With many projects on the go, finding time to work on the wood gas project is not easy. Over the past two weeks a photovoltaic system had to be set up. However, it gave me the chance to run the car air conditioning fan on the deep cycle battery and the result was much more promising than running the fan on a wall wart. The fan is a little over-powered so I will need to add a potentiometer to slow the fan down.
The fan I constructed from an electric leaf blower, and built a plywood case for, is now running on an old converted 386 PC power supply. The power supply has a +12V and -12V output and I am using this to run the fan on 24V. That fan is a little under-powered.
Interestingly, the car fan doesn't work well on the PC supply unit and the converted leaf blower doesn't work well on the deep cycle battery. Maybe someone reading this article knows the answer why.
The next thing to do is to build a transition for the car fan so that it can be connected to my no-weld gasifier. At long last I might be firing up the no-weld gasifier during the next week or two. I shall buy some charcoal and run the gasifier as an updraught gasifier just to check the seals and the power of the fans. Then the gasifier will be re-plumbed as a downdraught gasifier if the fans are up to the task. Charcoal is to be used as the planned gasifier will be a small one and charcoal is better than wood for that purpose. Of course, charcoal will have to be made on-site in future.
