I've looked into this. It's difficult to get going, difficult to get consistent results, difficult to make sure the gas is clean enough so you don't destroy the engine, etc. I might give it a try again though.
great points. difficult operation
after watching the video i kinda concluded that it feels like more of a "party trick" than a long term reliable and easy to maintain option. sap! sap! everywhere! hats off to them for trying, haha.
vroomyeehaw!!!!
wood is not photovoltaic but it is solar powered
As part of my prepping activities, I built a gasifier out of stainless steel 55 gallon drums. It will never rust out.
It is not at all difficult to make it work, but what is difficult is using it to run an engine that has a varying load.
If you build one, make sure the pyrolysis bowl is NOT just steel.. it needs to be cast out of a refractory material or it won't get hot enough for a quality burn.
Wood gas is useful for a lot of things but for some reason, running an engine with it seems to be the one application everybody focuses on. Hooking it to my 5500 watt Coleman generator, I found it was troublesome because the loading of the generator keeps changing as household appliances turn on and off. One action causes it to run lean and stall, another action causes it to run rich and stall..
However, there's a solution that worked flawlessly.. Instead of running the house directly, I sent the generator into the Sunny Island battery inverters. The Sunny Islands allow me to set the number of amps they will draw from the AC Charging source, and when set, the load on the generator remains constant until the battery is charged.
Running an engine on wood gas DOES require that the gas be thoroughly cleaned.. And I mean clean! Don't underestimate it with a "that's good enough" attitude or you'll destroy your engine. The best way to scrub the gas is through a mechanical filter, then bubbling it up through a set of PVC towers (short pipes) filled with water. We use aquarium bubble stones.. a whole bunch of them! Use a white pillow case or other linen type fabric to pass the gas through. How long it takes for the white cloth to "stain", will give you a good idea of how clean your gas is.
The water also makes great fertilizer for plants after its been clouded up by the gasses.
Gassifiers are best used to make cooking fuel, but can also be used for water heating. Here in Michigan, we get plenty of sunshine in the summer so in a long term grid down event, we wouldn't need the gassifier in the summer.. However, the winters are horrible for solar generation, and as luck would have it, the gassifier runs much better in the winter than it does in the summer. The colder the ambient temperatures, the easier it is to condense the gas and clean it, and the denser the gas becomes, which means more energy per given volume.
During the spring and fall when we're chopping and splitting wood for the wood stove, we get a lot of little pieces and chunks that end up piling up around the work area. We separate those little pieces out and dump them into a 275 gallon IBC tote. When the tote is full, we put the cap on and put it in the back storage area. I currently have 4 totes full, which is probably enough wood to run the gassifier for several winters.
With the exception of pine, the type of wood you use means almost nothing, and even pine works fine if you make sure it is bone dry.