There are three screws that go into the can. It was cut from a 6 in to 4 in steel AC duct reduction fitting. Reply Upvote. I Made It! This helps thermally crack the tars. My first attempt at gassification was a flop.

I believe it is fairly accurate. I would really like to invest in a vesta controller for my gasser. As for condensing, it is not a problem until really below about F, I play it safe and run minimum water temp at F.

I do run about 10 to 20 percent moister wood. I'm located in the eastern part of Nebraska, winters are not to bad here but just bad enough! I will post more pics when I get some time. I agree with the cold firebox issues. Any creosote build up in the firebox? My G series is surrounded by water which means that even when the boiler is at idle the hot coals are still radiating heat inside the firebox and transferring some of that heat into the water jacket.

I have a thin oily layer of creosote on the parts of the firebox that touch the water jacket. I thought that the manufacturers were shooting for around flue temps because of the concern about condensing flue gasses if they went below that number.

Maybe I am wrong. How many cords do you go through? Vinced Member. Feb 17, 67 Central Wisconsin. Nice build. Any pictures of the back before insulation? I'm interested in that connection as well. More pitchers please!

If that is 20 full cords I think you may have a problem somewhere. If your flue temps are that low that means you are getting the heat into the water so you are losing your btus somewhere else. What do you have for underground lines?

Have you measured your temp loss from the boiler to the house? This is what it looked like last year, I was in a hurry with winter on my door step. I had tremendous heat loss from it radiating into the garage. It was 80 or 90 in there when it was -5f outside and it was just a tin pole shed I uninsulated at the time.

I have about 1 degree heat loss with the variable speed bumblebee pump running at minimum and 0 degree loss at full speed, on a ft run. According to my heat gun! I do not have any of the pipes insulated in the garage and the house yet. The pipes underground the hots are separate from the cold ones, in a different housing pipe. I have my own insulating material proprietary and an air space between the material and the housing pipe which is buried 8' in the ground that is 55F. Well it sounds like your not losing Diy Wood Furniture Plans your btus into the ground.

Just don't know how you managed to go through 20 cords with a gasser with low flue temps, it doesn't make sense to me.

What were you heating with before and how much were you going through? How much wood do other gassers use? Sep 15, 10, Nova Scotia. I use maybe around 6 cords per year. That's a sq. Interesting having the primary firebox not water jacketed except for the back where the tank is and not just the secondary chamber. I don't think I've seen that in a 'factory' downdraft gasser before. That might make return temp protection not so much a concern also. Nice work! Oct 3, 1, British Columbia Canada.

Most of the time. The purpose is to force all the gases exiting the gasifier to pass through he hottest part of the reaction zone. This will cause tars to be cracked by the heat. My first restrictor plate was too big.

I made it smaller after doing some testing. By this point in the project I had my own welder Yahoo! Building it this way made it easily removable. I had a feeling I might need to modify it. Turns out I was right. The theory here is that by making the restriction smaller, the tar has to pass through the hottest part of the reaction zone and gets cracked.

My original larger opening was allowing tar to sneak out without passing through the hottest zone just below the j-tubes. Drawing: Here is another drawing showing the gasifier in its final so far form. If I had been thinking in the beginning, I would have made the tops of the j-tubes stick up enough so that they could all be connected together with standard copper pipe fittings to make a manifold. Unfortunately, I wasn't thinking that day.

So later, when I came to the realization that I needed to connect all the j-tube inlets together, I had to come up with another idea. Those of you trying to build your own gasifier should just extend the j-tubes a little and plumb them together.

Don't do it the way I did unless you are a glutton for punishment. My improvised manifold is always springing leaks, and tends to break loose when I remove the core assembly from the drum. Ignore the part of the drawing that says "extended reduction zone" since that is an experiment I tried that didn't really produce any benefits.

It was cut from a 6 in to 4 in steel AC duct reduction fitting. It slips down over the reaction tube and gets siliconed to the top of the flange. A single air inlet fitting will be installed on the side of the manifold.

I used a Tee fitting. One leg of the Tee goes into the manifold. One leg has a hose fitting installed that I can use to inject compressed air. The third leg of the tee is plugged for now. My idea here was that I could start the gasifier on compressed air, then once it was running, I could unscrew the plug, and let engine vacuum pull air through the gasifier from whatever engine the gasifier eventually gets connected to. Everything is all buttoned up and sealed with yet more great gobs of red silicone gasket material.

I failed to do a lot of basic research about gasification before just diving in and trying to build a gasifier. So I wound up repeating a lot of the same mistakes other people made before me.

So this gasifier went through many versions, re-designs and re-builds before getting to this state. One early mistake I made was poor initial choice of fuel.

It turns out gasifiers are finicky about what you feed them. They like fuels that are uniform in both particle size, shape and composition. Non-uniform fuels produce lots of gunky tars.

My first choice of fuel was about as bad as it gets. I tried to run the first version of the gasifier on wood mulch. I know of at least three places I pass on a regular basis that have signs offering free wood chip mulch to anyone who would come and haul it away. There are probably dozens of other sources I could find with a little research.

So I got myself a bag of wood chip mulch. The chips were very wet. So here I am drying them with a fan. After 2 weeks under the fan, they were bone dry and ready to burn in the gasifier.

I realized that if this worked, I'd have to find a less energy intensive way of drying the wood chips in the future. But it didn't work. The gasifier didn't really work at all on wood chips. The non-uniform size and shape of the chips, combined with their mystery composition led to terrible problems.

The chips didn't feed right, didn't burn right, didn't pyrolize right, and often wouldn't even burn at all. When the gasifier was running on these chips I got far more tar than gas out if it. Out of frustration I hit the books to try and figure out what the problem was.

That's when I learned about gasifier fuel needing to be uniform to work well. So I started groping around for a better fuel option. Unfortunately I live in Florida, and nobody burns wood pellets here. They are essentially impossible to obtain here. So I settled on hay pellets.

I could get them from feed stores. They are more expensive than I would have liked, but they didn't break the bank for testing purposes. The gasifier worked much better on hay pellets. There was more gas and less tar. The pellets fed nicely through the reaction tube and exited as little beads of char. I could start seeing the potential of this machine. On one of my trips to my Arizona property, I bought back two 40 pound bags of wood pellets. They were dirt cheap too. I couldn't find them to save my life in Florida.

Every hardware and homecenter store in Arizona seems to carry them though. Later I also found them on a trip to the North Georgia mountains, and brought back some more. Now I have plenty of high quality fuel for test running the gasifier. Fortunately I drive out to Arizona twice a year. So bringing a few 40lb bags of wood pellets back home on each trip in my big truck was not a problem.

The gasifier runs even better on the wood pellets than on the hay pellets. The wood pellets are designed to be a fuel after all. The more or less uniform size, shape and composition of the pellets is just what is needed for good gasification. Wood pellets are also dirt cheap if you can find them. Air must flow through the gasifier for it to operate properly. In normal operation, the manifold vacuum of whatever engine the gasifier is connected to will pull air through the gasifier and keep the reaction going.

When first starting up a cold gasifier, or testing a unit not attached to an engine, there must be another method of forcing air through the gasifier. It is usually used to start the gasifier, then once running, the vacuum from the intake of the engine the gasifier is meant to power keeps the gas flowing. I initially chose this method too. This blower is a little under powered.

However, it was the only all metal blower I could find at the time. Most blowers these days are full of plastic parts. The plastic would melt at the temperatures the gasifier operates at. So I made do with my undersized blower. I actually had some success with it. The blower worked, but it was very undersized. To get good performance out of the gasifier I knew I was going to have to increase the air flow. I looked into buying a larger blower, but powerful all-metal models were rare and very expensive.

I have an endless supply of compressed air in my workshop. So why not blow compressed air through the gasifier, rather than using a blower to pull it through? So I scrounged up a pressure regulator, a valve and some hose and hooked it all up.

This is the idea that forced building the manifold to connect the inlets of all the j-tubes together several steps back. I am using a piece cut from a silicone cooking sheet as a heat shield to protect the hose from melting where it touches the hot drum. The compressed air really worked great. The gasifier starts up almost instantly, and gets much hotter than before.

The quality of the gas has greatly improved. Eventually I had the gasifier working well. It was making lots of gas and hardly any tar.

Everything was working great. The gasifier was producing a huge volume of gas. The problem is that this gas is flammable and toxic. I needed to burn or flare off the gas to keep it from being an explosion or health hazard. Just lighting the jet of gas coming out of the outlet pipe of the gasifier didn't really work very well because the wind would quickly blow out the flame. I decided I needed a better way of flaring off the gas. So I bodged together a quick and dirty gas burner. My flare stack is made from an old tin can and a stainless steel vegetable steamer.

I just drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom of an 18 ounce steel can, and bolted it on top of the gas outlet pipe. I then put an old stainless steel vegetable steamer over the open top of the can. It works great as a burner. The flame doesn't blow out even in very strong wind gusts.

I increased the stack height to prevent the heat from the burner from cooking the rubber and silicone parts on top of the gasifier. It is just an old 18 ounce bean can with lots of air holes punched in the bottom. It sits on top of the outlet pipe of the gasifier and the gas enters through a large hole in the center of the can bottom. The top of the can is open. The gas and air mix inside the can. There are three screws that go into the can. The steamer is wired to these screws with stainless steel wire to keep it in place.

This setup works great as a gas burner. It didn't cost anything and took almost no time to build. The burner holds the flame even in very strong winds. My method of starting up the gasifier takes a few minutes, but it starts producing relatively clean gas quickly.

This sort of charcoal starts easily and burns very hot. Briquettes might work, but I haven't tried them. They would need to be broken up into small pieces. The lump charcoal is soft and breaks up easily. Here the bits have been placed in a stainless steel vegetable steamer and I am using a propane torch to start the charcoal burning.

The small bits of charcoal rapidly catch and quickly heat up. Once the charcoal is good and hot, I dump enough down the reaction tube to fill it from the shaker grate up to the j-tubes. The bed of hot charcoal in the bottom of the reaction tube really jump starts the gasification process. At this point I can open the valves and start the air flow.

Within a couple of minutes the gas coming out the flare stack will support combustion. The gasifier is not "done" yet. It may never be done because there are so many modifications I want to try out. There are a few big ideas I have for the not too distant future. Here are some of my future plans, not in any particular order.

I still have the goal of using the gasifier to run an engine. I have come a long way in reducing the amount of tar the gasifier produces, but will need to further clean the gas before feeding it into an engine. The remaining tar and any particulates will need to be removed from the gas. So I need to build a scrubbing system, or cyclone separator. The gas should also be cooled before feeding it into an engine.

So a radiator or other cooler will need to be added to the system. I am very seriously considering rebuilding the central core of the gasifier using ceramic materials.

The hotter the reaction zone can get, the better the gasification process works. The stainless steel reaction tube absorbs a lot of heat and conducts it away from the reaction zone.

Ceramic materials don't conduct heat like metal, and can handle much higher temperatures without melting. I want to build an automatic shaking system for the shaker grate. I want to build a moisture removal system for the fuel hopper section. As the fuel moves down the reaction tube, toward the reaction zone, it heats up and moisture is driven out of it. This moisture then condenses on the cool upper section of the tube, and makes the fuel there damp. Damp fuel doesn't burn or gasify well.

I was told mixing water glass and talc, then baking it could create soap stone. When I look at forge an kiln linings, many of the cloth materials offered list sodium silicate. Too, look into diatomaceous earth. Here, there is a "mine" and we can go get free, broken bags of the stuff for projects and pest control. A few jet stoves use it to insulate between pipes. I believe some bags material sold in auto parts stores for clean up are just diatomaceous earth.

That would be a lot cheaper than the bag my boss sent me to town to get twenty-five years ago. I paid twenty bucks for a one or two pound bag. Now I have a couple free, five gallon buckets sitting out in the shop. I've long had an appreciation for things like gassifiers, and jet stoves. I figure the two go hand in hand because they both focus on efficient use of an ancient technology. With today's knowledge and technology, they should be more common, and even more practical than they were back when the U.

Sadly, the wood stove has seen few honest improvements over the years. In fact, I was shocked to hear friends brag about only needing four cords of wood to heat their rather large homes. Especially because, back around 72, I heated an uninsulated, two story farm house off an antique stove about three or four hundred pounds with more controls than my modern car okay, that might be a slight exaggeration.

I did it in a fifty below, Eastern Washington winter and on two cords about a half cord of fir and the rest apple. Then there is the matter of my sister's complaint about her pellet stove - it's worthless without power.

In fact, when I lived on the ocean beaches of the Pacific Northwet, I saw nearly new pellet stoves out in front of houses with free signs on them, just after major storms and a resulting two week spell with no power to the area. I haven't done it, but for that solution, I figured one or two five gallon buckets of concrete would solve the problem. Using the method used to drive pendulum clocks, one could build a variable speed system that ran the auger somewhere around one RPM, or whatever such stoves require.

To raise the buckets, a simple block and tackle system would allow even a kid to "charge the auger battery. Using jet stove and gassifier technology, then mixing in the auger feed technology, one should be able to run a pretty efficient household, even if the gassifier portion only produced enough power to run a chipper to fill the auger.

One of the key points of both systems is, smoke should be nearly a non-issue, and one should be able to heat a well insulated structure with a fraction of the fuel the pretty wood stoves sold today use. I enclosed it and installed a wood burner in the basement. The solid concrete floors and walls acted like a heat flywheel. It took about three days to bring all the concrete up to a comfortable temp, but, once there, it took a couple days to cool too. The combo of heat and concrete made the basement quite comfortable.

I imagine it would have been remarkable, had the concrete floor had foam Diy Wood Chipper Shredder Plans For under it and if the exterior of the walls had six inches of insulation on the outside. Amazing project. Can you post video of the gassifier operating? Or maybe even make a video version of this how to article? Thank you! Question 2 years ago.

What about using a large flat panel magnifying glass focused on a tungsten Archimedes screw to gasifiy wet algae biomass? Reply 3 years ago. I appreciate the kind words, and I'm glad you could take something useful away from this Instructable.

Was wondering, I know that the one handle on the gasifier is the shacker but what is the other one for. Also could you post a drawing or something of all the components that go into the actual gasifier unit because I am having troubles understanding the configuration of it. Hey there! Thanks for the comment. The other handle just makes it easier to take off the ignition port cap.

As to your second question, I believe I showed everything on the inside. If you're still having trouble, let me know! Reply 4 years ago. Yeah, I am currently working on a machine to turn coal into diesel. It's essentially the same process, only using indirect heating via a burner. The gasses produced are then condensed and ran thru a fuel scrubber.

I've been looking at a way to use plasma to turn material into syngas too. Above is a link to a forum where a lot of people has done a lot of work regarding the plastic to fuel process.

This guy can explain it better than I can lol. He also has alot of other alternative energy projects you might enjoy. Hope this helps. Unfortunately, I don't have any social media accounts. However I do have a Youtube channel. I only have one video right now, but I have plans for many more! I'll post a link soon. Dude, that's awesome!

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