Experimental Wood Chip furnace

[Davetech]

I think this fellow is on to something. I found his site to be quite informative.

http://www.sredmond.com/vthr_index.htm

"Not only are we burning green wood chips, but our experimental furnace runs at high efficiency, virtually smoke-free. We fill it with four buckets of chips and in two hours it produces an estimated  175,000 Btus of hot water in a heat storage tank to feed our home baseboard heating system."

[hansvonlieven]

G'day all,

Well, congratulations, someone has just re-discovered solid fuel stoves. When I was a kid (a long time ago) we had nothing else. Not only did we cook our food with wood, we heated up the laundry copper (used for cooking pig swill more than laundry) we heated the greenhouse, even drove the truck with it. I am not joking, the truck was fitted with a woodgas generator that fed an ordinary internal combustion engine (at a somewhat reduced efficiency) because we could not buy petrol during and shortly after the war.

There was nothing wrong with this technology, except it was a lot more work, which is the main reason why nobody does it anymore. Besides, the oil companies don't like it.

We would be a lot better off if we still did that because wood is a renewable resource. Don't hold your breath though, they already found a lot of reasons why we shouldn't use it and they will find more.

Hans von Lieven

[Doug1]

Just finished my first burn in my home made gassifier down draft style. The gas gen gets pretty hot while it's producing gas. Sure burned a long time on two hand fulls of sticks. I did not lite the gas just wanted to check for air leaks on first burn.
  The flame thrower will be added as materials become available. It works just like in the videos on youtube. Im shocked at how easy it is to construct. I would'nt mind running a car off this tech if it can be reduced in size and made safe.

[Doug1]

http://itee.uq.edu.au/~aupec/aupec06/htdocs/content/pdf/182.pdf
This needs to be part of the other for use as a air conditioning system tied to the gassifier/heating/fueling/air conditioning system maybe all of it could incorperate a bee hive oven or a BBQ grill to die for so you can kick back have your cold beer some home made rolls with pulled pork in your climate controlled man cave watching boot leg sat TV as your genny gobbles up the fuel to power the TV.

[mscoffman]

@Doug1,

Hi. I like this tech too. You should consider designing one for sale as an
electric car recharging station. This is rather than redesigning it for vehicle
use which has much more problems. After plunking down $28K-45K for an
electric auto, folks may have some left over to not have to worry about fuel.

One possibility is reusing heat from the furnace to turn a minto's wheel sort of
doubling energy output.