This was a kickstarter campaign that was fully funded but unfortunately, the reality of how gasifiers actually work means that in building it and testing it, it became obvious that it was not realistically a viable option for most people to run one successfully and regularly. Additional time and expense to make the gasifier work could certainly be spent, but the purpose of doing so is a definite negative for the return on investment and would be helpful to pretty much no-one, especially since the facts for anyone willing to go through the trouble can be simply explained here in a few words.
During WWII, this simple, yet effective technology was used to run cars, boats, tractors, motorbikes with sidecars (see image above), generators and all sorts of machinery and production plants that normally ran on petrol. It was widely used technology and was operational in over 1,000,000 locations; yet today, almost no one is even aware of it.
Worse, most of the documentation to build a gasifier is now lost. No detailed building instructions from WWII can be found for the building of specific sizes of gasifiers, and don’t take my word for it, you can scour the internet, and you will not find a decent set of building plans that takes you from complete novice, that doesn’t even know what a gasifier is, to a working model that runs a generator.
The process is simple to explain. Basically a specialised stove that burns organic material in a controlled way (wood, leaves, or really anything similar, as long as it is dry to begin with), will produce gasses that, when purified, are combustible and can act as replacements for the petrol you would normally use to run the machine in question.
The aim of this project was to create a working prototype and create detailed, step-by-step instructions that can be easily replicated by others wishing to create a gasifier that runs a generator; from which, one can then run many appliances or even most of your home’s electricity requirements.
In order to do this, we crowdfunded the costs of building a gasifier, with the prospect of providing the investors with a video, and/or a detailed PDF manual for its construction and attachment to a suitable generator.
The problem is that upon having built it, and rebuilt it about a dozen times, it became finally clear that there were three main issues that would prevent a gasifier from working properly. The first was that the filtering mechanism that would be required was a far more involved process than originally conceived, and rebuilding this would be an equally time-consuming trial and error process that did not really have a parallel solution back in 1940 or so. This is because of tow other factors; firstly, back then, almost everyone was a farmer to some degree or other and wood stoves and heating homes with wood stoves was a real thing. As a result everyone back then understood that you need to dry your wood for at least a year, and for some species up to three years, before it was suitable for use in a wood stove. This reduced the humidity of the wood a lot and gasifiers are thought to run only if the humidity of the wood is only 8% at most and considerably less in all likelihood. While these two issues could be overcome with enough time and effort, the third one is a far more difficult one, and that is, the tolerances of modern engines and generators are far less forgiving than the ones of engines and generators from the 1940s. While this means modern engines work more efficiently, faster, and so on, it also means they have to use increasingly refined fuels to work properly.
Gasifier synthgas is far from clean. Already, as mentioned the filtering requirements are a lot more involved than originally thought, even if you were to use properly dried wood (which keep in mind almost no one does anymore and requires storage space in the appropriate weather conditions). But even then, the gas produced still has impurities in it, that invariably create a level of gunk, sticky, flammable gooey stuff that looks like and is somewhat related to tar. Needless to say, this stuff causes havoc on modern generators, engines and so on and seizes them up requiring a total stripping and meticulous cleaning of them. Which of course, defeats the whole point of having a gasifier.
There are commercially available gasifiers used to provide power to villages and so on, these are huge affairs that cost a lot of money and I personally am aware of a related project for the Veneto region in Italy that after using up millions has failed miserably too. The reality is that yes, burning various organic products can and does produce flammable gasses, but those gasses themselves need extreme levels of purification before they are truly viable in modern engines. The final point of all this is that a gasifier is not really a viable off-grid long-term option for anyone presently. At least not unless you are running engines that are far more forgiving to the “gunk” problem AND you use properly cured and dried wood that has been cut down to appropriate size too, because even commercially available pellets do not work in a modern gasifier unless you first resolve the filtering issue. And would still gum up your modern engine anyway.
So, although the final expected result was not achieved, scientifically it was a worthwhile exercise as it demonstrated what the issues are and why it is not currently a viable off-grid long-term solution. Besides which, there are other solutions that are more effective for less trouble and not much more cost, like solar panels or wind mills.
I am now beginning to explore other avenues for generating electrical power without needing to be attached to the grid. When and if we have any success at this we will report back.
