[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]

July 31st, 2020-

Hello dear patrons, I hope the odds have been ever in your favor these past few months. I haven't made a post in a while, mostly because so much has happened it's been hard to sit down a make a real update.

Back in May I used most of my stimulus check to buy a whiskey still from AliExpress to see if I could use it as a biomass reactor. My hope was that this reactor could simplify the design for people wanting to replicate the system, since it requires no fabrication or welding. After testing it quite a bit, I can say that it works way better than the original design, and is much easier to work with!

The new reactor is about the size of a beer keg, and has double-wall steam-jacket and a bunch of ports for adding heaters and sensors. I added two 600W 1/2" heaters, and started experimenting! Being able to use electrical heat makes it very easy to quantify the energy the process takes, with very high accurately.

On my first run, I found that with about 4kwh of heat, I could make about 16oz of charcoal, which has an energy density of about 8.8kWh. But that material wasn't completely dry, and the reactor wasn't completely full, so I still need to do more testing. I ran a patio heater at full blast for 3 hours with the gas produced by the reaction, and was able to run my generator on the gas, and use the electricity it produced to power the Precious Plastic Shredder for the first time, but only for a few minutes. The generator currently takes a little more gas than the reactor produces, at least with a 600W heating element.

The feedstock was a bunch of plywood scraps I had left over from prototyping the new trash printer, and it turns out that when you turn plywood into char it retains it's original shape - at least until you touch it and then it shatters into a million pieces. Good char shatters, that's how you know it's good.

I also collected this lovely "bio-crude" during the condensation process. Most of it is probably water, and the stuff that isn't water are hydrocarbons of varying lengths, some of which, if refined, could be used as fuels and chemical feedstocks - but I haven't gotten that far yet. Mostly I'm just collecting mason jars full of liquid that smells strongly of campfire.

I have also acquired these LOVE-ly tricycles from a friend. The LOVE trikes were built as an art project for burning man 2012, and have been kicking around Portland ever since. They needed a new home, so I've taken them in, and have begun to outfit them with ecological infrastructure. So far I've mounted a solar panel onto one with a battery and inverter system, so that it can act as a mobile power station.

Last Saturday we took them out to a rally against police violence at Peninsula Park and rode with the march to the Portland Polices Association building, where we used them to block traffic while a friendly road crew of courageous public safety workers painted ABOLISH in large friendly letters on the street. 

Now I'm working on adding solar-powered lights, a sound system, and eventually all of the Metabolizer infrastructure- Shredder, Reactor, Power Station, and Trash Printer, onto each of the trikes, so that we can ride them to where ever mobile, deployable, off-grid, open-source infrastructure is needed.

Thank you for your support! I'm planning on using the money from this month to improve the condenser system for the Reactor, in order to make it lighter, cheaper, and more mobile, and to buy the supporting hardware to get everything mounted to the new trikes. If there's anything left over, I'll upgrade the lights!

Onward!

Sam