Dale Hodgins wrote:I'm pretty sure that the temperature stated is for the area where the smoked meat goes. The chips would have to be hotter for any sort of charring to happen.
Yes, at 165F you can drive off water, but it's really not hot enough for char reactions to proceed.
the pan sits right on top of an electric element. But I doubt its 400F
A-ha, so if element is 400F, it's much too cool to glow, but it could conduct enough heat up through the pan so that the wood chips were in the 300-400F range. This is enough to char them, but not enough for the cellulose in any paper thin wood chips to auto-ignite. These temperatures are also enough to convert the lignin to char as well. And it is temperature that is the important variable, not particle size. The only thing that particle size buys you is time; if you had big chunks of wood, you could run it for hours instead of being done in 30 minutes.
As for it being soil amendment, at first it is going to absorb soil nutrients, so peeing on it first is definitely advisable. I leave my biochar in an open barrel and let the rain fall on it and the bugs crawl through it. It also gets the dregs of the
compost tea bucket thrown into it. That is pretty effective at inoculating it and loading up the nutrient storage sites in the char.