[Stoves] Commercial application of smoke? (Re: Crispin, Ron)

Wed Sep 14 13:36:02 CDT 2016

How about seeking poisonous trees to make poisonous things to coat the bottom of fence posts etc?

You would be turning poisonous wood (if burned in a fire) into clean charcoal. At the same time, make toxins that are natural and might be effective for a dealing with a real problem – bugs eating the house.

Regards

Crispin

Thanks Crispin, 

A final story you may like is how I started doing this to start off with, a neighbour was always quite keen to buy charcoal from our forest but would say since that since he smoked, the charcoal smoke made him cough(!)  So I googled charcoal smoke traps, read up a bit on what was happening in East Asia and history of Pine Tar in Sweden and USA and started tinkering with various sizes/lengths of pipe after paying close attention to the biomass stoveslist lectures and voila...liquid smoke. 

The basic principle I think is the outside of the thin metal pipe is cooler than the inside and this makes some of the smoke condense. I am sure there are many ways to water cool it and so forth but that can come later when we find a few more people replicating and hopefully improving on this simple design ( I have found two people so far in Kenya and highly encourage them!). I am still busy trying to convince people not to cut down whole trees for charcoal, and just to use the branches! Anyway, there is quite a large visible difference when making charcoal with and without the pipe trap - and since we recover about a liter of this wood smoke from appx 20/30kgs smoke it must be reducing something that was going into the air. My neighbour is much more happy now at least. I asked the stove testing center here if they could test the charcoal making emissions difference with and without smoke trap and also against the traditional earth mound kiln but that turned out not to be feasible given the costs. Any suggestions on how to do some simple home and farm tests would be greatly appreciated. 

There are seem to be many variables on the final quality of the wood vinegar - water content, age of dried wood, bark or no bark, temp and duration of burn, speed of smoke condensation, post collection treatment and refining and of course the question of feedstock choice. I suspect that within even a single species of tree for instance, the actual chemical composition of the wood vinegar would vary on age, location of growth (soil condition, light exposure) certain endemic sub-species traits of the plant like high tannins contents etc etc...these would all, I think, change the final chemical composition of the wood vinegar. 

For a practical perspective I reckon that if one keeps away from known poisonous trees like acokanthera schimperi (the poison arrow tree) this wood vinegar is alot safer to use on your fence posts than some of the dodgy synthetic termite chemicals on the market in Kenya right now.  

This could well work in Rwanda, as it is the cat is more or less out of the bag here, the Dutch owned flower farms in Kenya do not buy things they do not need and the very smart guy who is selling the wood vinegar is as busy as bee with it and he's still up to much much more. Not to mention the huge wood vinegar industry in Japan, China, Vietnam etc. 

As for the ethanol aspect, absolutly, we had always thought of incorporating a distillery system for the waste heat during charcoal making but public opinion (and laws) of making moonshine in the backyard were and still are quite against this idea sadly. 

In any event, I'm thinking a water heating pipe for a chicken coop will be a lower hanging fruit as you could then roast the chicken with charcoal (liquid smoke marinade optional!) at a later date. 

Speaking of not wanting to eat anything with liquid smoke, the next ''umami of barbeque'' flavor for fancy cocktails, is, you guessed it, drinking liquid smoke! And paying top dollar for it i'm sure! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-raichlen/up-your-cocktail-game--wi_b_4578535.html So no Smokey Marys for you for breakfast I take it! :) 

Sorry if this is quite long and off topic on technical aspects of biomass cooking stoves but the sustainable woodfuel production aspect of charcoal burning stoves is a key component of what we learned from our families ongoing KCJ experience.

Best. 

Teddy 

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