[Stoves] Fuel Management - Bamboo Sawdust

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Tony

One of the good uses of sawdust when you have electricity is a simple fan and sawdust combustor.

If you start a fire and spray air containing sawdust into it, you can get a really hot clean fire. It will probably be best to do it against a ceramic wall, like fire brick.

The bricks are available from Jakarta, if you are patient. They are used on Lombok to make combustors for palm kernel shells so you may find them easily ‎in Bali.

The burners that work this way use quite high pressure (centrifugal) fans, not the propeller type. ‎The sawdust is dropped into a hole so it is picked up by the air and carried into the fire.

In short, the fuel is not loaded into the stove, it is blown in ‎a little at a time.

Because it is an institutional stove, you can use the fire power. There are such small fans widely used by ‎Lombok blacksmiths among others. They are all 450 watts because that is the limit for a residential home (2 amps).

It would be easy to check. You might be able to lead a pipe into the fire chamber ‎and fill it with sawdust, loosely. As it burns at the bottom, it will fall down. The fan will burn only the bit exposed at the bottom. Build a structure around it.

Regards
Crispin



Dear stovers

Looking for some advice or suggestions to utilise a source of excess sawdust for institutional cookstoves at a school. in Indonesia.

After several attempts with various devices to burn the sawdust directly have failed to be accepted by the kitchen over time I am now looking to better fuel management as the solution.

Looking for simple lowcost options for Pelletizing or making briquettes from the sawdust.

In various postings I have found reference to managing sawdust/husk fuel using cowdung as a binding material and simple screw or lever based press to create briquettes or cakes that are dried.

Although dung is locally available there is considerable resistance from the staff to incorporate dung into the kitchen setting as part of the fuel.

The volume of source material available (6-8sacks/day) does not justify a pelletizing machine and we feel this opportunity could make for a good student lead project to create a sustainable fuel management process for the kitchen/support staff.

The available sawdust fuel is from treated bamboo from local factory which has some moisture content (18-20%) at time it is created.

I have seen reference to other "binding materials" or even partial pyrolysis to bind the fuel and am looking for some suggestions of things to try for a local pelletizing/briquetting process.
Or some arguments to accept dung as binding material.

We need to generate enough fuel to feed 6-8 stoves operating over 2-4 hours food prep time on a daily or twice daily basis with reasonable efficiency.

Suggestions??

Tony Vovers
+62 (813) 3888 9062 (HP)

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