digging McCoy

greetings!

I'm one of the new ones here so I might as well jump in with both feet!

Since you seem to love the rocket stove and so do I, I think it's grea.t You see I live the the north of canada where it gets snow 6 months and -40c so I spend a lot of time thinking about heaters.

Anyways I'm also interested in bio-char but only made in the clean burning way as in a gasification stove. First I wish to say that if there is a way for us to reduce co2 and build soil which could then grow trees better and faster that's what I want to do.

So I'm thinking if a person had one of these little stove units like a Anila char making stove, and joined it to the chimmey part of the rocket stove, the part that pulls and pushes the heat so it can travel longer distances and go through mass for heat storage, then we could have a cheap way to heat a greenhouse with carbon negative energy and build soil while getting the max of energy out of the wood. Here is a link to the stove I'm talking about.
http://www.google.ca/images?q=anila+stove&rls=com.microsoft:en-ca:IE-SearchBox&oe=UTF-8&rlz=1I7GGLL_en&redir_esc=&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=5cZwTNXdD9L-nAfWiMHhBw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CDYQsAQwAw
digging

Dear Paul,

I'm so glad to see you found and love the rocket stove, it is very brilliant. Something I've be milling over is an idea of building a rocket mass chimmey over a spot that would hold anila wood gasification stove? Then we could have carbon negative stored heat....
What do you think, could it work, could there be enough draft to pull the heat?

Digging

Yes it is an outside model, but simple, you could heat water or something else.

Here is another design I want to try and build with my 16 year old son.

http://worldstove.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/EverythingNice_Stove_Instructions.pdf

digging

Here is a great teaching link on a back yard char making stove!

http://holon.se/folke/carbon/simplechar/simplechar.shtml

digging

Well so far what I have been learning is that biochar can be used differently depending on the soil. You can make a char that has a high ph to help lift acid soils, but if you have base soils you can wash the char so it will not lift the ph up.
Also the char helps hold nitrogen so you will not need to add as much, so your compost would go farther. Many say to use urine and compost to activate the biochar.
As for helping reduce our land use I think it will help even more, because it can help the soil produce at it's highest yields thus reducing needed size of gardens, also I believe bio-char can replace some carbon crops that are needed for growing compost in the Jevons methods. Perhaps the Jevons carbon crops could be used for animal feeds or textile crops or planted into more forest gardens.
You see because by making and using the biochar we will end up with much high carbon levelsin our soils which is what Jevons teaches so much about. The carbon lose from the soil has been mankinds problem for 1000s of years! Bio-char can change sooooo much about how we farm etc.
Digging

Yes thier work is very good on volumes of food grown and needed. As for the point you were making about bio-char there are different stoves for making char from different plants. Yes you can make a very good char from straw of various plants. http://www.samuchit.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=3
Also you can make simple ones in your back yard to char larger pieces of wood.

What I'm talking about is simply how I feel I can best put all the info I've learned so far to create the best system I can to produce what I need and give back to the earth more than I've taken. If I could learn to do that befor I die I could die in peace.

digging

I'm building a greenhouse right now with papecrete as the infilling of the walls. I made many bricks last summer and go a feel for the mix I wanted. I'm using it for maxi R values since I live where it is very cold. I'm doing like a slip form slowly pouring into the walls all the way around. I like the fact that it is very fire resistant and nor bug or mice like to get into it. The walls will have about R36 but also be very draft free and no bridging. The greenhouse house is 20ft by 36ft.

Digging

You have asked a very good question! How much money can we really make? Well I believe if you look up http://www.spinfarming.com/ you will get some very exact info and great ideas on crops etc for sales. I have learned  a lot from them so far and my son and I have been vending in a very small town of less than 4000 people and we always make over $500/wk. They have excellent ebooks you can down load I would highly recommend them. I believe from what I've learned in the next few years working part of the year I'll be able to make $30,000.

Digging

It seems to me a hybrid system between the Jevons method and permiculture is slowly growing from people trying to learn how to grow what they need again. So in looking at the Jevons data and then adding into it the biochar factor I believe we truly could have in hand some tools to reduce the amount of ground we need for cultivation. They believe it takes about 4000 sq ft for food production per person including the carbon for compost production, but with a wood gas stove most of that carbon could be used for fuel helping to reduce wood burning (saving forsests) and at the same time increase the amount of carbon for soil creation and improvement. The biochar would also help our trees grow better and faster helping the whole system increase quicker. I'm very excited about learning how to create such a working system.

Digging