Nice, pure blue-purple flame of woodgas
I’ve successfully completed a stage of my wood gasifier project–firing the swirl burner. This is just a basic test of the hearth, grate, cyclone and cooling stage. I got lots of nice gas, some water, and some tar.
Solar Water Heater
This is a solar panel I made with some big glass panels I scrounged. It measures about 10 feet long by 3 feet wide. It saves on the propane bill big time, during the summer months. Sorry for the blurry photo, I used my aging Palm treo 650 camera. So this is certainly renewable energy, the sun comes up pretty much every morning like clockwork.
Here’s one of my latest adventures: Try to achieve stoichiometric combustion
of waste vegetable oil. This is like trying to burn something
efficiently that really would rather do other things besides burn.
Mission accomplished, however. (more…)
There’s a saying that goes, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull
boy.” Well, just in case things were getting a bit dull in the
workshop, we decided to blow off $2 and some odd cents worth of a different
type of energy: Soda-borne carbon dioxide. Since Dan’s Workshop
performs all projects in a very orderly and scientific fashion, below
you will find the details of this, umm, alternative energy method and
apparatus. (more…)
Veggie oil powered toy!
Children, you musn’t play with fire. This is serious business. HEY!
Wipe that smirk off your face, this is for real. What we have here is a
truly vegetable oil powered vehicle. Not new oil of course, it’s
premium quality used, rancid, and nasty canola oil. Otherwise known as
WVO, or waste vegetable oil. You know how a candle smells when you blow
it out? Nice! Well, this one smells like cat barf when you blow it out. (more…)