[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]

March 30th, 2021-

Happy Spring, dear Patrons!

This past month I’ve been grinding away at this enormous project by focusing a lot on power. I started this month by experimenting what I could do with the trash-gas produced in the process of making biochar, besides turning it into electricity. The generator I ordered is still in transit (stuck in the Suez Canal, maybe?) so I’ve been trying to turn my attention to other useful things.

One experiment I did was to see if I could create artificial lighting from the gas, without electricity. I used Coleman gas mantles, and they actually worked pretty well. This is how street lights used to work before the advent of electric lighting.

Next, I tried boiling some water to make some go old fashioned tea. I tried to calculate how long it took boil, so that I could calculate the energy usage. It was a little complicated though, since I had to accumulate the gas and store it in batches, which made it tricky to meaningfully calculate the energy return. Still, I did manage to boil enough water for a few cups of tea, and that’s pretty neat.

And then of course, there’s the option of just flaring the gas, which still looks awesome.

But the ultimate goal of this project is to create a set of machines that can generate useable power from waste, and so an electrical storage system of some kind is going to be a necessary part of that system.

And so I’ve fully redesigned our power system in the Magic Tool Bus, as a te,st of the off-grid energy storage system that I want to design to capture and store the power produced by the generator. These are all components I’ve been selling at Light Harvest Solar for almost a year now, so its really fun to get to use them myself.

You can check out my preliminary documentation on that part of the project on my google drive!

That’s all for now, stay tuned for next month, hopefully I’ll be able to get this little generator I ordered running on trash gas and charging up this system as an alternative to solar!