[Stoves] Don't waste the heat, grow red wigglers and glorious greens

[ajheggie at gmail.com]

On Sunday 16 October 2011 05:03:12 Crispin Pemberton-Pigott wrote:
> Water poured onto a large pile of hot charcoal can manufacture hydrogen
> and the pile can explode. It is not common, but not unknown.

Which is a lot different from dunking the char into water. 

freshly made char is hygroscopic. it absorbs water vapour from the air and 
this is adsorbed on the char matrix, essentially condensing it from the 
vapour state to liquid, in so doing it releases all the latent heat into 
the pile and a hotspot can develop and ignite the pile.

The release of hydrogen from sprinkling water onto char is s simple 
disassociating at low temperature? I don't recall Yury's post and I do 
read all he posts. From experience of putting out barbecues and the 
almost explosive generation of steam I would not advocate pouring small 
volumes of water onto hot char.

Perhaps Alex will comment because I think his method of augering the hot 
char into water also utilised the water as an air seal to prevent air 
entering that part of the combustion chamber.

AJH