Gray Henon

It is still early, but this tech has a lot of potential for restoring grasslands, sequestering carbon, improving soils, etc.  I am hopefully watching.

Resilient designs that rarely need repair.  I use very little duct tape.  I can only think of one place where I used it to cover some sharp edges.  There is also a very small amount of electrical tape. It seems to hold up fairly well.

Always glad to see social media being used for good.

I’m currently purging the “that might be useful someday” pile so I can access the basement walls and add more insulation.

Wife wanted me to build a new shed for my “spares”, but it made no sense to consume a pile of building materials to house what amounts to a pile of marginally useful items.

I really like the idea of the “Craigslist (or thrift, marketplace, etc) Closet”.  Many household items, recreational equipment, tools, building materials, etc are so plentiful, that you can sell your unused items to the “closet” and then buy them back if you ever need them again.  Guess what, many of them you never miss.

The shavings are tough to char, probably easiest to sell them as mulch.  The ends can be burned down to coals then quenched with water.   I have made quite a bit of it this way by pumping my quench water out of a creek.  A standard 2” pump works well.  The more the better.  A few pages to flip through, but the link below details my process.

What type of wood is it?

Hardwood logs make decent coals when open burned, but the pine seems to need to be processed down into 1-2” thicknesses to char well using this method.

Maybe you have a mechanical means to do this.

A retort kiln is an option, but much more capital and labor (loading) intensive.  Several videos of some large ones on youtube.  They tend to be for producing fuel charcoal, but could easily be used for biochar.

The soil around my chip pile is as soft as can be.  I wouldn’t recommend chips for a driveway. Maybe a charcoal (for the fines)/gravel blend if you are trying to reduce the carbon emissions of building a driveway.

Your place sounds great!  Got any pictures to share?  Acreage?

Insulation.  Put it in place, properly, and it does its job for decades.  

Roof overhangs.  Keeps water away from the foundation and summer sun out of the windows while letting winter sun in.  Simple and effective.

Burra Maluca wrote:

Judy Bowman wrote:I agree with weight.  Though you might want to weigh different types of wood separately, as different woods give off different btu's.  

I'm hoping someone can point me in the direction of reliable information on this, but I'm sure I learned once that the difference in btus from different woods is just down to their density and moisture content, and that if the wood is dry you get the same energy for the same weight of wood.

Does anyone have a good resource for this?

Agreed. A pound of wood is a pound of wood. However, you might get better efficiency out of a denser, slower burning, wood as the masonry will have more time to “saturate” with heat.

Looking forward to the results!

Old thread, but we make plenty of fish compost by layering charcoal and carp remains in plastic 55 gallon drums with locking lids.  I drilled  1/4” drain holes around the out side of the bottom of the barrel.  The lid gets a few 1/8” holes to let some rain in, but exclude blow flies.  There is some smell for a few days, but it is tolerable.  My wife sits on the deck 50 ft away and doesn’t complain.  You could roll the barrel around a bit if you want, but we don’t.  It could probably be used after 5-6 months, but we wait closer to a year.