Good.
Now, If I were you, I would start a charcoal production operation. This will teach you much about wood gas in general, and the product is useful in many ways. You can run an internal combustion, spark ignition engine, small single cylinder or automobile size. You can sell excess charcoal as chunk fuel for outdoor cooking. When you grind the charcoal used for engine fuel, you will have as a byproduct fines and dust, which can be “charged” with nutrients and applied to gardens and other soil improvement projects. This will also tell you which “Members” of your “Club” are willing to get their hands dirty and work for their sustainance! 
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there are a couple of philosophers 
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It sounds more like a cooperative then a commune at this point. It is basically you guys grouping together to save money.
I personally would have something that limits the scope of the ‘leadership’ like a constitution of sorts. Then assign everyone ‘jobs’ that rotate each week or whatever so if one job is easy then everyone gets to do it one week. Someone grocery shops, another cooks, another cleans, another does dishes, etc. then have an assigned work weekend where everyone cuts and splits wood. type of thing.
As far as energy, I would focus on supplying just the common area to start that is probably where you all make your money and thus the most important to have reliable power.
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I hope i am not putting anyone’s nose out here , i am just saying how i manage to get what i want for little effort i DO NOT want to start a charcoal over wood debate this is just my personal opinion that while cooking or heating your homes you could also at the same time collect the glowing charcoal just before refilling the heater / cook stove , if every home did that and collected even 5 litres a day that would go some way towards powering generators for charging battery banks and utilizing the power hungry appliance’s at the same time , that’s what i do and i enjoy what i do its not hard work to me its just a by product of my daily day .
On the other hand if you were to build a few Wayne Keith Gasifier’s and with the help of the Drive On Wood book and membership and the help from the people here who have already built and are using there Gasifiers then you could be well on your way to self sufficiency as far as power and hot water/heating goes .
Happy days
Dave
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I have found in my own investigation it is best to use wood for heat in a rocket mass heater ( batch box ) is one of the best ways to get heat. I moved to Florida to get more sun so that I could get the majority of my energy from sun. I have found since the sun makes the majority of my energy I only need generators on rare occasions ( I am off grid ) so I run them on those days with gasoline. I have rigged my solar system that when it is done charging my battery the energy goes to making hot water direct from the PV panels to the hot water heater element via a relay, and I use propane as a backup to that system for multiple cloudy days. I have seen comunities in Africa run lister engines with oils that they grow and harvest. I would second what has been said about forming a communities that you have written contracts, and you duplicate what other communities that are working are doing in the wording of those contracts, you have to have a way for people to get out of the community and make a clean legal break, and you need to have backup systems in place for when one of the key members leave. It can work, but it is rare that it does.
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I agree about the RMH. I wasn’t really aware of batch boxes when I built the one for my greenhouse. My bed is 30" inches wide, 24 inches high and 17 feet long and It was all filled with tamped, fairly wet cob (heavy sand/clay soil) It took over a year of running it through the winter to get the the cob dried out and until it did it didn’t build and hold heat real well. It would cool down overnight. I just wanted to point out that some of these systems take time and some experience to get them optimal. Knowing what I know now I would have done some things differently. What I learned from communities is why I am a hermit now. All groups have bosses. Mine is a dog.
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Dave & Brian,
I like your system–there is minimal energy waste, it is simple, and it works.
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I think what you and your friends are attempting are very commendable but remember many have tried this and failed miserably. Very recently in Colorado, USA a mother ,her friend and the fourteen year old died from starvation and exposure also probably. I am not trying to discourage you it is doable but plan , plan, and plan some more and be realistic about your future. One of the biggest problems is the politics of the endeavor, i.e. who is the leader of the group and how are they selected.
If you do decide to go through with it then utilizing individual generators would be best probably , although it would be possible to build a large scale WK type gasification plant to power a large generator that could be used to charge individual storage banks, as mentioned elsewhere solar panels would be a very good option. A community that exist here in the US called the Amish have lived that way for many years until recently and they have relaxed that belief somewhat I think. You need to determine what your KWH
needs are first. There are many questions about such an arrangement that need to be answered before the adventure begins.
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Their are the Amish, and there are some branches of the Amish that aren’t officially Amish with varying degrees of ‘relaxed’ rules.
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There are two groups of the Amish , the Old Order Amish and the New Order Amish, they have different rules governing what they can do and what they can’t do. So it depends on which one of those you refer to. The New Order do use electricity but will not rely on the power grid, they produce their own from homemade generators or use batteries and use propane or gas for their cooking and heating needs.
There is another possibility for accomplishing what you are looking for, and that is what was used around the beginning and middle of the 19th century. That was called “producer gas” and it was piped gas that lit the street lights and home lighting. I think most of it came from coal but wood would work just as well and did in some communities such as the ones that did not have a ready source of coal. You could distribute the gas to individual generators and it could be used for cooking and heating. It would take the building of a gas manufacturing plant and there would also be some very large safety concerns. Just a thought.
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I found this article on Wikipedia that might be very interesting to you for your adventure. If you have enough organic materials sources ( wood, agricultural waste, etc.) a plant for manufacturing the gas would be very possible.History of manufactured fuel gases - Wikipedia.
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Wow, Glenn Gray.
That is the most comprehensive, historical, thorough single article I’ve ever read. Covered pretty good the effective 150 years of commercial use of make-gas-for-powers.
ALL, be sure and read down to the ending Producer Gas.
Although mostly about use of fossil coal; has gasification of raw petroleum oil; and the considered weak-sisters of wood and biomass.
Ha! Coal sure does produce the bad nasties! Gasifing many of the modern plastics the even worse nasty soups made
Wood-is-good. Has “good” useful bi-products.
Steve Unruh
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Around and on my property we have fence posts that are over a hundred years old still standing that were soaked in creosote/coal tar. They are not sturdy but still standing. Railroad ties that are still stable enough that you can’t pull the spikes out of them without a fair amount of leverage, that were laid in the 1890’s.
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Hey Veljko!
I would choose the option with a personal mini-CHP for each house. It is easier to get heat, electricity and combustible gas for cooking, heating water and balancing consumption between heat and electricity. Just use a wood gas boiler when you need more heat than electricity. Conducting all this to 20 houses from a single station can be much more expensive both at the very beginning and during operation: electric cables, heating mains, gas pipelines.
In addition, the survivability of the system is higher with personal stations, incl. and during quarrels between participants. Communes, communities and collectives of people in general are good, but food, housing and energy must be their own for each participant in order to have freedom. Otherwise, a person can be easily manipulated when he is hungry, his family freezes, or he is threatened with a life in darkness and without contact with the outside world.
Solar panels and chemical batteries are not for me. I do not have a factory for their production, and there is no free land to dispose of very harmful waste from their production … I do not set myself the task of leaving a poisonous dump to the children as a memory of myself.
But the round-the-clock operation of an internal combustion engine without batteries carries rather big tasks:
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Engine resource. 365 days * 24 hours = 8760 engine hours per year. I would like the engine not to require major repairs for at least 10 years. And this is already 87,600 hours of continuous operation. If the average speed of a car is 50 km/h, then this is 4.4 million km without major repairs. No one has advertised such motors yet.
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If a car needs to change the oil every 10,000 km, then at the same average speed of 50 km / h, this is at least 5 liters of engine oil every 200 hours. Those. 220 liters of engine oil per year!
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Harvesting firewood for the continuous operation of the engine will require thoughtful mechanization. Otherwise, you can easily become a slave to this power plant.
These are quite real tasks, but they will require non-trivial solutions. Very non-trivial solutions! But it can be a very interesting adventure. For example, to extend the life of the engine, you can apply solutions from motorsport (dry sump, autonomous cooling system, self-diagnosis, etc.), and even solutions not used in motorsport (engine deforcing, large engine displacement with low power output).
Motor oil can be your own vegetable or even animal product. Then the waste oil can be burned along with firewood. Or maybe you can learn a low-cost technology for refining used engine oil, such as lye (derived from wood ash) and centrifugal separation.
Perhaps you will not need to save energy, but on the contrary, think about where you can use its surplus for good: CNC machines, 3D printers, greenhouses, etc. I like the law of IBM: “The machine must work, and the man must think!”. It would be bad if things went the other way around…
In any case, the world is beautiful and amazing! Good luck to you and your like-minded people in this world!
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Some big diesel trucks will go 4 million miles, 6.4 million Km.
Yes, I agree with you, these are quite real tasks. However I think that a company like Jenbacher, Austria would like to produce such a system. There are other companies. Here is Community Power Corporation, USA.
Rindert
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That CPC looks promising. But devil is in the details as we all know. And some details are really blured at their site.
They repeat 24/7 operation, without a single word about coverage of scheduled maintenance. There is 30 day period between them and it include things like cleaning, oil and filter, etc. Can’t do this on running engine for sure.
In FAQ section, they announce 80% efficiency in CHP mode. But in fact sheet they declare production of less than 7 MWh electricity+heat out of 3.5 ton of dry wood, which assumes to more than 15 MWh of input.
Certainly, it works. But one should be carefull if it works like they say it works.
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I can’t be quiet here, based on my tests from 1 kg of wood, which contains a maximum of 4kWh of energy, we can produce approx. 1kWh of electricity, this is the real efficiency of a high-efficiency device, think about the losses on the gasifier, the losses on the engine, the losses on the generator, if someone states an efficiency of 50%, he counted himself boldly, this number is not reached even by the most modern diesel generator, which has already prepared fuel. Our friends indicated the consumption of their vehicles, from which we can also conclude that 1 kg of wood produces a maximum of 1kWh, this is a reality that only the best systems can achieve.
3500 kg of wood will produce 3500 kWh, which is very good, but 7000 kWh is a lie.
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You are right, Tone. That’s what they declare. Those 7 MWh are together with heat output in CHP mode. But still, its not 80% efficiency.
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True Tone. They “fudge” their claims by quoting only gasifier sub-system system energy conversion for that number.
Mr Veljko it is well worth reading and studying two peer reviewed publications put up here in the DOW Library section.
Go to the top tool bar Library. Once opened up scroll down to the “Gasifier theory and operation” section.
Download, and read study both:
“World bank Tech Paper #296” and
“FOA 72”
Different reasons each organization developed these conclusions. The World bank decided that while village-community bio-mass gasification power systems were technically possible the combination of social factors, outside sourced high-techs single points failures, world market up/down available petroleum energy sources made financing these a no-go for them.
The UN Food and Agriculture was more optimistic. But even they could only find two longterm community/schools continued in-use systems that were locally supported ongoing. One an island religious school. The other an in Uruguay? Religious community in their logging mill operation.
(I may mixup which publication said what. No matter. Only conclusions matter. Study both.)
The diffnert largish scale gasifier systems were measured as ~72% energy efficient. Using a BTU/Calorie basis for the made fuel gasses.
Now turning that into engine shaft power, then into electricity overall: the wood-mass to useable electric was in the low 20% ranges.
Considered actually good in comparison to equivalent sized steam systems. Even petroleum fueled systems.
With the age of these paper PV solar was not studied. Neither was the newer battery storage systems.
These work. But more $$,$$$ or whatever capital, to have to pre-invest into. With even more technical specialist dependencies. Certainly more choke-point, 1st world hardware dependencies.
I agree with Marat’s opinion on each household as a separate self-producer and user. Now that to build could be scale cost reduced by manufacturing a same-same base model system.
And then when the Power-That-May-Be try to tax, regulate or even shut down trying to force their supplied instead they would have a much more difficult job of it.
Social it will only work if you can collect up individual member households with a core ethic of defending their own personal freedom and independence right down to the last bullet.
Maybe this is possible in Serbia.
It has proven possible in other places of the world in the past, and the present. Improve your odds by locating up in the terrains of mountains. Or bogs and swamps. Desirable flat land, and flatlanders too often just get rolled up and placed in someone else’s pocket. Under someone else’s thumb. Think. Live the ethics of these poor-landers folk. Be Swiss. US Appalachian/Cascade mountains hills-folk. The different south central Asia mountains peoples.
S.U.
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Me thinks Mr. Veljko left the conversation about 10 days ago, so we are preaching to the choir again, amongst ourselves. Comments, @mveljko78 ? 
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