[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
So the first thing we want to do is set up the windscreen.
So I need a couple of hands.
We're just--
Let's see.
OK, so I'm going to share a few tools that are really handy.
If you're like me and you're not really a chainsaw person,
this is a great tool.
It's called an alligator lopper.
It's an electric chainsaw.
And it can cut up to four-inch diameter stuff.
So if you've got big, long branches that came down,
you want to just cut them up and put them
in your little backyard kiln, it works really great.
And it's pretty safe.
And I'm comfortable with it.
Another thing that you really want to have
is some welding gloves, so if you
need to get up close into the fire, you can do it.
And some other just good leather gloves.
Here's an interesting tool.
This is a moisture meter.
Is somebody willing to take this and go take some readings off
of our feedstock?
Volunteers?
Anybody?
Thank you.
So have you ever used one of these?
No.
So you just turn it on, and if the battery works,
it'll come on.
So if you have wood that's like more than 20%, 25% moisture,
it's just not going to be very efficient.
So you really want your wood dry.
And you stick those two prongs in the piece of wood.
And it puts a current through there,
and the resistance will tell you how much moisture is in there.
What does it say?
11%.
That's fantastic.
We rarely see that in Oregon.
Do we turn this over?
OK, oh, good, we're making progress here.
So we're going to have one open side.
That's why there's an elbow here.
So which side should be open?
Probably this one.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
The wind's coming from there.
Yeah, so let's make this the open.
You got it.
Perfect.
So just take the four-foot pieces and put them in there
and tighten them up.
So you need four more pipes?
Yeah, there should be four--
I thought they came over here.
Yeah, excuse me, the six-footers.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
There's six on the bottom.
No, there should be three six-footers for the top.
There they are.
Just didn't get them all.
And then once those are tightened down,
then we're just hanging these with wire.
I have some more wire.
It looks like some of the wire fell out.
It's just a windscreen.
If I'm in a calm--
If it's not windy, then you don't worry about it?
I don't bother with it, although you could,
because it is going to protect you a little bit
from the radiant heat.
So there's some advantages.
But a lot of times, I don't bother with it.
And it's going to be noisy.
It's going to bang and clank.
But I think it's good here.
We've got a good breeze.
So the other essential tool for this work is a propane burner.
Actually, I was with a group of people doing a burn
the other day, and I forgot to bring the torch.
And they were kind of mad at me.
I said, sorry, this is a test.
Can you do this without the crutch of the propane burner?
And they managed.
But this does make it easier.
How did you do it?
Huh?
How did you do it?
We just found some dry kindling, and I think
some kerosene was involved.
Can somebody screw that on there?
The threads are backwards.
Here's a-- you can tighten it.
So before I ever start a burn, I make
sure I've got water, live water.
So where's the water?
Oh, wow.
Get your number.
I think we're good on that score.
And then I want to make sure I have some tools.
The amount of heat that this puts out
is pretty phenomenal once it gets going.
You'd be quite surprised.
I'm amazed, for instance, that I have eyebrows left.
But just be careful.
So we need to center this a little better inside the frame.
You can move the frame or you can move the kiln.
All right.
Great.
Is this size of kiln typical with what you normally use?
This is what we call the forestry kiln.
So I have another model that is one foot smaller on top
and bottom, so it's four feet across, rather than five.
It's the same height.
And I really like that one.
That's the one I use when I'm doing burns in my yard,
you know, because it doesn't take as much wood to fill it
and I can kind of move it around by myself a little easier.
I also have a little tiny one, too,
but you can do it in a hole in the ground.
So any questions up to this point?
How much does it weigh?
It weighs about 200 pounds.
This one, the big one?
This one does.
And so when I first made these, I
thought, well, that's why I put the crane on the trailer,
so I could unload them myself.
And it works.
But then first time I showed up in the woods
with a forestry crew, these guys just
could pick it up and run away with it.
So anyway, we have the grandma way of doing things
and then we have the forestry crew way of doing things.
So I think we're ready, then, to talk about the feedstock.
So these guys have done a nice job of sorting it
by size class, because this is the first thing you
want to think about, is what size is your feedstock.
So what I want to do is get probably
a bunch of medium-sized stuff like this.
And we've already--
--regular stuff.
So let's take a bunch of stuff about that size
and kind of fill it up to the rim.
And it needs to be loose, but not too loose.
So pack it in there just a little bit.
Great.
Perfect.
And we'll save the littlest stuff there.
You've got some of that little bitty stuff.
Let's save that for the top.
Save that for the top.
And this piece here might want to come out, OK?
But [INAUDIBLE] the other side.
What is that?
The species?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Where did it come from?
Where did this come from?
Does somebody want to talk about the feedstock?
PJ knows.
PJ?
[INAUDIBLE]
Talk about the feedstock.
[INAUDIBLE]
Just talk about what we got here.
So the feedstock is mainly--
we got some pinyon juniper limbs.
[INAUDIBLE]
You know, I've got a little bit of a personal
and a professional interest.
I worked for the Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands.
And we're always looking for ways
to deal with the waste from our fuels projects.
But I also do a little bit of gardening, as well,
and I'm always looking for ways to try and improve
what I'm dealing with.
I live in Tooele, and our soils out there are not great.
So I'm always looking for ways to improve.
So I've got quite a lot of information
about this, and some ideas about how to create
some char for myself, so.
PJ, do you have those plugs I gave you?
Yes.
Are they in your pocket?
They told me I was fired if I lose them, so.
Great.
I had another one I kept in my purse, but I can't find it.
So we have a drain hole here.
And sometimes I forget to plug it until we're ready to quench,
and then I have to try to put a plug in a hot kiln.
So anybody want to put this plug in for me?
Wherever the drain hole is.
Finger tight is fine.
OK, so this is a good start.
Now let's put some of the really small stuff,
like make a pile about just up to the top of the windscreen
with the smaller stuff.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, it's about $500 worth of steel.
So and then the labor is more.
Did you make it or did someone else?
No, I have a fabricator in Medford that I work with.
And we were able to get a pretty good price on this batch
because I made six at once.
If I make them one at a time, they're more expensive.
Yeah.
So it's under $1,000, depending on how many I make.
I like to get the price down to--
oh, could you-- it's all going one way.
Could you kind of take some of it
and put it the other way, just to crisscross it?
They're not good at building fires.
We know how to put them out.
No, they know how to build fires, I'm sure.
But you know, that's one of the things
that, when forestry workers are doing
fuels projects in the woods and they're
building the little fires, they have
a protocol, which is really about putting everything
in a line.
But that cuts off the airflow, and so you get more smoke.
You get better complete combustion that way.
But OK, that's good.
Whew, we're going to have a blaze.
In fact, let's take a little bit of that off.
That's going to be--
We don't want to get the poison people too alarmed.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
But yeah, if forestry workers are going to do this,
they're going to have to kind of relearn the technique.
And I've put a lot of kind of thinking
into the economics of this.
And what I learned was that, to build those piles--
and sometimes there might be a couple hundred piles per acre--
it actually takes a long time.
It's not that easy.
My friends at Grayback Forestry said their best workers can
make eight piles an hour-- and this is a pile that's about
this size--
because they're really carefully constructing them
and there's a lot of art to it.
And they have got to go gather all the wood.
So it's time-consuming to construct the piles.
When they actually burn them, when they're just
burning them to get rid of them, they
run through with a torch on a rainy day,
and two guys light them all off.
So the burning doesn't take that long.
So potentially, we might save some time
if we're doing this method in the woods.
We might not take so much time piling because we're not
so worried about getting them all compressed,
but we'll take more time burning it.
So that's the tradeoff.
All right, who's a real pyro here?
Who wants to operate the torch?
Or who's qualified, I should say, to operate the torch?
Anybody?
Volunteers?
Fire?
Oh, I'd like a fire person.
Fire person?
Yes.
Lone Peak.
Lone Peak, step up here.
Just let him know about the flame lengths and the wind
speed.
It's going to be laying over right where everybody's
standing.
Yeah, and the camera should back off, or pretty soon here.
So open that up.
And then if you crack it just a little bit and hit the piezo--
oh, there you go.
OK.
So just try to get the whole top of it
evenly lit so it can sustain a flame.
And that's pretty much all you need to do.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
We're going to light the top.
I mean, try to light the stuff--
yeah, what you're doing is perfect.
Keep going.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
That'll probably-- I think you got it.
So let's move the propane tank away from the flames.
So this first part is pretty leisurely.
It'll take probably a half hour, 45 minutes
for it to burn down before we're going to add some more.
So this would be a time to take another look at our feedstock
and see how we've got it sorted.
So what have we got here?
This all looks pretty well sorted.
Now, this kiln can consume a lot of feedstock.
You'd be surprised.
We'll have no trouble consuming what's on the ground here.
We'll definitely want to get into the smaller stuff here.
And some of those four-inch logs we can use.
I don't think we're going to want
to try these bigger ones, unless we can cut them up.
But we'll wait until closer to the end, and decide how--
I work for the state, so yeah, just for interest's sake.
I'm a community forestry coordinator for the state,
and I thought this might be a great example for communities
to use some of their excess products from trimming trees.
This might be a viable option for them just
to get rid of those products, instead
of having to pay the costs for waste removal.
We want to stay here.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well, I'm going to fill it full of water so it's cold.
OK.
And then I'll-- yeah, that's a good question.
So the question's been asked, how do you unload the kiln?
So when it's full and we're done charring
and we fill it full of water, we're going to flood it.
And once it's flooded, we know it's really out.
And then we're going to open the drain and let the water out.
And at that point, one of the easiest ways to unload it
is tip it over on its side.
It's stable.
It's quite stable on its side.
And you can put some [INAUDIBLE] here, and just
scoop it out onto the roofing.
We have a new version of this kiln that's
being built right now at Umpqua Community College that's
got four pockets on the bottom.
And they're going to try building us a tilt mechanism,
so it'll be like a tilt, then.
So you could come here with a tractor,
pick up the whole bin of charcoal,
and take it to wherever you want it.
It's going to be an improvement.
It makes the kiln heavier, though,
so it's no longer really movable by hand.
That's the tradeoff.
And if we have a tilt mechanism, we
could dump it right into a bigger hopper.
So if we're out of the woods or if we're on a farm,
we can just dump these with a tractor with forks
right into a bin or a dump truck.
And it's possible also, if you didn't want to quench it
individually, is once you've got the hot glowing coals,
you could pick it up with a tractor
and dump it into a bigger bin, maybe that's full of water.
Somebody's been asking also, do you
have to use water to quench?
Well, you know the fire triangle, right?
To have a fire, what do you need?
Oxygen.
Fuel and heat, right?
So to stop a fire, you've got to remove one of those things.
So you know, quenching it with water,
you're removing the oxygen pretty effectively.
If you just put a lid on it, you're removing the oxygen,
but with water, you're removing oxygen and heat.
It's like a double sure you're quenching it.
And you put a lid on it, you're removing oxygen,
but you're not removing heat very quickly.
And if you got a gap in your lid or a leak or something,
you risk losing all your char if you get oxygen
in there because it's going to take a long time to cool.
And we have done it this way.
And the way I do it is I'll take just a piece of thin sheet
steel that fits inside the kiln, because trying
to seal it around the outside, these kilns were--
making that seal is not easy.
So I put it on the inside, and then
I seal it with dirt on the top.
And that works pretty well, but it takes overnight to cool.
It holds heat a long time.
And what happens, if you just sprayed a little water on it
and didn't get it fully out, the heat retained in the char
would evaporate the water, and it could re-ignite
and you'd lose your char.
So that's one reason why I prefer water quenching.
I really know that I've done the job.
But sometimes, you don't have a fire engine or a lot of water,
so then you're going to want to try the dry snuff method.
And that works.
Just be aware of the things you need to be aware of.
And if you have a bigger kiln, like if you
had a 20-yard dumpster, trying to snuff it that way,
it might take a couple of days to cool down.
I don't know because I haven't really tried it.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
[INAUDIBLE] tell a story.
Where's Darren?
Darren?
Yeah.
We need to hear your story about trying to dry quench char
and what happened.
What happened?
How'd you learn the hard way about the combustion?
Oh, yeah, with [INAUDIBLE] kilns,
we didn't know much about quenching char.
It was a new thing to us.
And at the time, in one instance,
one of our very first demonstrations,
we asked people if they wanted some of the char
when we were done.
And so we sent a guy away with a couple
of five-gallon barrels of char.
And everything was great, he's driving down the road,
and looks in the back of his truck and everything's on fire.
He had to stop in the middle, and yeah, it
was pretty exciting for him.
We thought we had learned our lesson.
You think we had smarten up after once,
but we don't learn that quickly.
And we had to make a much bigger mistake to learn,
and this was in Nevada.
We were making-- we were set up there for about a month making
biochar, bio-oil from Pinion Juniper, and working away.
And we filled up a super sack, so
a similar size of the kiln there full of char
and set it away from everything else,
away from all the equipment.
So it couldn't burn anything, and we left it there
for a week.
OK, all good.
We rearranged things.
We're cleaning up the landing, and we stack
it next to everything else.
And we come back a couple of days later,
and there's things stacked up.
But then there's a hole, where something should have been,
and overnight, that char burned up that whole stack.
What was left.
So I told the story to people, and they said, oh, some of that
char you gave me, I have in my warehouse with my equipment
back home.
Oh.
Get that out of there, so it should be--
there should be no chance of it ever reigniting.
But if you don't fully quench it, you could have a problem.
And just storing char long term just without oxygen,
there can be problems as well, especially if there's
moisture in the char.
Thanks, Darren.
Yeah, if there's enough moisture, though,
and if it's made in this process, it's not a problem.
I brought a bunch of empty pellet bags.
So if you stick around to the end,
you can get a cubic foot bag of char to take home with you.
So I've got a bunch.
Application rate.
OK, so it depends.
If you're-- well, let's just take our typical garden soil.
In the Amazon, those terra preta soils have about--
what is it-- 20 tons per hectare of char, which is about 2%,
like in the first six inches.
About 2% of that is char, and it doesn't seem like a lot.
But it really is.
So the first biochar researchers,
they wanted to recreate these soils.
So they would go ahead and add 20, 30, 40, 60, 80
tons per hectare to soils, and it was too much,
especially because they were just
adding the raw char without charging it
with any nutrients or biology.
So often, they would see worse results the first year,
because that char was sucking up the nitrogen
that the plants needed.
But they come back the second year
after the char had been in soil for a while
and had absorbed some nitrogen, and they'd
see big improvements.
So this presented a real problem for the people
were trying to start a biochar industry.
How do you sell something that it's
going to give you worse results the first year,
and then you have to wait till two
or three years before you get good results?
That's not easy to do, so people started composting it.
And that gets it ready for the soil.
But if you don't have a compost pile,
and you just want a little bit, and you just
want to add it now, the way to do it
is save a garden bed to apply it about a 1/4 inch
to a 1/2 inch kind of sprinkling it on the top of the bed,
and then just work it in.
And as long as you're only putting that little
on at a time, it shouldn't be a problem.
But if you've got problems, too, especially you
want to be very really careful not to overplay it.
If you go ahead and mix it with compost,
or if you make a manure extract or use something,
like fish emulsion, so you can soak it in it,
then you can add a lot more at one time.
A lot of times, people have not had a lot of char to add,
so that saved a lot of people from making mistakes.
Because they didn't have enough to get into trouble.
But if you only have a little bit,
and you want to really see the maximum benefit,
you would maybe band it underneath a seed row,
or you would-- what I do, like when
I'm transplanting out my tomatoes from gallon pots,
I'll dig my hole.
And I'll make this complete organic fertilizer
with seed meal, and minerals, and a couple other things,
and biochar.
And it's all mixed together.
The char is not really charged.
It's just plain char, but I mix it
with all those other nutrients.
And then I'll just work it into the soil around the planting
hole, and that seems to do really well.
Yes?
The chicken manure combo that you have there.
Uh-huh.
The main reason that I came to this
was that I've heard a little bit about biochar before,
and I know that there's a lot of potential for good.
So I wanted to know more about how to do it, actually,
how to do it, and we've had-- that's been
very well demonstrated.
Well, that's a year old, but I'll tell you what I did.
I took that chicken manure.
I had a couple of buckets of it.
It was very fresh, very nasty stuff,
and I made some little piles, you know?
And one was just plain chicken manure.
One was 25% biochar.
One was 50%, and I actually stuck a compost thermometer
in it.
So there were little piles that didn't heat up a lot,
but they did heat up some.
And I noticed that the one was 50% char was, like,
three degrees hotter than the one
that was 25% hot char, which was hotter than the one
with no char.
So just by volume, like 50-50?
50-50 by volume.
I usually talk about volume with biochar, because--
and that can be a problem when you're working with char.
It's, like, how do you figure out how much of the stuff
you have?
Because some of it's dense.
Some of it's light.
It crushes, so getting a bulk density on it is kind of hard.
And if it's wet, it's going to weigh more than if it's dry,
so working in volume is usually the easiest way to do it.
The researchers, of course, will work in mass.
So they have to figure out their bulk density,
and their particle density, and all that stuff.
But this is a moment, where a brave person who's
properly attired would approach that thing with a shovel,
and kind of poke some of those ends in that are falling out,
and just compact it a little bit.
One of the things I really need to do is I
need to get my welder to make me a long handled tool,
because you don't really want to get real close to that.
So when I first started playing with these cone kilns,
and I had the smaller cone shaped kilns,
I would build a little, tiny fire in the bottom.
And I would slowly build it up, and that worked.
And the sloping sides really help you
build the fire up hot quickly.
But then I realized, if I put one of these rakes
in the middle, it would take me an hour
to get enough heat with a little building, a little fire working
up.
And I realized, if I put a big rake in there,
I've got my heat almost instantaneously.
So it really speeds up the process,
so I think, at this point, take some
of those two and those three inch pieces.
And let's put a layer of just three inch pieces in there.
They can all be going the same way.
You know, we got a few little bursts of smoke
when we add new material in, but overall, the process
is pretty clean.
And I think most of the smoke we're seeing
is the grass burning and the little pieces that
have fallen out.
So in some of your slides, the kilns
were set on cinder blocks.
Uh-huh.
Is there an advantage or disadvantage to doing that?
You know, well, a lot of people have put them up
on little legs or cinder blocks, and maybe they're
worried about burning the ground.
I'm not sure.
I've never really had to do that.
We were at a fire expo, Fire Wise Expo in Medford
on Saturday doing a demo, and we were
on their beautiful concrete pad.
And they made us put it on top of a pallet,
because that's all we had.
So it started burning.
We kept having to douse the pallet,
but we saved their concrete.
It doesn't actually get that hot there.
You know, I have one of these really cheap thermometers.
Do you guys have here a good one of these,
a infrared thermometer or a flare meter?
No?
Too bad, too bad.
If I can find the battery for it, we could try it,
but in the flame, one way you can tell the temperature
of this stuff is by color.
So there are color charts.
So cherry red, if something's glowing, like cherry red,
it's about 800 or 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
Can somebody put this battery in here for me?
Thank you, but I can tell you the temperature of the kiln.
That thing won't really tell you the temperature of the coals
inside, because the flame messes it up.
But I get the outside of the kiln,
and what I've noticed doing this is that,
right now, the bottom of that kiln is pretty hot.
Because the flame is right down there in there,
but the temperatures we're talking about with the metal
are pretty much wood stove temperature,
so 600 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's not going to get a lot hotter than that.
Thank you.
Wow, this is actually working today.
So we've got, oh, 731 on the bottom, 730 in the middle,
780 at the top, 800 at the top.
So yeah, it does get a little higher than 600.
The small kilns only get up to about 600,
because they just don't build up as much heat as we have here.
But what I've noticed is, once this thing gets
a little more full and the flaming zone is
up higher in the kiln, the bottom is going
to cool off pretty quickly.
It'll be down at 300 degrees, you
know, after this initial period.
Does that have a Celsius scale?
It does.
What are those numbers?
In Celsius, OK.
The bottom is at 398 Celsius.
The middle is reading about the same.
The top is 425, and over here, it's 460.
It's cooler on this side, 220 right here, 240 there.
That's right.
[INAUDIBLE] on a spit.
That's right.
Yeah, they've got to spit.
So if you have an old 55 gallon drum lying around,
cut it in half lengthwise or shave off part of it, one edge.
And you can make a pretty nice kiln or whatever.
Yeah, it's such a big [INAUDIBLE]..
So is that--
I mean, did you buy the can itself?
Or is that an old paint can?
Oh, you can buy them at the hardware
store for three or four bucks.
Then you don't have to worry about cleaning the paint out
of it.
Gotcha, yeah.
It's just for a demonstration.
Yeah, well, I was just thinking, you know,
I've got a wood stove--
Yes.
--I heat my house with.
There you go.
You can make charcoal that way.
I've got tons of bark chips and stuff just from splitting wood.
There's actually somebody who sells
something called a BioCharlie.
It's a piece of stove pipe with two ends.
I'm trying to figure out ways to have a backyard.
It strikes me.
It's a little bit like some of the livestock waters.
Yes, people do that.
OK.
Yeah, yeah.
That's galvanized.
Right, and the galvanizing will burn off.
But it's not that big of a deal.
So if you want to go buy a little small galvanized stock
tank, sort of a little trench shaped thing, you can use that.
A lot of people, when they first see these cone kilns, you know,
these slanty side things, they think that's there's
something really magic about the angle or something that
makes the char.
The angle is nice for a lot of reasons,
but it's not strictly necessary.
So you can make char in a straight sided container,
and it'll work fine.
The only thing that happens is, sometimes,
like, when I had my big tube, I had this four foot diameter
tube, and I was putting mill ends in it.
And some straight sided pieces of wood,
a piece would get right up against the side,
and it would have char completely.
But it's just not a big deal if some of the wood
doesn't char completely.
You just save it and throw it in the next batch, you know?
Or bury it deep in the soil, you know?
A lot of people put big chunks of wood
in their soil to hold moisture.
How's that looking?
That is fantastic, perfect.
Lin on?
Lid on, and let's wait till this burns down a little bit.
And then we'll throw it on there and see what it does.
Should we fire up the little tin can tea lid?
Would people like to see that?
OK.
Did anybody bring a tea kettle?
So this, you can make yourself, and I actually
have a little e-book that you could buy for $5.95.
It's on my Backyard Biochar website,
so you can just download it.
It gives you complete instructions.
I do this a lot with kids.
This is a great, fun activity for kids and adults.
So you need two cans.
This is, like, a tomato paste or tomato sauce can,
and you need a hammer and nail.
And you make a bunch of holes.
Kids love doing That, and then I put these little screws
in there for feet.
So the air can come up through the bottom, and then
these holes in the top, you know,
and have the appropriate clothing.
And do a smaller pile rather than a bigger one,
so you're not going to risk your safety and your eyebrows.
How many people here are aware that 1/3
of the world's population still cooks their food on open fire?
It's-- kind of mind boggling, but you know, that's, like,
three billion people or something like that still cook
on an open fire.
And there's a lot of health implications for that,
because it's still-- it's usually in a house.
They have a cooking fire in a house,
so the women and children are in there.
And sometimes, they're burning dung and really smoky stuff,
and they're dying of respiratory illness at a young age
sometimes.
So it's not really a very good thing health wise,
so there have been some initiatives, a lot of them,
to develop cleaner cookstoves.
And one of the cook stoves that was first initially developed
was something called a rocket stove, and it's real simple.
You can just-- it's basically an elbow.
So you just put sticks in the bottom,
and then air comes in, that same hole.
And it's just a more efficient cook stove,
so you can get more heat out of just a few little sticks.
Then it's clean, and also, another group of people
were starting to use these tea lids
and develop tea lids with little gas fires for people to use.
So there have been a bunch of different designs.
Some of them have gotten really fancy,
like they've added a fan.
They've added little swirl plates
to clean up the combustion even more,
and then you generally use-- they can use chunks of wood.
Or they could use dung pellets, or seed hulls,
or a lot of waste stuff that wouldn't really
get used otherwise.
So people don't have to go cut down a tree,
and that charcoal is not very hot.
Let's get the propane torch.
Are we getting hand sanitizer, right?
OK, squirt some on there.
She's looking pretty good.
If we could get another smack down and kind
of a spread to spread it a little more evenly,
that would be good.
This tea lid here, I have one that's got a fan in it,
but it's a tube.
And you put pellets in it, and on top of it
is a barbecue grill.
So it's like a gas grill that makes biochar out of pellets.
It's pretty nice.
The guek that Darren talking about,
the gasifier kit from All Power Labs,
it's a different kind of gasifier,
and it makes a different kind of char.
So this is a top lit updraft gasifier,
but guek is a downdraft gasifier.
And it doesn't really make as much char.
This makes a lot of char, but the down draft version doesn't.
But the down draft version is better
if you want to actually use the gas,
because the gas passes through the hot charcoal layer.
The flame is actually on the bottom,
so that cleans a lot of the tar out of the gas.
So then you have this gas that you can actually
run in a diesel engine.
It's that clean, so that's the beauty of a downdraft gasifier.
But you don't-- it burns a lot of the char as part of that
process.
The top lit updraft gasifier is a much simpler device,
and the gas that's produced is burned immediately
in the flame.
So it's really nice for cooking or heating things.
I think you could put one of these under a hot tub
and have a hot tub or whatever you want to do with it.
I used it.
Actually, I had a fan assisted one
that I use to heat up big pots of water for brewing.
So if you need to heat up, like, a two gallon pot,
I was making beer.
Yay.
Actually--
Smoked porter?
Yeah, no, actually, it was wine.
Yeah, these tea lids are really pretty
easy to make out of any kind of can or barrel
that you might have.
And the bigger the can, the bigger the stuff
you could put in it.
Like my 55 gallon tea lid that I showed you,
I could put mill ends in there, you know, two by four chunks.
And it's pretty nice, because you just light it on the top.
And then you can walk away for an hour, and come back,
and it's done.
How long will that take to turn into biochar?
This here?
You know, this is amazing.
This will burn for almost an hour once it gets going,
so you can make multiple pots of tea, you know?
You could boil multiple kettles of water,
and that's the thing that kind of surprised me is that--
and the reason why I really liked heating up water
for making wine for my brew.
Because it's got more energy than propane.
So if you're trying to heat up big pots of water
using propane, you're going to use a lot of propane,
and this wood gas will heat up the water faster than propane,
all for the price of some wood pellets.
Ken Ludwig and I were just talking about another system
that another colleague has used before for making biochar.
Just a 55 gallon drum filled with--
Ken was using slabs from the sawmill.
But Chuck Gay, my former boss, would just
use sticks from the yard.
And once it was full, cap it.
And Chuck Gay's system, he just had a hole
in the barrel about the size of your pinky--
about the diameter of your pinky.
And then, he'd set that barrel in some cement
blocks and T posts.
The forest health coordinated with forestry fire and state
lands came to basically see a project that we have planned up
the mountains-- and some of our foresters
have planned up in the mountains,
and just came to see what it was all about.
So he'd set the barrel up over a fire--
two feet up over fire.
And with other wood, he'd have a fire underneath it.
And all the gas would--
the moisture would come out that hole.
And he would just let it cool down.
And then, when it was done, he'd take it.
And he'd fill the whole barrel full of water
and run the whole thing through his chipper
so he didn't lose any of the fines.
And he said, he had good success with that approach.
And he'd ship it directly into his compost pile
and mix it in with his compost, and it would charge.
So that's another simple backyard system.
Nice.
I like that, running the whole thing through the chipper.
Now, let me talk a little bit about crushing biochar.
Because I have these kilns now.
So I know I'm making lots of char.
And driving over it, it works, but it's a little tedious.
So I've tried a lot of different ways to crush it.
When it's dry, you can run it through a chipper really easy.
Especially one with a hammer mill
that shreds the leaf shredder.
But you're going to get a dust storm.
If it's too wet--
if it's pretty wet and you put it through that hammer mill,
it's just going to clog.
It's like paste.
It's really sticky.
If I get it right at-- there's a certain sweet spot of dryness
where it goes through without making dust.
So I usually wait for that.
But I just bought an electric-driven hammer mill--
a really small one.
Because it was a straight through,
whereas my pioneer chipper, you drop it in the top,
but then it goes around the circle and comes out.
So that would clog really easily.
So I thought the straight through one would work better.
And it worked really great with really wet char.
So what a hammer mill is, it's just these flails.
You put the stuff in the top, and there's
a screen in the bottom with 1/4 inch size holes.
So it drops through, the hammers beat against that screen,
and the stuff goes through the screen.
Well, when you put it in when it was pretty wet, just quenched,
it came out like soft serve ice cream.
[LAUGHTER]
And it was really fine.
So if I wanted biochar powder, that
was a great way to make it.
So I'd dump it in there, and this black extruded stuff
would come out.
But I wanted also some bigger particle size stuff.
So I let it dry.
But I guess it's not dry enough, because I
put that stuff through the other day,
and it completely clogged it like that.
So yeah, it's a little bit of a problem.
People have tried all kinds of things.
They have-- a great crusher seems to work.
I have one friend who has a concrete slab at his shop.
And he gets a lawn roller and pulls it with his ATV.
So he gets a more even-- it's better than truck tires.
How else do people try to crush char?
A front-loader to smash it.
[LAUGHS]
Yeah.
Yeah, that would work.
So in big ag systems, we haven't talked about that very much .
But applying the biochar on a field level,
there's some really interesting ideas there.
In Australia, they are doing that soft serve approach
with an extruder.
It's actually some kind of machine
they have from the food industry.
It's a mixer extruder.
And they're mixing it with--
I think they're mixing it with manure
and then extruding it out into a slurry.
And then, they have a deep injection system.
So they're going through a field,
and they're cutting it with a chisel plow
and injecting it deep in the soil.
And that's giving them good results.
Another thing that you could think about for a larger
scale, if you had a rangeland--
you wanted to get char out on a rangeland.
If you've got pinyon Juniper you're getting rid of
and you want to get the char in the soil in the rangeland,
you just get a rangeland drill.
And if you can get the char at the right consistency,
you could potentially just put it in the seed box
and apply it just like you would seed or fertilizer
with the rangeland or a no-till drill.
So that's one option.
One gentleman was asking me about turf.
Golf courses are starting to use char now.
In fact, it was one of the original uses
for char was golf courses.
One of the biochar textbooks has a picture
of an ad from the 1920s that talks about putting charcoal
on a golf course.
So to do that, to get it into turf, you use an aerator.
You punch those little holes, and then you spread the char,
and it'll go right down into the little holes.
And that's how you apply it.
You can use a manure spreader--
especially if you-- or a compost spreader.
So really that's probably the easiest way.
If you're doing an organic system
and you're already applying manure or compost,
then you're going to just mix it right in.
And on an industrial scale, really,
the best way to use char is going
to be to use it first in a composting or manure management
operation.
There is a huge potential to use it in dairies
and solve a couple of problems at once.
So dairy waste water is a big pollution problem.
And so, you can add biochar right in the dairy stalls.
And you've got a wash-down system, it'll go into a lagoon.
It'll help suppress the odors in the lagoon
and absorb the nitrogen in the lagoon.
And then, it will also-- when you press out the solids--
it'll be in the solids, so it'll help that compost better.
So there's just huge applications
in animal agriculture for char improving conditions
for the animals, improving the environmental output,
and producing really valuable soil amendments.
We've had good luck with a lime spreader
as well when we were putting acres of char
out on a site in the Uinta Basin here last year.
We had the lime spreader.
It's looking good.
Time for another load.
Stay away from that terminology, because it really does
refer to activated carbon.
Squish.
[LAUGHTER]
Everybody ready for that?
Yeah?
Hold on.
The phones aren't ready.
Get your phones ready.
Our phones aren't ready.
You might need a back--
It looks like--
Right there.
Under there.
That didn't get burned.
[LAUGHTER]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
There it is.
Slide in.
Black and greasy, baby.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Definitely, that one is not done.
We've done it with hot rocks.
[INAUDIBLE]
The tank.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
What is going on there?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Oh, there it is.
It's underneath there.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Right there.
Under there, it didn't get burned.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
[LAUGHTER]
There it is.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Yeah.
Slide in.
[LAUGHTER]
Black and greasy, baby.
Definitely, this is not done.
We've done it with hot rocks.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
What is going on there?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Oh, there it is.
It's underneath it.