Make Your Own Lump Charcoal?

I use a milkcrate to sift the cool ashes from my can when it fills up. I save birdseed bags, dump the charcoal into them and have a decent amount for shorter grilling - steaks, chicken etc.

 

Water? I always hear charcoal is not what it should be after it gets wet?

 

Takes a while to dry imho.

 

great great, another thing i am going to try to do on my own that my wife will view as a colossal waste of time....

 

Me too. Told the wife after I cleaned the stove today.

 

Yup just a couple or so hours on a hot spring/summer day.Having in the sun really speeds it up a lot.

 

i think henry ford had the idea to make charcoal so he could use the scraps of wood from making cars which had a lot of wood in the bodies back then

 

That was the beginning of the Kingsford charcoal company.Changed hands several times since then,its part of some big conglomerate today most likely.

 

I have a metal ash can outside with a grate over it, just some hardware cloth. When the ash bucket that I use to empty the stove is full it gets dumped into the large ash can and the grate separates the charcoal from the ash. Ash goes on the garden/lawn and compost pile, Charcoal goes in a paper bag for use on the grill. You would be surprised how much accumulates over a season with only a few pieces a time.

 

I was gone for the weekend and when I got back home my house was 51 degrees. I was stuffing the stove with red maple as fast as it would take it. After about 5 hours I was up to 66 degrees and the stove looked like this. I was really tempted to shovel a bunch out into a metal ash bucket and cram the lid on tight. Wonder if it would have stifled it enough to preserve it all as charcoal?

 

Interesting thought, using the wood burner. You'd get some heat in the house trying anyway.

 

All you have to do is prevent oxygen consumption to stop the coals from burning any further.
A metal/galvanized trash can is air tight enough to stop the burn.

 

I might have to give it a whirl.

 

Yup, i hear that loud & clear.
Ray

 

I made charcoal a few years ago. I took an old 30 gallon drum with a clamped on lid. Drilled a hole in the lid for gasses to escape. Filled it up with lumps of hardwood and laid it on a good hot fire in the pit that had been burning for a while. Once it got heated up, the gasses coming out of the hole in the lid fired up and shot out like a torch for quite a while. I left it to smolder for most of the day. The results were pretty good. There were a few pieces that weren't completely carbonized, but most of it was charred all the way through. I made a second batch and there was enough to fill a 50 pound feed bag. I used it in the grill for the rest of that summer and it worked great.

I wouldn't use the stove to try and make charcoal, but the hardware cloth over the ash can idea sounds good.

 

I used a grill grate to sift some out of my ash can last night. Worked pretty good and did not have a bunch of small pieces in the mix.

 

Well I took some coals out of the stove but didn't try to stifle them, I added them directly to the grill. I started with a nice pile of lit charcoal briquettes this weekend while cooking a chicken. Felt I needed more heat so I just went into the house, shoved a bunch of coals into a bucket and poured them into the grill. Worked pretty good.

 

I sift my ashes from my wood burner and use the coals for my forge.

 

I wanted big pieces of lump- You get a few big pieces in a bag but not much. I got a piece of 1/2"
expanded metal to sift my ash in my wood burner, and discovered about half of my insert ash is actually small bits of charcoal. Same with my ash pile outside. The deal with wanting larger lumps has to do with not wanting the smaller pieces falling through the air vents of my kamado cooker. I fashioned a bowl of expanded metal to fit in my firebox. Seemed to solve my problems. I used the little crumbs that are most of a bag of lump charcoal. I found this way to make a small batch of large lump charcoal in the wood burner. http://www.mman.us/charcoalretort.htm Looks like a good way to do it if you can spare the space of a log maybe two or three. Kinda sounds like you can make some charcoal in the wood burner, while still heating the house. Stock up on summer grilling charcoal while still heating the house. I think it's worth a try.