Friends, Paul Olivier's recent post about layering wood pellets and rice husks got me to thinking. As Paul has previously written, air channels thru a TLUD's fuel bed can cause problems.
Today, I mixed 4 scoops of wood pellets with 1 scoop of rice hull and 1 scoop of coffee chaff. I then soaked some of this mix in alcohol for 5 minutes to use as the igniter. Note, this ratio is only a zero order approximation of a balance between energy density in the fuel chamber and smaller particles as air channel blockers. This worked very well in a TLUD with some gentle help for both primary and secondary air from a variable speed fan set at a low rate at the base of the unit. The rice hull biochar was just lovely. It passed Hugh's no soap test better than any biochar I have made to date. [Note to Hugh: I am dry quenching some of the results in a mason jar. Would you like to see some of it?] To me, this suggests that it may well be worth experimenting with various fuel mixes to minimize channeling in the fuel bed as this appears to improve the overall results. Further, this gives a combined result with multiple carbon particle sizes. Perhaps easier to get into the plant root zone. If only applied to the growing mounds, we can avoid giving the weeds the advantages of biocahr. Why help the weeds? This strongly suggests that pyrolytic carbon [biocahr] may want to be applied in a very strategic fashion, not simply broadcast over the fields. Forest application are probably another story altogether. I look forward to the results of more testing and evaluations. Cheers, Jock Jonathan P Gill Peacham, VT. [email protected] Extract CO2 from the atmosphere.
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