Comments

TacticalWoodGas.com – Joins the MSB — 16 Comments

  1. Very awesome! Wood gasification is incredibly amazing to me. My brother lives on 20 acres of old growth forest, and he has converted his hot water and heating system to an outdoor wood boiler system, and I’m sure he would love one of these.

    Does anyone happen to know how many watts the 6.5HP might produce? And what sort of runtime do you see if you load it up to max or optimal capacity?

    That price seems very affordable, but hopefully it produces 3kw at a minimum, because he has a forced-air heating system, just with the boiler A-coil insert. So he still needs electricity for the blower motor.

    • Oiy, the instant I posted this I saw that today’s podcast is about wood gasification… Which no doubt answers these questions. 🙂

      Sorry about that.

    • It doesn’t work that way the turns a anternator that produces electricity you are not going to get a 100% conversion. Franky the motor isn’t going to run full on. This was covered in the show today where Mike was interviewed, this generator puts out about 1KW. Not even close to 4.8.

      • Thanks Jack. Sorry about posting before seeing that there was a podcast about it. I was looking at posts from top to bottom.

        I broke my rule of only listening to your podcast while driving, exercising, or doing something permaculturey and listened to it while mowing the lawn.

        The two big take aways I got from it was this is awesome because it is super light and portable, and it is designed mainly to power a Steven Harris battery bank. To answer my question from above, run time is in the range of 1-4ish hours on a full load of wood. The wood has to be fairly small pieces, pellet-stove sized to golf-ball sized. So no cutting a round out of a 2′ diameter tree and hucking that in the barrel. 🙂

        Finally, I totally agree about the idea of offering the full product, not just plans. There is just no possible way I would ever build my own gasifier. My specialty is computers, automation, and growing food. I am woefully inept with small and big motors alike. That is a major weakness of mine, but I just don’t know where to even start. Would I take a community college class on it? Randomly start reading Briggs and Straton manuals?

  2. The fellow that is doing the wood tar cracking and distillation that Mike made mention of has a youtube channel called Mr Teslonian. He has a lot of interesting and cool videos of the experiments he works on such as this one.

    • Yep, I follow him. I’m not sure he’s sane but his videos are fun and educational. Love his stuff.

  3. This is awesome! My wife has been griping at me to get a generator but I have been putting it off because of the fuel issue (poor storage, cost,…) This is in the range of what she was looking at and we already have all the fuel we would need to run it.

    • Well I know this guy talked to Steve but Steve wasn’t really interested in being involved. I like stuff to be Harris Approved, but Steve is just an ass at times, really he is and so I don’t care if everything is “Harris approved”. If Steve wants to approve it, let him spend his money, buy one and try it.

      I love Steve and he is a friend but sometimes he rubs me the wrong way. It is like he is married to anything in this space coming from him or it isn’t good enough at times.

      IDK what he really thinks of this. Since it aired he has emailed me twice with what seem like uninformed veiled negative comments. Since I know he has never touched one I don’t really need his opinion right now. Mike guarantees his product to work, that is good enough to me. I also trust a man that is good enough to design a product for the international space station can build a functioning gasifier.

      • Did the prices go up since the broadcast?

        I’m seeing $999.95 for the Big Dragon Full Kit. Don’t see anything priced at $799.