[Destrier]

A small wood chipper should would work well.

Some use pellets, not something I would do since there is a cost involved.

I am using hand cut small wood blocks, and pieces from the limbs of trees I log from the property. A full hopper is about a ten gallon pail and lasts about 4-5 hours based on wood type.

Which for me is going to be plenty of time to run my major appliances for the day and recharge Batts. However that is not tested yet and is still only my best estimate.

I am using soft maple primarily. Wood consumption also depends on what your fueling, I am fueling a small 5kw generator. It starts best with crushed charcoal and the wood on top of it in the hopper. I am currently testing using charcoal lumps from my wood burner and crushing them, that I get from the ash daily during the winter.

This system does require some labor, but when the alternative is zero gasoline or diesel available, time may be more available. The generator can still be run on gasoline by switching the valve. It can also be run on propane so I have a friend altering our intake to allow us to switch between, biofuel, a propane tank from my grill and the gasoline tank.

I am still in the testing stage but so far all is looking good. I plan on getting a dump truck of wood chips from a local logger that I worked with awhile ago briefly.

Gasifiers are not new technology. They were utilized in World War 2 and many homemade styles are out there. The United States sent about a million units to post WW@ Europe and they were thrown on tractors and trucks to keep the farms going etc.

The one I have acquired is from MAtt in Michigan and the unit is well built and the cost was reasonable. If your online looking there are some over the top expensive ones out there as well.

I will do more testing but mine is working out fairly well. The interesting thing to me is that the smoke from the gasifier is also turned into the biofuel-gas and enters the carb, so the only smoke is the exhaust of the generator.

A friend and I are also working on my inverter-batts etc to run the house. That will be another month probably even though I have all the equipment on hand.

Time is my limited resource at present.

Doing more horse fencing this week, I will try to post a few pictures of mine working next time I run it.

Apologies for the rambled post, am running out the door to feed horses and get fencing done.