270 litre biochar gasifier build using hot water tanks.

Discussion in 'Designing, building, making and powering your life' started by bazman, Mar 22, 2014.

  1. bazman

    bazman Junior Member

    Joined:
    Jul 4, 2005
    Messages:
    802
    Likes Received:
    2
    Trophy Points:
    0
    Hi all Last weekend my kind brother asked if I wanted some old copper water tanks from his work which had tested positive Legionnaire's disease. I'm not one to knock back anything like this. When I dropped over to his place I found the 4 systems were in fact stainless steel 250lt Edwards units. Perfect size to make series of larger scale biochar batch gasifiers based on my Bazman unit. It will take me a while to make the first unit (I'm having to do some real paid work for awhile) but the next three after that should be much faster to build and these will probably be for sale if anyone is interested. They will hold 250-270 litres of wood chip and should make about 100 litres of biochar over a two hour run. So if you were keen you could make 300 litres a day if you had enough dry wood chip. The water tanks have a colour bond steel outer skin with 50mm of spray in insulation which as you will see is a bit of a pain to chip off. The height of the unit will be a bit of an issue at 1600mm meaning it will need to sit another 500mm off the ground, so to put the chip in you will need to be 2100mm off the ground. This will take some work to get right but it should be a fun little unit to hack around with over the next few months. To the pics. [​IMG] The other 3 tanks sitting in my container. [​IMG] The first step was to cut along the seam and peel the colourbond skin off. [​IMG] You can see the unit access panels and the fun job of chipping off the insulation with a heavy duty work knife. [​IMG] I have ended up with a heap of insulation in bags, this will have to go into landfill. [​IMG] The bottom had a quite hard type of insulation but chipped out ok with some force. [​IMG] In my wisdom I tipped the unit upright after cutting off the bottom pipes, this emptied a heap of water onto the ground. I will still need to remove the finer bits of insulation with a wire wheel on the grinder. Took about 2 hours to this point. I will update this page when I get around to my next step. FYI. this is my design made by an NGO based in the UK. They have a nice video on the front page. https://www.carboncatcher.co.uk/ I can't for some reason get all these images to sit nicely on the page... Sorry =(
     

Share This Page

-->