mavrickjohn

What I find works best for me is to soak the charcoal in water and then put it on the concrete driveway. I then roll it with a lawn roller. It's the kind that is filled with water and used to firm down a grass seed bed. After rolling it I sieve it through a 1/4'' hardware cloth. What doesn't sieve through gets rolled again. It helps to sieve the charcoal through 1/2" hardware cloth first and roll that first until all of it passes through and then graduate to the 1/4". Also wiggle the roller as your rolling. It is fairly fast and you have a nice finished product with no dust.

See if this might work for you a simple but easy method. MAGH BIOCHAR RETORT

Here is a link to a site that is dedicated to making bio-char stoves available to undeveloped countries and their people. home (www)

That could be done very easy by using a heat exchanger. The flue line would run into the exchanger and transfer it's heat to air or water and the heated air or water circulated into the house heating the air inside. Regulating the heat out put would be the problem, but there are many ways to do this. Because you would probably use a batch stove to make the charcoal a reservoir system of heat storage would be best that way a steady stream of heat could be generated through the day and night and firing of the stove could be done at your convenience.

I do not know what the energy requirements for recycling paper is but I do know that shredded documents can be processed to make pellets that can be used in place of wood pellets. and these should make great bio-char. YouTube - Make FREE wood pellets from recycled junk mail to run your pellet stove. - Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whH_E2fI2Cw Using these paper pellets to make bio-char seems to me the best way to recycle the shredded documents.

Thanks for the post and the links I've wanted to build a unit like this but couldn't get the specks I needed. This fits the bill I want to use it as a heat source for my barbie so I'm making charcoal instead of using it to cook. Might start cooking more outside if I can make it work.

Interesting stuff there. Does any one have a chemical breakdown of the clay shards found in Terra Preta? Or does any one have some actual shards that could be analyzed by a ceramic chemist? The other part of your post is very interesting about Prions. I did a search on Prions and found this. Prion From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search For the bird, see Prion (bird). For the theoretical subatomic particle, see Preon. Prion Diseases (TSEs) Classification and external resources ICD-10 A81 ICD-9 046 A prion (pronounced /ˈpriː.ɒn/*( listen)[1]) is an infectious agent that is composed of protein. To date, all such agents that have been discovered propagate by transmitting a mis-folded protein state; the protein itself does not self-replicate and the process is dependent on the presence of the polypeptide in the host organism.[2] The mis-folded form of the prion protein has been implicated in a number of diseases in a variety of mammals, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also known as "mad cow disease") in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. All known prion diseases affect the structure of the brain or other neural tissue, and all are currently untreatable and are always fatal.[3] In general usage, prion refers to the theoretical unit of infection. In scientific notation, PrPC refers to the endogenous form of prion protein (PrP), which is found in a multitude of tissues, while PrPSC refers to the misfolded form of PrP, that is responsible for the formation of amyloid plaques that lead to neurodegeneration. Prions are hypothesized to infect and propagate by refolding abnormally into a structure which is able to convert normal molecules of the protein into the abnormally structured form. All known prions induce the formation of an amyloid fold, in which the protein polymerises into an aggregate consisting of tightly packed beta sheets. This altered structure is extremely stable and accumulates in infected tissue, causing tissue damage and cell death.[4] This stability means that prions are resistant to denaturation by chemical and physical agents, making disposal and containment of these particles difficult. Proteins showing prion-type behavior are also found in some fungi and this has been important in helping to understand mammalian prions. However, fungal prions do not appear to cause disease in their hosts and may even confer an evolutionary advantage through a form of protein-based inheritance.[5] The word prion is a compound word derived from the initial letters of the words proteinaceous and infectious, with -on added by analogy to the word virion.[6] What I find interesting is the proteins showing prion-type behavior found in some fungi. Perhaps the clay shards helped the fungi that are unique to Terra preta exist in the charcoal environment and might explain why the fungi present are so wide spread through out the range of know TP sites. It might also explain why these fungi are unique to TP.

To see some ways of making bio-char check out youtube.com and search bio-char and terra-preta there is one where the oils are collected with an extremely long tube used as a condenser. One of the easiest retorts you can make i found at this site. MAGH CM-II NATURAL DRAFT T-LUD WOODGAS STOVE I plan to make one out of an old hot water heater and use it as a barbecue as well. I don't know if it will work but I'm going to make a second top half that will have a chimney and I'm going to put a trap in it where charcoal can be loaded and then charged with the smoke vinegar as the smoke travels through the chimney.

You've got the basic idea. Yes after grinding the ground charcoal needs to be charged with nitrogen. I use the cheep-est form available to me my urine. .Fresh cut grasses is another source you might use. Fish waste or aquatic weed can be used also. Check out organic web sites to find other nitrogen sources. After abortion has taken place the bio-char can be added to compost and then the soil. It seems to work better that way the compost helps to quickly charge the bio-char with fungi and bacteria. The alternative is to add the bio-char to the soil and add compost at the same time or later. The bio-char will become the home to fungi and bacteria but the soil does not contain the numbers and diversity of wee beasties found in densities in compost

If you are going to use a mechanical means to grinding charcoal or even if your going to grind it by hand first soak it in water for at least 5 days. This should keep the charcoal dust to a minimum whoever if you see any dust stop and let the charcoal soak some more. I don't know if the body can or will extract it from the lungs. If you find a black residue in your nostrils then the charcoal needs more soaking

Has anyone posted this link MAGH CM-II NATURAL DRAFT T-LUD WOODGAS STOVE It's a simple updraft bio-char stove that can be used as a model for making your own bio-char unit. With modification you might be able to heat your hot water for washing or to warm your house and generate all the charcoal you need for your garden. Let's make producing bio-char take some of the Co2 emissions that we generate every day out of the bio loop. Seems insane to me to heat your house with natural gas then burn some wood to make Bio-char so you can add it to your garden. Or to put it another way spend the day making bio -char and that night and for the rest of the week barbecue with some of the charcoal you just got through making or worse yet buy some charcoal briquet's with hickory flavored smoke for cooking your dinner for the next week?

True you will create CO2 in making bio char however think of this. If you have a use for the heat created in making bio char it really starts to make very good sense. The concept is called co-generation when part of that cycle produces electricity and the left over heat is used for something else or recycled into a lower state of generating power. You get twice the kick for the same energy used. Let me put it another way. Your home is heated let us say with gas. The gas is burnt. The air in your home is heated. And the heat rises until it exits the house and radiates outward. Now instead if the gas is first used by a sterling engine to make electricity and the waste heat from that process is used to heat your home that is co-generation. Now if you were to do the same thing, create the electricity with a sterling engine using wood and creating bio-char and heating your house that would also be co-generation and makes the best of sense. We tend to think in great and grand manners. We think of creating a power plant to burn tons of wood to create mega-watts of electricity and get bio-char as part of the waste stream to be transported somewhere else to be spread on the land and Incorporated. Third world people could and would use wood to cook and heat their homes and the bio-char by product used on their land in a very closed system. Many small farmers doing this would easily match and probably exceed bio-char production in first world countries. We just haven't given them the stoves and ovens that would work on these individual home levels just yet . And that my friends is where we should be focusing our efforts to design and promote bio-char production in the homes of the 3rd. world where it will make the greatest difference to the people abiding there.

Impressive beats my hand grinder in speed and volume.:lol:

My god help me I landed in here and am surrounded by a tribe of brilliantly eloquent Thespians! And now two of most venerated elders have given greetings to this explorer of the unknown. Dare I hope they come in peace also. Da yea!:lightninghttp://hypography.com/forums/images/smilies/doh.gif

I went to Wikipedia to read up on Terra Cotta. When I finished digesting that information I looked up clay and found a note that seemed very interesting and followed that. There they were using iron rich clay minerals that had been used to treat Buruli ulcer patients to see if they had antibacterial properties. AsAgO2 did have pathogenic properties against bacteria and antibiotic resistant bacteria. I wonder if these properties would have worked in the soil and could be one of the reasons clay shards were incorporated in TP. I tend to think that TP was created with Humanure because of the lack of nutrients in the tropics. Perhaps the use of the clay shards helped to control soil pathogens from the human manure if it was not properly composted or poorly composted? Broad-spectrum in vitro antibacterial activities of clay minerals against antibiotic-susceptible and antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens -- Haydel et al. 61 (2): 353 -- Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy