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Since lots of people are off grid I was curious if anyone is using wood gas to power their generator? Seems like a good alternative to gas and it works on any gas generator.
The tricky part is you need dry fuel to get it up and making wood gas, but looking at the list of possible fuels on this unit, it mentions nut shells. I would think the macadamia shells would be perfect for it. What do the nut farms do with their shells anyway?
Here's just one of many gasifiers:
http://www.leafgenerator.com/about-l-e-a-f/ The cool part is you can build your own and there are lots of forums and help online.
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It's a high maintenance kind of thing. You can't store wood gas and it's fairly corrosive to whatever your running it thru. You have to find, process and hual the fuel. And the one I saw made a lot of smoke
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I have to be careful what I say, never having tried it myself but lots of references to it refer to use during the depression/war years. Lots of things were done during the great depression that we wouldn't be happy doing today. FWIW I share the impression that it is dirty, hard on equipment, not portable, and generally hard work. I have solar which is free now that the initial investment has been made but sometimes when coming home tired and dirty I fire up the generator to run the dehumidifier and do laundry just because I am impatient and can't be bothered to wait until morning to do those energy intensive tasks. Imagine if I had to cut and chip wood and tend a fire. I tried making hot water in a compost pile. Sorta worked too, for a shower or two, but definitely not worth shoveling hundreds of pounds of manure. Many things work but still aren't worth it. Still, I'd like to try it someday so I could speak from experience.
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A much easier alternative is to grow mac nuts and crush the oil out of them and burn it in a diesel engine. The leftover nut meat can be eaten, made into mac nut butter, or used as livestock feed. Much of the mac nut butter you see for sale at the Maku'u market is the leftovers from fuel production from a single grower on the Ainaloa end of HA.
To answer your question, the leftover nut shells are usually added to mulch as a soil conditioner.
ETA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_b...rop_yields shows mac nut biodiesel at 240 gallons per acre, one of the highest producing biodiesel crops.
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Interesting about the Mac Nut, beats the heck out of mainland corn crops.
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quote:
Originally posted by Vitus
Interesting about the Mac Nut, beats the heck out of mainland corn crops.
Anyone know the performance of Kukui nut as a biofuel?
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I was wondering the same thing.
