Agrichar

[liam chambers]

I'm interested in talking to anyone with a working model of a char -making plant? I'm an organic farmer and wish to combine space-heating for the farm/ house with char-production. I wish to carry out some basic research on the benefits of char as a fertiliser for grass/ legumes/ cerel production at a practical farm level.:shrug:

[Nitack]

Welcome Liam,

 

You have a very interesting and practical application question that I absolutely love. How can you use the energy that you already consume (home heating) and incorporate the production of biochar on a small farm scale application. So, lets jump right in shall we?

 

Here are some questions to start us off.

1. How is your farm house heated now? Natural gas, wood, coal, oil?
   
2. What sort of material are you going to use for your char creation?
   
3. Does your house have a basement? (this question might tip you off to what I am thinking of)
   

 

Riddle me this while I write down some of my thoughts for a design for you... :shrug:

[Nitack]

So, here is my concept for a design.

 

You would like to set up this process in order to basically reuse the heat being produced for the creation of char. This will work very well because there is considerable waste heat in the process of creating char (lost to radiation) and after the char is created it must give off it's stored heat.

 

I would propose this idea. If you have a basement the furnace is probably located there. That also means the fuel supply is piped into the basement unless it is a wood furnace (for others reading, many farm houses still have wood furnaces, my wife's grandparents still do). If you are heating with natural gas or oil heat, I would suggest splitting off the pipe rather than messing with the furnace. Where it splits off you can create a burner set up with a manual valve to shut off the supply of gas or oil. From there you find a suitable vessel for your char production. The vessel should be made from metal (a 55 gallon barrel would work nicely), and be able to be sealed. You will want to position all of this near a wall in the basement. From there you would need a pipe in order to carry off the wood gas that will be created in the process. I would just pipe this out of the house. You could try to set up a retort to feed the combustible gases back into the flame, but while inside the house I think that would create problems (tar build up on walls, smokiness in the house, potential for combustable gas build up :shrug:). Once the setup is complete you are ready to go. You will have to manually turn it on, light it, and turn off the flow of gas/oil. The benefit is that the gasses are piped outside, and the heat used in the process will help to supplement your home heating (basement warm, warm air will rise throughout the house), so your furnace will not run as much to maintain the same heat.

 

Possible issues - open flame in the basement (you would want to build something that would make sure nothing accidentally drifted into the flame), working with combustible piping is always worrisome, having very hot apparatus and vessel sitting in the basement that could burn some one.

 

I think all the issues can be worked through with a more detailed design, but this is the basic idea I had. Retain the heat you used and produce char.