Wood Fired Electricity Generators For Domestic Use

Since I’ve been living out in The Shire these past six months I’ve been foraging firewood and using it for the the open fires in the house. I’ve found that trees which have been felled and left lying on the ground are already more or less seasoned enough to burn (25% water) and when stacked indoors they drop below 20% within a week.

The heating set up is a bit odd, in that there’s a gas fired Aga which seems to run GCH for hot water and two radiators downstairs plus a towel rail in the bathroom, but there are no gas fired rads upstairs apart from that rail. Upstairs heating is provided by plug in oil filled radiators.

I would like to explore the possibility of generating some of the house's electricity with a wood fired generator, but as the house is a rental, it can’t be anything which needs intrusive or permanent installation and I would take it with me when I leave. I have plenty of outside space.

Any ideas?

What are the pitfalls and problems?

If there’s nothing on the market I’m half toying with the idea of having one made up in a Victorian steampunk style.

Thanks

 

Thanks for the replies folks. I don’t mind the time and labour intensity aspects as even before Covid I worked from home most of the time anyway and I live literally on the edge of a country park so it’s no biggie to take a trolley/trailer with me to forage for firewood when walking the dog. I’ve found I can collect enough in one trip to last about a week and as it’s fallen/chopped wood it is already more or less seasoned and its water content is about 25%. I have a bit of a system going where I have the main stacks outside then further stacks indoors, down the side of the Aga and another stack in an alcove in one of the fireplaces indoors, both of which bring the moisture content to below 20% and therefore avoids problems with excess smoke and resin build up in the chimney.

I enjoy the process of chopping the logs down to size and then splitting them into quarters as a chainsaw is probably one of the most satisfying tools to use, plus, being a 2 stroke it produces very comforting sounds and smells. Then quartering the logs with an axe is also very satisfying, not to mention that it’s good for fitness. I don’t exercise as often as I’d like because I don’t have the patience to aimlessly push weights or go jogging. For me, exercise has to have a purpose, so until lockdown I was boxing training and occasionally sparring (diary permitting, as rocking up to court or conferences with a black eye isn’t a good look in my profession) and an hour chopping wood several times per week is a good compliment to that.

I’ve had a google but can’t seem to find anything for domestic use but that may be because I imagine that the very limited market means that meeting health and safety regulatory requirements would probably make it difficult to turn a profit.

 

I think going totally off grid is unlikely but it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I even looked into dropping out and joining a hippie or Christian commune in the 90s after my music career went nowhere but prior to me studying law. I’ve had to put those sorts of plans on hold for a while due to my marriage to the boys’ mum falling apart 10 years ago (and as she stayed in London, I wanted to remain close by) plus the nature of my practice doing lots of criminal work used to mean I was in court every day. However, as soon as the kids were old enough to travel on their own and also when I had replaced most of my criminal (ie: mostly court) work with civil (mostly paper) work, meaning I could WFH most of the time, I moved out into the countryside. I’ve also started a pay as you go telephone advice service which is doing really well and so I could actually work from anywhere with an internet connection. The timing has also worked out well vis a vis my girlf, as she’s in a career (architecture/planning) where she WFH approx 3 days per week.

When house hunting just before Xmas my first choice was a petty remote place in the sticks outside Bishops Stortford which wasn’t on the gas main and you had to ford a river to get to it. Unfortunately the deal fell through, but it was probably for the best because it would have been too much of a culture shock for the girlf who is a dyed in the wool SE London girl. So instead we found a place in a village which is within striking distance of two towns, and though it took her a couple of months to get used to the open spaces and the only gunshots she heard were people shooting game rather than each other, she loves it now and is open to the idea of moving somewhere more isolated.

A few years ago I even seriously considered buying a boat but decided against it due to lack of space for motorbikes and also because my youngest son has aspergers which made him very absent minded and clumsy when he was younger, and I’m pretty sure I would have been fishing him out of the water on a fairly regular basis.

I would just like to live more sustainably and ideally, eventually, semi off-grid though. I recently watched something on you tube about a family who live on the shore of a lake in Canada or the NW Pacific coast in the US where you can’t even get to the house by road and I must say that idea really appeals to me, though it’s probably unrealistic at the moment.

 

As wood is part of the short term carbon cycle the impact of burning it is very much lower than when compared to fossil fuel, which was laid down and has been locked up since an epoch when the Earth’s atmosphere had a different composition to now and it contained much higher O2 levels, (which is why that was the era of mega fauna such as 3ft long Dragonflies). That’s why it needs to stay in the ground.

Clearly neither individuals or the human race as a whole live can entirely without some adverse impact on the earth and that’s been going on and getting exponentially worse since the end of the Neolithic when we switched from living as small tribes of hunter gatherers and instead became farmers. That agricultural revolution effectively enslaved Man and also made him more warlike because first of all, agricultural societies support much higher population densities and also developed as hierarchal stratified societies with a small ruling class and a vast labouring/slave class, plus he then had crops and towns to defend from outsiders engaging in resource competition, meaning an army also became necessary.

We obviously can’t return to that “golden age” (though I imagine it was anything but when a broken ankle would likely turn out to be a fatal injury) as the earth will only support a population of hunter gatherers in the low millions and so any attempt to do so would mean mass starvation. The biggest problem Man needs to solve isn’t just switching from rampant consumerism and depletion of resources to a more restrained and disciplined lifestyle, but simply that there are too many of us. How overpopulation can be solved is another very difficult question though, as any of the solutions are to a greater or lesser degree, repellent.

 

For that very reason I’ve been looking into getting a scrubber unit but as the house is a rental I’ll see whether the landlord wants to renew before pulling the trigger. I make sure all wood I burn is bone dry (the 25% reading is when first chopped and stored outside but then when the wood has been rotated through the house it’s more like 15%). I also never burn waste wood as that often contains contaminants.

 

Thanks for that. It’s a really interesting piece of kit but it looks like the tech hasn’t been scaled down to domestic use yet. The unit (plant, more like) comes in a 20ft container and produces enough leccy to run a village. I also noticed that the video concentrated exclusively on rural developing world applications, suggesting that it might not comply with US/EU safety regulations.

In addition to steam powered turbines and thermoelectric generation, I wonder if there’s scope for fitting something like a series of fans in the flue of a wood stove, each with an output shaft linked by something like a differential to a common shaft driving a generator. I imagine that with the relatively low rotational speed of the “turbos” it probably wouldn’t produce enough for all a house’s needs but it might be useful for lighting, charging batteries etc and as the waste gas is going up the flue anyway, it might as well do some useful work en route. If any engineers are reading this and wincing to themselves because I’ve overlooked some obvious fundamental problem with the idea, I am not having a Donald Trump “disinfectant-gate” meltdown, more like just thinking out loud.