amazing homemade gasifier uses wood pellets to run generator -- renewable alternative energy video

hi YouTube my name is jr. I just built the gasifier so I want to post a video of it gasifier basically uses wood fuel to create a smoke or vapor that you can then use in a generator or an internal combustion engine so I'm going to start it and get it going and warming up and then explain everything to you as it's warming up and hopefully I can start my generator on it once it's all going this is just rolled-up newspaper what is doing right now is it has a blower motor attached to it that's pulling air through everything and so as I lit that newspaper it's drawing that flame into this tube and igniting the fuel that's that's in the fire too from the top here you now hopefully what the goal is is that will ignite the fuel inside here which is in a four inch diameter pipe that goes down into here and then there's a basket at the bottom holding that fuel although I'm using is wood pellets for a wood pellet stove they tend to burn pretty clean and they work pretty well okay so that's got that's got the fuel lit in there so I'm going to do is I'm going to cap off my ignition port and now the only oxygen that's coming into the system is through the tube that the fuel is in so what I'll do is all I'll grab the camera and I'll kind of explain to you what these different pieces are of the gasifier so this main this main unit is a 30 gallon barrel that I have and what it has it has a four inch tube welded into the top there that then goes down about 18 inches 16 or 18 inches into this unit and then what it does is it like I said it's burning in there this front piece is just in a just a clean-out port it's got a gasket around it and then this is a shaker assembly this handle goes in through this tube and interlocks to the basket so you can shake it and loosen up any charcoal and get rid of the old stuff before you light it with new fuel I got all of these plans and everything from the FEMA booklet if you want those those instructions they're free on the internet you can just google FEMA gasifier and you can download I think it's like 85 or 95 pages worth of material it's pretty long but it's it's well worth reading a lot of the stuff I did I did completely based off of those plans and based off of some ideas that I saw off of hello YouTube gasifier people so what's going on now is is that burn that's going on in this main container is the smoke is being drawn through this pipe then I have a rubber coupler into this unit right here which is an old freon canister and what it does is it's a cyclone filter this this is the inlet pipe and this is the outlet pipe right here this outlet pipe goes through the top of this canister all the way into about two inches off the bottom so what it's doing is it's drawing the smoke in that smoke is in theory spiraling around that outlet pipe and it's depositing a lot of them of the water vapor and creosote and tar on to the sides of this canister which then drip down into this drain into this pickle jar that I have here and so what I can do so everything's still airtight I have if anything's been made it up together without welding I've used a high temperature silicone to seal those cracks and gaps so that everything here is airtight so no oxygen is getting into the system at any time other than through the fire tube up here and that's where it's supposed to get the air so once it goes through the cyclone filter it's pulled up through here there's another rubber coupler and then it comes down this this pipe right here down to the very bottom of this big ammo can that I have this was an ammo cam that had a detonation cord in it so it's pretty big I chose enamel can because it has the rubber seal the rubber gasket all the way along the top and it's designed to be air and water tight so this comes in through the bottom right there at the bottom and then right above it I have on the inside I have angle iron welded to the sides here and that angle iron supports a screen which sits on that on that iron and then that screen holds an entire box full of sawdust essentially it's just like the cedar or the pine shavings that you get it like a pet store for your hamster so this thing's full of sawdust which which acts as a media filter for cleaning out a lot of the other impurities that's in the smoke now what happens next is that it's drawn up through this pipe right here this outlet pipe and it comes through here to this this is just a 12-volt camping air mattress pump essentially and I have it it's it's kind of bad it's just wired right now - a little potentiometer or a rheostat that I got it Radio Shack I ordered a bigger one because this one can't handle the amount of watch that this needs so it gets really hot really fast but essentially all that is is that's connected to a 12-volt battery in my car so that's going and I can adjust I can adjust how fast it goes based on what it needs because when you first start it up it needs a it doesn't need a whole lot of air being sucked through it it only needs a little bit to get it going and then you can slowly increase the amount of air that you're pulling through it okay and then that just comes up to this little torch like thing and that's just so that you can so that the the vapors can exit and you can eventually light the smoke that's coming out of here right now it's just it's just air it just feels like smoke cool smoke at least and so I can eventually light this and once I can light this and it stays lit then I know that I'm I'm able to turn on this valve which then goes over to a manifold that I bolted right up to my carburetor on my generator now there's absolutely no gas tank on this generator right now actually right here is where the gas line usually connects so you can see there's absolutely no guess they're usually the gas tank that sits right on top it's completely gone I drained the float Bowl so the I know there's absolutely no gas in there and I have these marked exactly where they need to be this is the fresh air and this is the vapor so there you do need to control the air to fuel ratio in here because obviously it's not doing that through the Jets and everything that it's designed for so eventually and it's a little breezy out today I'm not sure if you can see this on the camera but there is some smoke coming out I wonder if you can see that up against my house I'm not sure if you can see that but anyways so and it's and the barrels getting warm to the touch so usually it's getting a little hot usually this is about the time when I test out my the fumes that are coming out of the out of the torch okay and what I can normally do is I can just light it and they're staying lit but not for very long so it's almost there and you can't see it unfortunately for some reason it's a very invisible flame you can only see it when it's dark outside but we'll give this just a few more seconds to go and then it'll be ready to turn on the generator and fire that baby up so basically what I have coming is I ordered I found on Amazon a rheostat that will handle I think it's 25 watts which is what this will take this is a 12 volt motor it draws at at most 2 amps so that's 24 watts maximum rated power so I bought a 25 watt I think it's a 20 20 or 25 ohm rheostat so it should be able to drop the voltage to about a volt and a half or all the way up to 12 volts if that 12 volts this sucker really pumps out a lot of air and actually I tried to start this thing with it on full blast and it actually it got too hot in the barrel and kind of backfired and stuff all the wood fuel out the top and put itself out so that was kind of not a good idea to do okay so I just lit the torch don't know if you can see the heat coming off of it but it's it's staying lit so that's telling me that we're ready to go and we can start up the generator okay so what I'm going to do now I'm going to leave the fan on for just a minute but I'm going to open this one right here I'm going to come over here and make sure my motors I'm just going to spray a little bit of starting fluid and this should be able to pull it I'm going to come over here I'm going to turn off my fan and close that port and this thing then we're running on wood and what's strange is the exhaust that comes out of my generator just smells like a campfire it's kind of funny so it took me a little while took me a little while to get the oxygen setting right on there and it's not entirely perfect yet I still have to tweak it just a little bit to figure out the air to fuel ratio but it works it's running my generator and if I'm good enough I can plug in my saw let's see if I can kill it so there you got it I'm running my generator completely on the vapors that are produced by this gasifier I'll put up some pictures of what the inside of this looks like as far as the basket and the shaker assembly and the fire tube that's going down into it but you can start ready see that is used up a little bit of these pellets just kind of start to see the fire tube there but basically that's it all-in-all I used a lot of recycled material for this obviously a freon canister in an old 30 gallon drum and a an ammo box from the Korean War I think but overall I did end up spending probably close to about $300 give or take on pipe pipe fittings all the difference I mean I have at least four of these ball valves to control where the vapors going in through all this and through that manifold there but that should give you a pretty good idea on how a gasifier operates now obviously once that was going I turned off the fan because this was getting screaming hot but also because you don't you don't want to overload your gasifier the size of the size of your gasifier dictates house how big of a motor you can run off of it on the FEMA plans they actually have a graph that tells you the horsepower of your engine what size of fire tube you need and all that fun stuff and so this is only a seven point eight horsepower motor and supposedly a forest fire tube like this can handle up to fifteen horses I kind of I kind of don't believe it because this thing gets really hot running just at eight horse eight horsepower motor so I would almost say if you're going to go with a larger motor you need to kind of over engineer it and go with the step up I think the next step was a six inch tube and that would handle up to a 30 horsepower motor which if I was doing anything eight horse or over eight horse I would probably use a six inch tube just to try to keep the heat down because the cooler you can run it obviously I've used rubber couplers to isolate the heat going from this model quarry to this model point in the same gear from here to here just for cooling purposes the more you can cool the smoke was going through your gasifier the more energy it contains once it gets to your motor so if you're running really hot gas not only is that going to start to compromise the material the rubber couplers the socket the sawdust all that stuff but it's also not going to contain as much energy for your generator so the cooler you can get it the better that's why I recommend that if you're going to go with any motor that's a little bit bigger than that to just kind of go the next step up and utilize utilize the bigger fire tube that way it doesn't get as hot you're not really running it at 100% full capacity so this thing is getting pretty hot to the touch now but as you can see I mean I've been running this now for couple minutes and it's running pretty good there and the fun thing for me is that it actually generates electricity that's pretty cool all right thanks guys okay here's a shot of the fire tube going down into the barrel before I welded the top on you can see some supports there holding it in place also down towards the bottom there's the there's the pipe that is the ignition port that you light it from it goes all the way into and connects to that fire tube there's a hole there and then that's welded around that you can see the chains going down to the basket down there at the bottom now in the FEMA plans they tell you to use like a stainless steel bowl and to drill holes into it but really it's pretty flimsy looking to me and so I really beefed it up I used some quarter-inch thick three-inch flat stock and and bent it around into a hoop and then used some half-inch rebar and welded that grate onto the bottom of it so it's really heavy-duty I'm not too afraid of that burning through anytime soon the next shot just shows the basket itself and how the chain connects onto it I just use some quick links to get that chain around it the chain is welded up top and I used a tape measure and everything to make sure that it was level and as as plumb as possible the next shot shows the inside of where the shaker assembly comes in and connects to the that basket it has that that piece of quarter-inch bar that you can see the handle of on the outside of the barrel comes through that pipe out that cap and then is bent around and interlocks with a hoop that's welded onto the actual basket so when you use the shaker assembly on the outside it grabs that hoop and grabs that basket and moves it around so it empties all the dead ash out of that basket and allows the fresh fuel to come in

Channel: JR M

Views: 2,006,740

Keywords: Power, Electric Generator (Invention), Energy, Amazing, wood gas, emergency preparedness, Alternative Fuel, Do It Yourself (Hobby), Cool, prepper, gasifier, Wood, DIY, generator, alternative energy, green energy, Gasification, Do It Yourself (Website Category), Renewable Energy (Economic Bubble), Hobby (Website Category), Hobby (Interest), Renewable Energy (Industry), Solar, Solar Energy (Industry)

Id: a6e3CprVTi8

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/everydayacheesesteak]

Burning wood is renewable?

[u/[deleted]]

Damn I just gave away an old gen that would’ve been perfect for this setup. Carb went to shit. I’m gonna build one of these with some scrap steel I have ! Very cool

[u/KidzKlub]

So I'm guessing in a doomsday scenario (no electricity and no gasoline), you'd want to have a bunch of car batteries (actually golf cart batteries would be better) and one of these so you could both run the machine and charge batteries for power storage.