Coalpail.com Forum

coalnewbie wrote: ↑

Wed. Oct. 11, 2017 5:38 pm

Here is the sequel video made by the funniest man on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFBiHG_KcK0

Looks like the video was pulled down.

No IS, works for me. If you like comedy look at the first one in the series (thx Dave).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om1pfiCzzT8

franco b wrote: ↑

Wed. Oct. 11, 2017 5:18 pm

hotblast1357 wrote: ↑

Wed. Oct. 11, 2017 5:08 pm

What’s so dangerous about the New Yorker that it will blow up that is not dangerous with the propane boiler??

Propane or oil shuts off promptly when a control commands it to. With a boiler burning wood, the control nor longer can do that and pressures can rise dangerously in a pressurized system. It is probably why outdoor wood boilers are not pressurized or sealed systems.

Controls can malfunction.

The comfort of all the in floor heat and available DHW from the new Yorker on coal must far out way the slight worry of something happening.

No smoke, doesn’t “he” say not to worry!

I have thought outside the box before and considered heating with grass...

In my case it was in another direction. being a dumb sheep farmer I was smart enough to know that when I dug into the silage pile in the dead of winter and it was so hot I could barely put my hand in it, that heat could be used to heat my home.

And it can be, people do this a lot and a guy named Jean Pain; a forester from France kind of pioneered the way.

But while it can be done, is it practical? Moving all that grass and wood chips, laying out pex, pumping water through it, and...here is the kicker, putting literally thousands of gallons of water on it. It was "free" but at a very expensive cost. For me, the biggest problem was water. I live on a hill so there is none here, and my 2 gallon per minute house pump would have trouble wetting down a hay and chip pile with 9000 gallons of water.

I might try this at some point in the future, but for now wood/coal/charcoal works best for me.

NS, I like thinking out of the box as well.

We have thousands of tons of horse manure aging well and even an Artesian well. My revolutionary idea is for you to come over here do all the work and set it up for me. Innovative yes???

you said tomorrow is your "big date"

i'll be up early and working late storming the gates for you.

please ask Katie to let us know how you're doing at comfortable intervals.

steve

coalnewbie wrote: ↑

Thu. Oct. 12, 2017 7:04 pm

NS, I like thinking out of the box as well.

We have thousands of tons of horse manure aging well and even an Artesian well. My revolutionary idea is for you to come over here do all the work and set it up for me. Innovative yes???

Oh you mean be an "intern" at an organic farm?

I know you are kidding, and I know you would never do that, but it angers me that people of some farms advertise for "interns" under the theory that they will teach them how to farm, and then do nothing but make them do all the labor intensive work.

The worse thing is, this exploitation does nothing for them. Ultimately they lack people to fill those roles and unwilling to do it themselves (laziness) they ultimately fail, and for the "intern", they only experience the labor intensive work, and lose interest in farming.

The heat compost puts out is amazing though. Last year a waterline going to one of my sheep barns froze, and to keep it thawed, I put a bucket full of manure over the spot where it froze.It never froze again, even in -20 below weather in February.

I heard about one guy that took a box trailer, buried it underground for insulation, then lined the roof with pex pipe. Then he filled the inside of the box with compost, the heat rising up and heating up the pex pipes that went into his home. I heard it worked well, but as my old teacher once said, "believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see!"

I am burning what little bit of charcoal I did produce and it is so-so. It is not extremely hot, but honestly it is hard to tell. This is my first fire of the season and the house is chilly. I have a timber frame home with lots of wood and it takes about 3 days it seems to really get everything warmed up.

It is weird, the air temperature quickly goes up, but after the fire dies off, the house instantly gets chilled again. After a few days of sustained fires it stays fairly warm.

This is also a new stove to us (it is actually an antique 1893 stove) so I am getting used to it. I like it though. I can tell already that while it is a pot bellied stove, it is of much better quality than my previous Vogelzang Chinese knock off stove. I am not saying that the Vogelzang did not work, nor would it work for others, but the fit and finish of this stove is much better. That translates into air-tight, or at least much better at being air tight.

When I was 19 I went to visit a guy in Dorset, England. He lost his leg in WW11 but not his brain. I worked with him on mixing 50% pig sh*t and 50% chicken sh*t (not horse sh t but some cow stuff was OK). His giant composter was warmed very gently for 48 hours and it then took off and methane came out by the bucketful. He rigged an air compressor backwards and filled propane bottles. He ran his Hillman car on this mix for 8 years with no decokes. I should have stuck with either engineering (for which I had no talent) or music (for which I had some talent but not quite enough). Realizing I was basically useless, I graduated in medicine so at least I had something to keep the money coming in. .... a wasted life.

I looked into biogas (methane) as well, and went to a Digester in Exeter, Maine where they have a 1 megawatt plant. Granted it is a 1200 cow dairy farm, but they were producing power for the grid from cow manure.

Biogas seems doable in that it can be scaled down and still work, so I researched that pretty heavily. What I found out was, silage leachate is actually a strong producer of biogas. This seemed odd until I thought about it; of course it would have more biogas in it, it is what the animals eat before they...well...burp and fart...so of course it would have more biogas.

The silly thing is, today farms put their silage pads on concrete and run the silage leachate to filtering systems. I am thinking why not run that silage leachate to a biogas pit and make something useful from it...like biogas to produce electricity?

There was 2 problems with this; one I overcame and the other I have not thought of a solution for.

1) To produce biogas, the silage leachate, manure, compost etc has to be preheated to 103 degrees or it will not start producing. The solution to that is pretty simple, and that is to use a liquid cooled propane generator (that uses biogas instead) and instead of dissipating the heat through the radiator, pump it back to the compost pile to preheat it. This is what most farm digesters do, including the one in Exeter, Maine. It just happens to be, I have a 3 KW gas/propane liquid cooled genset kicking around...

2). The second problem is, with the exception of a steady supply of sheep manure, the silage leachate coming from the silage pit would come in a large volume when the crop was first harvested. Trying to regulate that flow would be expensive.

So I have a lot of stuff to work with, but honestly I am playing with a lot of unknowns. Do you say "what the heck," and spend a lot of time and money trying to make electricity from silage leachate and sheep manure, or do you just try to cut back on expenses where you can, and hope to be better in the end for it?

Tough call...I don't have the answer.

Interesting to swop notes with the engineering master. Your persistence is stunning, by now I would have exercised the family motto - I f******* give up.

The interesting part of my setup is by storing in a cylinder you take out the peaks and valleys. Also if I think back 54 years The gas pressure did not continually build if we switched off the flow to the compressor. However the methane gas pressure curves do not show that so I dunno. More interesting is by introducing methane to the air intake of my Lister CS/6, I could run it on a mix of soybean oil and methane. Ohhhh , the games we play. My left eyebrow never did recover. All this gets mega dangerous. The cheapest solution is to cut back on mains electricity use but that is far less fun.

My feeling is that the operation has to be big enough to justify all kinds of special equipment to make economic sense.

A small operation is hard to justify. Even if you had an anthracite seam in your back yard it still might not make economic sense to dig it and process it unless you could do it in quantity high enough.

Was not my intention to offend anyone , i have both and use both kinds of stoves. Some of the coal stoves pictured here are downright gorgeous. I honestly have never seen these antique stoves before. Just commenting from my own personal experience with my own stoves.

KingCoal wrote: ↑

Thu. Oct. 12, 2017 7:16 pm

you said tomorrow is your "big date"

i'll be up early and working late storming the gates for you.

please ask Katie to let us know how you're doing at comfortable intervals.

steve

from the time stamp of your postings i have deduced that the date with the surgeon was an advisory rather than surgical experience.

soooo, how'd it go ? do they still feel that surgical intervention is the way to proceed ? any time frame to proceed or alternatives ?

steve