Creating charcoal in an airtight stove

[northmanlogging]

Carbon is carbon, nothing more or nothing less and I have never said otherwise. Even a diamond is carbon and will burn if it gets hot enough. As for getting angrier, try looking at yourself. I am not angry. I know the difference between charcoal, activated charcoal and biochar and they are all made from the same base carbon sources. For charcoal, the material is usually wood, but for biochar the source can be any organic material, even elephant poop. Biochar is made at higher temps than charcoal to preserve the internal structures of the product. This allows the biochar to uptake and hold more water and nutrients than charcoal. That is the only real difference between the two products. You can use either to fire your grill, or grow your garden, only for growing, biochar is better than regular charcoal.


As for not being made in the same process, that is exactly the point.

this is just going around in circles.

BTW this is why they used to teach basic science in school, so that folks wouldn't buy into some BS advertising ploy, and they might understand that big words like pyrolysis, just means we got it hot, and it produced its own heat.

Furthermore, since i've been waiting for you to actually look this up, Activated carbon is charcoal, that is sometimes ground or sifted, then SUPER heated, wayyyyyy above 900f of the pyrolysis stage, in a ZERO oxygen setting, which causes the pores of charcoal to open up, it is then exposed to other gasses such as argon, or Nitrogen, then SUPER HEATED to an even higher temp in a zero 02 environment. becoming a better filter media in that it catches and holds, without releasing btw. Which is why it makes a skookum filter media.

You can not make activated carbon in one step you first have to cook off the volitiles before super heating, because then you would essentially have a super heated bomb waiting to go off. As to maintain a ZERO 02 setting, it has to be virtually sealed, not a loose fitting lid, or hole punched in the lid to let gasses out, as there shouldn't be any gasses to let out.

And I repeat, Cannister Charcoal, is no different then the stuff left over from a fire, both are created at relatively low temps and a LOW oxygen setting, they burn the same and will do the same job when used as a soil supplement, this is scientific fact, claiming it has to be done a certain way is just marketing **** and a ******* lie.

I skipped over the wood gasifier as thats just a whole nother argument, does it create charcoal, yes, do you need a canister within a canister no, is it more efficient if you do, maybe. Really all you need is a can full of ANY ORGANIC MATERIAL that is sealed except a pipe that is fed into some sort of combustion apparatus, and an outside heat source, the organic materiel gives off volatile gasses, those gasses are fed into said aperatus where they are lit and produce some sort of secondary function, the "waste" of Gasification, becomes charcoal, its not magic, in fact the Fecking Nazis tried to extend WWII using wood and coal gasification to produce a diesel substitute... its not very efficient though, and they still lost the war.

 

[Del_]

I've made high quality charcoal in our Jotuf F600CB quite easily.

Cut wood into even sized chunks and fit them in a turkey roaster.
We let our Jotul die down to a bed of hot coals about 2 inches deep.
Place the turkey roaster loaded with the chunks of wood.
In just a few minutes flames will start jetting from the turkey roaster around its top lid.
When the flames stop remove the turkey roaster and place in on the fireplace hearth to cool.
Of course we only do this during the wood heating season.


This is a small amount of charcoal.
We burn the pyrolytic gasses right in the wood stove and use the heat.
We recover the heat from the cooling down turkey roaster.

We soak the charcoal in a water/urine mix for a few days and then add it to our vegetable garden. Our grow rows are 36" wide with 24" walkways and are in exactly the same place year after year. We also dig to 14" deep using a Meadow Creature Broad fork.

 

[pdqdl]

Isn't that kind of hard on your turkey pot?

 

[Del_]

Isn't that kind of hard on your turkey pot?

It's an old one and it doesn't seem to bother it at all.

But I imagine it is not good for it. We use turkey roasting bags for turkey and venison.

It's just something I played around with. It's a fun process to watch through the glass windows on the stove.

It only takes about ten minutes and surely is not a way to produce large amounts of charcoal.

I'm not claiming that the biochar makes a huge difference. It's not really a difference I've noticed but I'm sure it does have some effect.

 

[SweetMK]

Isn't that kind of hard on your turkey pot?

I think it would be hard on the turkey he mentioned,,,

"Place the turkey roaster loaded with the chunks of wood.
In just a few minutes flames will start jetting from the turkey around its top lid."

 

[Del_]

I think it would be hard on the turkey he mentioned,,,

"Place the turkey roaster loaded with the chunks of wood.
In just a few minutes flames will start jetting from the turkey around its top lid."

Fixed it! Thanks.

Now the wife is telling me it is a dutch oven.

 

[SweetMK]

I wanted to add some "biochar" to our garden this year,, I figured that purchased charcoal would be a start.

I went to Walmart,, they had the 30 pound bags of Royal Oak lump charcoal mis-priced at around $10,, I purchased 6 bags.
There is no way I could create 180 pounds of charcoal for $60.
Some guy on YouTube said he got the Royal Oak Lump charcoal at the dollar store real cheap.

The stuff is perfect, I may try crushing some tomorrow,

 

[SweetMK]

Fixed it! Thanks.

Now the wife is telling me it is a dutch oven.

My wife said it is a roasting pan,, I do not know,,,,
I should know,, my mother used to tell us kids how coating those pans was her job before she was married,,,
She was born in 1910,, and married at age 21. so that must have been about 1930.

Her job was tossing the "white dots" onto the coating,, all done by hand,, (in Pittsburgh)

 

[pdqdl]

So why are you guys adding charcoal to your garden? Seems to me compost would be a lot smarter and easier.

 

[pdqdl]

BTW: this is a dutch oven:



There were an awful lot of cast iron pots included in the search for that picture, but as any Boy Scout knows, that lid is made to put coals on too.

 

[SweetMK]

The reason for charcoal is surface area,, the surface area is a spot for microbial life to attach to.
I can not remember the exact number,, but,,
it is something like one pound of this charcoal has the same surface area as a football field.

I already added almost a half million pounds of compost,,
(the county was loading, and giving it away free,,, I got 100 loads on my tandem dump trailer.)

 

[muddstopper]

Activated charcoal is made using high heat, similar to biochar, but that is where the similarities end.
Activated charcoal is charcoal that has been ground into a powder and treated with calcium chloride and then dried again.

As you can see, I have already mentioned the temps needed to make activated charcoal. I didnt go into the details, but at the time, I had no intentions on providing a science lesson. I am glad to see that you are now doing some research on the subject.

 

[Franny K]

I've made high quality charcoal in our Jotuf F600CB quite easily.

Cut wood into even sized chunks and fit them in a turkey roaster.
We let our Jotul die down to a bed of hot coals about 2 inches deep.
Place the turkey roaster loaded with the chunks of wood.
In just a few minutes flames will start jetting from the turkey roaster around its top lid.
When the flames stop remove the turkey roaster and place in on the fireplace hearth to cool.
Of course we only do this during the wood heating season.

This would be an alternative to putting in small pieces of wood to get some more draft (to burn down the coals pile) when the wood stove has such a belly full of coals that it isn't putting out satisfactory heat for the conditions.

Or when the outside temperature has risen, and one can't decide how to operate the thing.

My guess from looking at the picture I linked you likely don't have the issue that the guy in post 1 does
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/...V5PQ2R8KX0/binary-33898-33466.png?format=500wLooks like youi can top load it. Not sure if any current models still can be.

 

[Del_]

This would be an alternative to putting in small pieces of wood to get some more draft (to burn down the coals pile) when the wood stove has such a belly full of coals that it isn't putting out satisfactory heat for the conditions.

Or when the outside temperature has risen, and one can't decide how to operate the thing.

My guess from looking at the picture I linked you likely don't have the issue that the guy in post 1 does
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/...V5PQ2R8KX0/binary-33898-33466.png?format=500wLooks like youi can top load it. Not sure if any current models still can be.

What I do is such a small amount of fuel that it makes almost no difference on how the stove runs or how much heat it puts out.

And yes, I do not have the issues that the original poster was speaking of and what I do wouldn't help him a bit.

My more modern Jotul F600CB has a top that opens but has a plate, insulation and stainless steel secondary combust air input tubes.

My understanding is that approximately 50% of the energy in wood is to be found in the coal so removing glowing coals and quenching them in water would be giving up a good percentage of the heat value. That's a stiff penalty to pay when the goal is to get more heat out of a wood stove.

 

[Del_]

So why are you guys adding charcoal to your garden? Seems to me compost would be a lot smarter and easier.

https://www.permaculturenews.org/2016/11/18/biochar-brief-history/
We make use of lots of compost but biochar is reported to add a greater time release of nutrients, especially the elusive N. Biochar also sequesters carbon and last a very long time in the soil. I've really used very little, just played around with it. One main problem with the dutch oven technique is it carries smoke odor into the room and we are used to running a stove that adds no smoke odor. I enjoy a little smoke odor now and then but she does NOT. Makes her cranky.

There a lots of ways to produce charcoal outdoors and I believe outdoors is the way to go.

 

[muddstopper]

So why are you guys adding charcoal to your garden? Seems to me compost would be a lot smarter and easier.

Promise to behave and I will answer.
The point of adding charcoal or biochar to a garden is to provide carbon to the soil. Carbon is the building block of just about everything and is the one thing that most soils are lacking. Compost also adds carbon to soil, but when you start figuring the conversion rates from organic material to humus, it takes a lot of compost to equal a few lbs of charcoal. Compost on the other hand also provides a lot of nutrients that are not found in charcoal. Recycled nutrients are the easiest nutrients for plants to take up. We are also taking charcoal made from our firewood, which by itself is a very poor food source for feeding plants or microbes. biochar on the other hand is made from just about any organic material, even though the making of the biochar pretty much burns off about all of those nutrients. In one way, charcoal, might provide more nutrients back to the soil than biochar because wood charcoal hasn't been completely consumed in the low heat process, but the benefit of the added carbon outweighs the tiny bit of extra nutrients that might be gained. Activating, not to be confused with activated carbon, the biochar is a good way to add microbial organisms back to a soil that has been made sterile from the overuse of fertilizers and chemicals. One of the best ways to activate, or maybe the right word is inoculate, the biochar is to simply take it out in the woods and bury it in the ground. The porosity of the biochar will allow whatever soil life that occurs naturally in the soil to move in and fill the pores of the biochar. When you dig the biochar up and spread it in your garden, you will have successfully inoculated your garden soil. Very low cost. Or you could just pee on it like Del suggests, and he isnt the only person I have heard say to do such a thing. Not my thing and Del and I have discussed this before.