Tip: It's easier to reduce the ash and maximize the charcoal if you build a simple kiln for your fire.
Discussion
I do have kiln. I just was not in the mood to chop the wood. The little extra I do get is not worth the hours of cutting.
Yeah with this one I just lay the logs & branches diagonally & then nudge them in as they burn down.
The other benefit is that you can burn newly cut branches & leaves without smoking out your neighbours. Once it's going, the radiating heat vaporises the water in the leaves & gets that clean burn.
You are right.
This burn for being open didn’t not produce that much smoke. 😂The quality of the char is definitely not commercial, but I have been using it for years with excellent results.
I messed around with TLUDs and crap for a couple of years. Far too time consuming & labour intensive to prepare all the materials. The charcoal from an open burn is excellent as an amendment.
This design I copied from a Bitcoiner with a permie background. It's better than anything I'd tried previously.
He burns green bamboo in his & them runs it through a shredder to get the particle size down. He sells the char for sats/cash & the structure of the bamboo produces really nice garden charcoal.
I just burn my brown waste (I have lots of eucalyptus) & get the charcoal as a by product.
thanks for the thread gents, learned a lot
well your propensity for hard work makes me not even want to attempt a kiln now 😂
If you build a huge kiln then you can just toss it in. But then you have all of this heavy ugly material lying around. That shit drives me nuts. It will make better char though.
My go too for a few years was 6 foot radius cone dug in the ground which made excellent char. Same issue here, you have to chunk up everything to fit.
You can make a big rectangular pit, but then you have a pit and a lot of work. Now you can make biochar in it for a few years then start back filling it with kitchen waste and whatever you want once filled maybe cover crop it for a year then plant. That would be an excellent strategy.
In my opinion open top burn pile with wood mostly dried creates good char for the least effort. The purest and environmentalists are not going to be happy.
this is gold 🏆