridgeration, gas stove heating, clothes dryers, and cooking can all be done on this gas. For refridgeration is it will be more efficient to run a gas refridgeration unit even they are less efficient than electric. The reason is there is a huge loss when converting biomass to electric you lose 80% in this convdersion. Most is lost in engine to electric convertion. So its actually more eficient to run a gas refrigderator when boimass to energy convertion systems are employed.
Country is Serbia, Europe. There are people, one even has a machine shop in which we can build gasifiers. A lot of guys are remote workers, and can earn well over Internet. My idea was to run gasifier in a central location each day for 8 hours, and supply power to laptops and Internet, and charge batteries. In the same time heat would be used for cooking and heating water. After 8 hours gasifier is shut down and people can use lights and internet powered from batteries. However its seems there is no way to put refrigeration in this equation - it doesn’t need a lot of power but its needed constantly.
I would plan on batteries, and plan on adding solar panels at some point, it is just less work but more expense upfront. then supplement with a gasifier. In what order you do it depends on time/money what resources you have available.
Depending on what part of Serbia you are in, you might meet a lot of the refrigeration needs with just packed snow.
Hello and welcome Veljko, “uninterrupted self-supply with electricity”, there is probably no one among us who has not thought about it. The gasifier and generator powered by wood gas is, of course, the main component of independence, which provides energy regardless of the time of year and the weather. If you are thinking of cooking with waste energy from the process, you are wrong, but there is quite a bit of “waste” energy for heating. So we are talking about the cogeneration of electricity and heat, if I give some numbers: from 1 kg of dry wood, 1 kWh of electricity can be produced and, in the best case, 2 kW of heat energy (wood contains approx. 4 kWh/kg), part of the heat energy will need to be used for thorough drying wood. Otherwise, “waste” heat is removed from gas cooling, gasifier cooling in the condensation zone, engine cooling and exhaust gases.
Your original post is only about gasification but I am nosy. I would not be offended if you ignored my questions.
How is this community to be structured? Individual ownership of plots of land or some sort of communal arrangement where the land is jointly owned under one deed. What is required in the area you are planning to build in as far as government oversight is concerned. Building and electrical permits. well and septic permits, My experience is that local bureaucrats get nervous when people form groups like you are proposing.
Hi Veljko welcome , what you are talking about is a big ask on the scale of 20 houses , but not impossible , if you look at a bought system like the All Powerlabs systems PP30 25kW Power Pallet - ALL Power Labs
Trouble with that system is the cost and i would imagine for 20 houses you would probably need at least 2 .
On the other hand if you were to say build smaller systems shared between say 2 or 3 household’s that shared a battery and solar system and a Gasifier system that people on this site have built then it would be a much easier task .
My first thought as soon as you mentioned heating your house with wood was try doing something on a small scale while wetting your feet at the same time , my system runs on charcoal and the charcoal is produced from the wood that has burnt down in the house fire heater that i have in my living room , and on a daily basis i can salvage at least 25 litres of crushed charcoal that will run a small engine 7.5KW generator that helps to charge up a battery bank on days when solar is low .
Then there are systems like Matt has for sale on the Thrive off grid site , he can link 2 or 3 of his units together to produce even more power .
Go through some of the builds on this site for wood Gasifiers that are used not only for transport but stationary use as well , but be aware it is hard work on a 365 day basis
Dave
Thats an excellent idea - recycling charcoal. Which type of gasifier is best suited for charcoal? And is there some method to make sure that wood stove is producing more charcoal than ashes?
Communal arrangement, collective ownership. But there would be individual houses, and one bigger central house where cooking and eating would be done. Because its too laborious and time consuming to cook in each house.
I don’t want to be rude to my friends, but my opinion is that coal gas is like skimming milk, dry wood is the law for calorific gas production, of course with a condensing zone according to the WK system or a water cooled surface
I hope you can make this work. In the early 1970’s I belonged to a commune and also traveled through the country visiting other communal groups. The largest being “The Farm’” The vast majority of them failed and always because regardless of high intentions groups always separate into a hierarchical structure and there is always a pecking order that gets established. The most famous of these groups being Findhorn in Scotland. It is good to research these groups to learn what mistakes were made and how to possibly avoid them. Not throwing cold water on your project but just wanting you to be aware of the pitfalls. I won’t bring it up again as you are here for advise on energy production.
https://thefarmcommunity.com/why-the-farm-collective-failed/
EVEN though burning charco for generator has a lot of waiste heat making the charco-- a gasifier made to run a motor naturally makes a lot of charco by design- so there is charco to use for cooking or run small or large generator-of coarse some people here dump the waiste charco that is created running the gasifier back in with the wood at the next gasifier refill. JUST wanted to show possible use of charco already made from running the generator wood gasifier.
Wow, Tom. That is a great article!
A “must read” especially for anyone who might be wearing “Rose colored glasses” about what happens when you believe that good intentions will overcome human nature! 
We have a system already in place - we are voting with money. Every month we pay membership ,50euros ,and one vote is 50 euros which goes into the budget. Votes are in the same time used to elect 3 guys who are deciding how to spend the budget and what to do. So if you want more influence,you can put more money into the voting 
I would not want to be part of such a system. Money is NOT wisdom.
Rindert
Veljko,
Isn’t that how we got into this mess from the beginning?
Зар нисмо тако од почетка упали у ову збрку (hope a good enough translation?)
You will need both “managers” and “workers”. Your best workers may not be able to buy votes.
it is still an experiment we will see.
the theory is that in modern democracy rich are at the helm,yet not putting enough into the budget. I know a serbian guy,who is now US citizen and very rich,yet I am putting into Serbian budget far more than he is putting into US budget. And its all legal. Some huge corporations pay less tax than average plumber.
In our littlle system,if the rich guy wants more influence,its obvious since voting is public ,and it will actually cost him. If he tries to bribe official after elections,since elections are every month the other guys see that official is not doing what he promised. So next time he wont be elected. So far actually nobody is trying to put more than one vote into the box
of course its a small system,it probably couldnt work on a bigger scale. and of course we havent had any serious challenges so far…