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David Yarrow, Four Oaks Farm

sunday we conducted our 18th test burn with our TLUD biochar burn barrel.
this time brad mostly loaded wood chips in the barrel.
this burn ran over 95 minutes, quietly, smoothly
and produced over 15 gallons of solid, dense biochar,

for more details see: http://www.dyarrow.org/18thBurn/

monday brad did two more wood chip burns.
the first ran 90 minutes.
the second ran over 2 hours.
we like burning wood chips!!

REMINDER:
this weekend is our first biochar workshop at four oaks farm.
saturday at 10am, sunday at 1pm, and monday at 6pm

http://www.dyarrow.org/biochar/

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Today Chris fired up his own creation, which took an oil drum (with Texaco logo still intact) and a butane tank with the bottom cut off. Total cost, including welding & machining labor, was US$40. He stuffs the inner chamber (inverted gas tank -- the top handles serve as a stand) with guadua (bambusa vulgaris) -- great for the cellular structure -- and the outer chamber with woody scraps from the farm as he limbs trees, opens trails, etc. It takes about 20 min from the time he fires the barrel to get up to pyrolysis temperature, at which point the smoke coming from the barrels ignite and the burn is pretty clean. He puts food for his pigs -- breadfruit, chocho, bananas -- on top, to use some of the heat (it comes to a boil in a minute or two), but I have to say there is still a lot of waste heat that would be good to find some uses for.

The nice thing about this rig is that it is so simple and easy to operate that it can be used every day by either the farmer or his wife or son. Chris throws the bamboo-char into his pig pen for the pigs to pulverize. They ate it the first time, which was even better, but haven't eaten it again since.

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Douglas Clayton and Hugh McLaughlin

Hugh McLaughlin and I have been working on describing our retort over TLUD char maker, which Hugh has christened the Jolly Roger Oven or " J-RO". The current draft of our paper The “Jolly Roger Ovens” family of Biochar-making devices in pdf, and attached to this story

From the YouTube notes:
A 30 gallon retort heated by a 55 gallon TLUD is the basic idea. I've been a biochar enthusiast for 5 years now and riding the learning curve on how to make and use biochar at home. This device can run very cleanly. The cleanest I have seen for a simple batch device.


From Magh Biochar Retort 2

Magh Bichar retort - 1 is a simple low-cost biochar making retort. In this design a two hundred liter steel drum is used. The top and bottom portions of the drum were cut open. One of the lids is used for covering the open side. The biomass is dumped into the drum and lit at the top and more biomass is added while it is still lit to fill it up to the brim. In TLUD condition the flame continuous. After some time the intensity of the flames lessen. Now the lid is placed over the flames and using soil the lid is sealed, so that no smoke is seen leaking out. Now the smoke appears at the pipe, which is attached through a connecting pit at the bottom of the drum. Leave it for more than 12 hours. The biochar continues to form and also the retort cools down. This second situation is the downdraft condition.

Note: Precaution should be taken to keep oneself as far as possible from the flames. The efficient production of the biochar also depends on the producers experience. For more details see http://maghbiocharretort.blogspot.com/

Magh Biochar Retort is demonstrated to the community under the GSBC Project. GEO is implementing the project with support of GoodPlanet, France.

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MAKING BIOCHAR: with Peter Hirst of New England Biochar

Many thanks to George Packard of Parrot Creek Productions, Warner, New Hampshire for some really fine work. This is the short version of greater works in progress. Very well done by George and much appreciated.

Peter Hirst

Al Latham, September, 2009

I have a pdf (download the attached file) showing a simple biochar retort that I put together, that
might be of interest to your viewers.

If you'd like to add it to the Making BioChar.

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Charcoal production for carbon sequestration (1.1 mb pdf)
Gustan Pari, Djeni Hendra, Dadang Setiawan, Mahpudin Saepuloh, Salim Soleh, Mad Ali (Forest Products Technology Research and Development Center) and Kiyoshi Miyakuni, Nobuo Ishibashi(Japan International Cooperation Agency) April 2004
Demonstration Study on Carbon Fixing Forest Management in Indonesia

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