What have we been up to: boiling potatoes with garbage!!  Gnome’s Garbage Stove (TM 🙂 ) is a stove that runs on garbage including twigs, plastic, leaf litter, organic material and generally all your bits of rubbish that you throw out.  Oh you can also use charcoal.  Anyway, this is Gnome’s copy of a gasifier stove; Gnome says,

“…a gasifier stove takes solid fuel made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and turns it into natural gas which you can burn for heat and energy.”

Gnome says that if you need more information: just look up gasifiers on your favourite search engine.  Okay, Gnome!!  But not every-one can make something out of reading just a Wiki entry…

(Munchkin: here, try woodgasifierplans.com)

…the advantages of this is that it is a smokeless stove and it doesn’t produce soot.  And of course, the fuel is completely free because it runs on garbage.

How does it work, Gnome?

“…the heat vaporises the solids and the gas produced is ignited by the metal of the hot stove which keeps the tin hot which then creates more gas…and runs the stove.”

So we did a run with the stove yesterday.  We did something simple: boiled potatoes.

Here are the pictures with some running commentary:

Gasifier stove with inside tin which has to be filled up with garbage to burn:

Garbage:

Oh, and bits of plastic too; can get rid of bottle tops and plastic bottles.  Don’t use too much of this, needs to be balanced with other organic material.

This is the filled stove: twigs, plastic, bit of corn cob.  Panda’s fire-starter in the middle.

After you light stove, you can supplement with charcoal if you want:

See: the flame is clean and the whitish vapour is the gas which is produced by the gasifier which is being burned as fuel.

Eventually the stove gets hot and more flames spill through the holes from the inside tin:

Heating up potatoes:

The potatoes took 15 minutes to get to a rolling boil and then 8 minutes to cook.  Once cooked, most of the garbage turned to charcoal and a little bit of heat was left ie. not enough to cook anything else or boil water.

Overall, I told Gnome that I was pleased with his innovation and that I was willing to try “steamboat” with the stove for dinner.  We had a lovely dinner last night: dipping slivers of beef with Chinese veggies and finally eating the soup with rice noodles.  The stove stayed warm enough for the whole dinner event which took about an hour.  Gnome says that he will continue modifying and he is now looking for larger tins/ metal pots and vessels to make larger size models.  That’s because I promised him another steamboat dinner tonight! 😉