<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><div><div>Hi Rob:<br><br>You can also make biochar as a byproduct of biomass heating, where you burn the volatiles instead of releasing them into the atmosphere as pollution, as in the tradtional way of making charcoal.<br><br></div>There is a workshop next week near Kingston (ON), with some international cookstove experts:<br><a href="http://mha-net.org/docs/15052201.pdf">http://mha-net.org/docs/15052201.pdf</a><br><br></div>I am anxious to meet one of the local guys, Alex English, who does the biomass heating there for a bunch of commercial greenhouses. He can apparently make biochar in his boilers at the touch of a button.<br></div><br></div>We have been playing around with a new masonry heater firebox developed recently in Austria, that our testing has shown to reduce particulate (smoke) pollution by about 50% over existing designs:<br><a href="http://www.heatkit.com/research/lopez-2014-03-01.html">http://www.heatkit.com/research/lopez-2014-03-01.html</a><br><br></div>The PM (particulate matter) emissions factor we are getting, 0.5 g/kg, is about twice as clean as a pellet stove.<br><br></div>One of the features of this design is that the firebox is airtight, and you can shut off the batch burn anytime you have reached the charcoal phase of the burn. Very convenient as you can just walk away without waiting for the fire to be out, and your house has heat for the next 24 hours. Depending on when you shut off the air, you get varying amounts of charcoal, which you can just burn the next day when you burn the next batch of wood. Or, you can take the charcoal, and put it into your garden as biochar. As a rough guess, you could probably convert about 25% of your firewood to charcoal this way. Carbon negative heating.<br><br></div>Norbert<br><div><div><div><div><div><br><div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 8:46 PM, RT <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ArchiLogic@yahoo.ca" target="_blank">ArchiLogic@yahoo.ca</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
<div dir="ltr"><span class="">On Sun, 28 Jun 2015 19:22:12 -0400, <<a href="mailto:conservationarchitect@rockbridge.net" target="_blank">conservationarchitect@rockbridge.net</a>> wrote:<br></span></div><div dir="ltr"><span class="">(snip)</span><div><br></div><div>Anyone who heats with wood will know that charcoal is the result of incomplete combustion -- ie a dirty, smouldering fire.</div><div><br></div><div>Its seems (to me anyway) that to promote charcoal "aka BioChar" as a Green resource is akin to promoting a 1967 Buick Electra with a 430 cubic inch V-8 engine as environmentally-friendly transportation.</div><div><br></div><div>It would also seem that instead of using 4500 kgs (almost 5 tons) of charcoal as a desiccant for dehumidification , simply using clay or salt would achieve the same result with far less embodied-energy. I suspect that Norbert Senf would have a pretty good idea of actual figures but my wild-@$$ guess would be that something like 10 tons of hardwood would need to be burned in a very dirty manner to make 5 tons of charcoal.</div><div><br></div><div>However, I could be completely off-base with my antiquated 1970's impression/opinion of charcoal. </div><div> </div><br><div><div>-- </div><div>=== * ===<br>Rob Tom DT7-64 <br>Kanata, Ontario, Canada</div></div></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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