Recently visited some historical sites around me and one had a wood burning power generator from the 20's. It was rather small the boiler couldnt have held more than two or three pieces of wood at a time. I have looked and not been able to find much info about them. Anyone know of or have any plans for making one of these?
I have not seen anything about small wood boilers but there is a ton of information out there about wood gasifiers. That would be my route of choice for power generation.
What you have there is an old Donkey Engine, a boiler and a single cylinder steam engine. They were primarily used in rural wooded areas such as lumber mills and logging operations. They were fueled with the leftover wood scraps. The picture shows it belt driving a generator. Most were built to drive a winch. They were built on a set of skids/runners so they could pull themselves to their next location over the ground.
The smaller boilers work better on gas fuels or liquids. Stanley Steamer is a good example. It ran at about 600 PSI, with a superheater just ahead of the engine intake to kick up the heat another 150 degrees. Trying to get that on a solid-fuel boiler is not a simple procedure. Using wood gas to run the boiler is a better proposition because (a.) you have a clean-burn, easily controlled heat source to get your pressure up, and keep it there, and (b.) you avoid the clean-out issues that would otherwise cause problems in operating a solid-fuelled boiler.
Uncle Fester, I have built three of these. Their use with the infernal combustion engine is only one application of a gas fuel from wood, and not the most useful one that I have found. As to the FEMA plans, and the old WW2 Imbert systems, they work, but there are stationary designs that work even better. And I've been a member of the Yahoo wood-gas newsgroup for several years now.
Personally, you might be better off getting a diesel generator and running it off biomass. For example, if you raise pigs for food, you could rend the fat to oil and run the generator off that. And of course in the meantime it will run off diesel.
Edit: You can also collect free used cooking oil from many restaurants to burn now or save up.
Yeah mate Google stratified downdraft gasifier. I made one to run a lawnmower engine out of a weber kettle using a perforated s/steel pot lid as the grate with a 3/8 copper air inlet pipe straight from the top to the hot spot. Also have a 12gal inside 44gal setup on trailer behind Ford Ute. Do the junk yards.Collect drums with sealed lids,s/steel bowls/colanders/punch-hole mesh,exhaust pipe and flanges and flexible suction pipe.
Cooled through a car radiator,filtered through a 5-6 gal paint tin full of mesh. Run inlet to bottom of filter and direct inlet to swirl gas before exiting through top hole/outlet. Gas is further cooled and cleaned by long delivery(suction) hose and finally filtered by the cars air filter. Mixing is done with the warm air butterfly on the air filter spout which has vacuum module removed and replaced with a cable to dash. Gasifiers can be DANGEROUS-explosive gas/air mixtures.Co2 poisoning,fire risk,flashbacks and flare-offs.
Even so they are less complicated and unpredictable than a woman. Cheers
With an ammonia based refrigeration system you can use heat to cool the house, run a refrigerator or freezer. This is the same technology that is used on RV's and wilderness cabins where propane is used to power the AC and the refrigerator.
Forced air charge, lit off at the top and burning toward the air flow will give you cleaner gas (less tar and particulates) and a lot better grade of charcoal when you are at burnout. You can wind up with as much as 20 percent (by volume) of good grade charcoal when you do it that way.
I have a interesting book I picked up years ago. It was wrote by a fella named townsend. It's instructions for building a gasifier, if memory serves it's called the mark two gas generator. He also had some other interesting books along the same lines but he seems to have disappeared.
Using gasifier gas to produce steam is going to be a lot cleaner burn than using wood or coal directly. It's an interesting notion. Properly done, a gasifier will give you about 20 percent of your charge as good charcoal. I've been waiting for cooler weather to run mine a bit, and fine tune the charcoal making capability.
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