Re: ROT: Drilling / Cutting Butane Tanks

I considered doing all the above for the same reason, logic prevailed, I went to a scrappy & got a blue peter version for 50p then just trimmed the cut with a grinder, let someone else blow themselves up.

Chris

Amanda who walks her dog in the park and feeds Max little bone shaped biccies could easily fill a couple...

... She will hurt me if she ever finds out I've said that!

And if Charlotte finds out you know her by name she'll ensure you never feel anything at all below the waist....

Mother"

On or around Tue, 02 May 2006 20:41:42 +0100, Simon Isaacs enlightened us thusly:

FANTASTIC!

Somewhat more sophisticated than my simple brazier, too.

Tommorow night - I get the angle grinder out... :-)

Yeah looks trick...can't wait for my gas to run out now :-)

Is Mrs I doing a line in stowage bags for the caravan / 101.

I could get all arty with the Plasma cutter... bacon cooked with "unoffical" toasted across it....

Martyn.. you could use it to heat the water for the shower doofer with a built in exchanger and plug it in to tanks on Grumble... that way when you go to Africa you can be safe in the knowledge that the Lions and Tigers will be kept at bay by the fire while you take a bush shower.

Here's another route:

I've seen other articles in the same vein but, naturally, can't find them when needed!

Seen some incredibly efficient woodburning cooking stove plans too - using small PC fans to force convect the fires.

Steve

It's a bit of a hobby with me, small stoves. Forced draught makes a load of difference to combustion performance. A researcher at Phillips has produced a stove with a fan powered from a cheapish thermoelectric generator, the aim is to mass produce them cheaply for those 2 billion people that still cook using wood stoves.

AJH

TVS who pops in here once in a Blue moon converted an Oil Burning Boiler and added a exhaust and Turbo which in turn pumped air in to the combustion chamber. The Uni wouldn't let him run it on site... when they did run it I seem to recall it glowed quite well from Tobys account... and the water got warm PDQ too.

Lee

On Thu, 4 May 2006 20:05:33 +0100, "Lee_D" scribbled the following nonsense:

I have an old turbo kicking around, and I have just been offered serious money for the one I've just built my my Head of Dept, who also teaches DT......

Does a propane tank lend itself to a small, efficient HEATER, rather than a cook stove though ? I've part made my contribution to the Afl October cook-off, but these inverted downdraught stoves have really intrigued me too, and I could modify what I have here....

Steve

I think the IDD term is being phased out in favour of toplit updraught. These TLUD devices really need a narrow cross section and quite dry fuel but a 6" stove pipe makes quite a good patio heater run this way. In theory they are so clean burning you can use them just like an un flued paraffin or propane stove, in practice I wouldn't. The thing is at the end of the burn they are simply CO generators, during the initial burn if the flame goes out the thick acrid smoke is a good warning at the end of the burn you might just wake up pink as a lobster and rather *stiff*.

AJH

We did that and actually netted some power from it. Trouble is that at

700C steel's strength is a tiny fraction of what it is at ambient and 45psi exerts quite a force over the pressure pot. So casting a ceramic liner for the pressure vessel took some design and a lot of cost.

Ours occupied a good part of the floor of Cardiff's engineering dept, it got so embroiled in funding and grant bodies I never got to play with it. I still have the original MAN turbo and oil pumps in my garage and the spare lucas APUs are floating around on a farm in Worcester.

At the same time a researcher at the university was working on pulse combustors, they sounded just like a machine gun being fired.

AJH

TLUD ? Must remember that - its a much more obvious way of puting it !

How long is your 6" tube ? My son and I made a tiny camping stove last week, but the ratio of diameter to length seemed wrong to me, too narrow, too tall so bugger all out, very quickly.

Can you blow a column of wood chippings or even sawdust in one ? I saw one guy burning rice hulls in an elegant indonesian design I think it was,

If you made a gasifer, and then lit the gas, so flames were played over a radiant, like a gas fire, would that be much less efficient than a length of stove pipe ?

Steve

Woodburning stoves for cooking has become a serious environmental issue in some areas. The research (I think) which your are talking about was a mad cloggie who started by doing something very similar to the cutting up a gas bottle strategy. ISTR he achieved the same results using a third of the fuel or somesuch.

There was a huge alternative living expo a few years ago which looked at low-tech solutions - one was based on a very high efficiency burner

- which also had a feed to boil water for safe(er) drinking. Other rather neat, equally low-cost low-tech gadgets included a condensation water collector (big sheet of plastic over a hole type stuff).

A lot of the 'survivalist' techniques originally came from 'grass roots', have been modified and are now going back home as it were. The best and most officient means I've found for heat and coffee (erm, boiling water) has to be my well battered Kelly kettle.

I've done it several times at about 4 ft. There's one chap experimenting with an inclined tube model.

is a picture I just uploaded of a 6" ventilation pipe stuffed with dried heather clippings. The galv burned off ages ago but there is a hazard as it does. You can see the pyrolysis offgas rising from the tube and igniting as a diffuse lazy flame.

If you look at the bottom of the tube on the right you will see white crayon marks, I used these to show the downward progress of the pyrolysis front.

Many of the experimenters used old food cans, the term tincanium was coined for this resource. My first ones were natural draught and 6" diameter, I think they held about 500g of dried woodchip. Of course woodchip is not very dense and a much longer burn can be had with wood pellets

Yes but fan pressure becomes an issue with deep beds, there are work arounds. Are you familiar with the "boy scout's candle"? A tlud version of these with multiple holes can be made.

I think it would be more efficient because you would be rejecting heat directly into the room, just like a propane fire, but just as with a propane fire there are problems like condensation and CO. Flue pipes get the gases out of the room but at the cost of losing some heat. Unlike gas boilers wood burners don't do well run in a condensing mode.

AJH

Soon weld a tube like that up. Just a grill at the bottom ?

Kicks out a warming amount of heat for what ? an hour or so ?

Where do you get pellets from ?

No, thats a new term for Googling. I didn't know you could burn the little buggers for heating purposes....

Thanks for the tips.

Steve