Cooking with gas(wood)

[Paul_H]

 I've been wanting to check one of these out for awhile.The claim is that a couple of handfulls of twigs will cook up a storm.





The stove works by gasification of the wood and uses a small fan with a Hi/Lo setting and is powered by 2 AA batteries




I tried the stove right off the bat when I got it today and then decided to run a test to see how long it would take to boil 1 quart of water.

The ash in the bottom of this pic is from the first run but the ash is cold as I put the first piece of wood in the cooker,





Once the tinder on top is lit,you plug the fan on Lo and in 30 seconds it's ready for the pot.

The fire was lit at 2:06 pm






The outside is quite warm but not too bad because the preheating combustion air also keeps the outside from getting too hot.

The quart of water began to boil rapidly at 2:13 pm for a total of 7 minutes from lighting to boiling.Not too shabby,

Notice that after lighting,there was no smoke to speak of while heating the water.





Here is the link to more info on the stoves.

Billion stoves

And here is a link to some pics from a gasification project in Madagascar and how the air quality and fuel consumption was improved by simple gasification from local materials

Link

[Tom]

Well, I'll be doggone!  I'm High Tech and didn't even know it.

We've been doing that gasification stuff for many years.  We chop a few holes in a 55 gal drum down next to the bottom and start burning leaves and trash.  Eventually the smoke goes away and the fire is a rolling flame just under the top of the barrel.  We've used the phenomenon to grill meat and all kinds of stuff.

[Paul_H]

Well, I'll be doggone!  I'm High Tech and didn't even know it.

We all knew you were high tech Tom and you make a heck of a Banana shake too.

To give the cooker it's due,two single handfulls of little wood chunks to boil a quart of water is pretty good.

Simple but effective just like the wheel.

[jpgreen]

I had seen that stove, and was curious about it. Pretty amazing really, to boil that quick with so little fuel.

Looks like it would be good for camping and cooking on the porch...

[Paul_H]

A plywood mill is also cooking with gas in Heffley Creek, British Columbia

The wood gasification project has replaced 40 percent of the mill's natural
gas consumption, an amount equivalent to the volume of natural gas used to heat approximately 1,900 homes in Canada's western-most province

Link

[sawdust]

Paul do you know if they have to pay tax equivalent to what they would have paid if they were burning natural gas? In Alberta the pump jacks that ran on scrubbed gas from the hole had to pay an equivalent tax. dont know if that is still a fact.

sawdust

[ohsoloco]

I found some websites about stoves like that when I was googling wood gasification.  I saw those ones with the fans for sale, but also ran across some with no fans at all.  It's called a MIDGE stove (Modified Inverted Downdraft Gasification Experiment).