Making Spent Coffee Grounds Into Charcoal For Terra Preta?

[freeztar]

Hmm, one more idea based off of a video I saw on greenpowerscience - you could also put grounds, loosely - maybe with some scrunched up paper to provide air pockets- into a clear glass jar and hit it with a fresnel lens. Those things look like so much fun! The jar might explode though and you can burn yourself fairly badly with one of those lenses, but hey...

 

Just a quick aside...

You might enjoy this thread, Kira, where Greenpowerscience was a participant. Several of us are trying to figure out how to make char with solar power.

 

http://hypography.com/forums/science-projects-homework/6465-solar-parabolic-trough-charcoal-oven.html?highlight=solar+parabolic

[maikeru]

n/a

Edited August 24, 2012 by maikeru

[palmtreepathos]

Hmm... it may just be me but I had gotten the idea that coffee grounds already were charred, especially the dark roasted ones used for espresso. I am using them as char in my compost and garden. I treat them to a soak in natural fertilizer and then mix in the soil with some sand as my soil is pretty heavy clay.

 

I also mix them with old grass clods (chopped up) with the soil from their roots to a rotary composter, some leaves or wood chips adds larger bits of organic matter. As part of the soil amendments I add liquid molasses, ceramic powder and ground granite dust. I am now growing an avocado in this mix and for the first time would call the thing a "tree"... lol

 

Garden Grounds - Home

 

Grow Joe--Plants benefit from neutralized coffee grounds

[mavrickjohn]

I can think of better uses of Coffee grounds than bio-char. Growing Oyster mushrooms (Pieurotus Ostreatus) Harvest the mushrooms breakup the spawn and incorperate into the garden bed where the worms will have a field day. They love it. Some of the spawn will run into the Bio Char we hope and create a home for it's self there. It's what I'm doing in my home with my leftover coffee grounds. Wood chips I can get any time of the day for bio-char. Look up Fungi Perfecti with your search machine for kits. He even has a Garden kit of 3 mushrooms that will work in your garden I've got those already and am going to get a morel kit to try out next.

[mavrickjohn]

I can think of better uses of Coffee grounds than bio-char. Growing Oyster mushrooms (Pieurotus Ostreatus) Harvest the mushrooms breakup the spawn and incorperate into the garden bed where the worms will have a field day. They love it. Some of the spawn will run into the Bio Char we hope and create a home for it's self there. It's what I'm doing in my home with my leftover coffee grounds. Wood chips I can get any time of the day for bio-char. Look up Fungi Perfecti with your search machine for kits. He even has a Garden kit of 3 mushrooms that will work in your garden I've got those already and am going to get a morel kit to try out next. I'm also working my way through his books about mushroom growing.Mushroom Cultivator and Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms. I've already read Mycellium Running great book.

[DFINITLYDISTRUBD]

Be ever so jealous all I've got a steady weekly supply of grounds coming in from a local coffee bar:hihi:

They dun want em so'z they load zem into sealed drums (filters an all) for me to pick up every Sunday

lots of compost fer me:) I give up on char cuz it makes lots of CO2 just to sequester a little carbon.....argue all yins wants but (burning) "CHARRING" things makes CO2 no mater how you do it (unless you're using a solar/ or some other non-combusting / non-combustion powered method and even then a small amount of CO2 will be released by the process).

[mavrickjohn]

True you will create CO2 in making bio char however think of this. If you have a use for the heat created in making bio char it really starts to make very good sense. The concept is called co-generation when part of that cycle produces electricity and the left over heat is used for something else or recycled into a lower state of generating power. You get twice the kick for the same energy used. Let me put it another way. Your home is heated let us say with gas. The gas is burnt. The air in your home is heated. And the heat rises until it exits the house and radiates outward. Now instead if the gas is first used by a sterling engine to make electricity and the waste heat from that process is used to heat your home that is co-generation. Now if you were to do the same thing, create the electricity with a sterling engine using wood and creating bio-char and heating your house that would also be co-generation and makes the best of sense. We tend to think in great and grand manners. We think of creating a power plant to burn tons of wood to create mega-watts of electricity and get bio-char as part of the waste stream to be transported somewhere else to be spread on the land and Incorporated. Third world people could and would use wood to cook and heat their homes and the bio-char by product used on their land in a very closed system. Many small farmers doing this would easily match and probably exceed bio-char production in first world countries. We just haven't given them the stoves and ovens that would work on these individual home levels just yet . And that my friends is where we should be focusing our efforts to design and promote bio-char production in the homes of the 3rd. world where it will make the greatest difference to the people abiding there.

[maikeru]

n/a

Edited August 24, 2012 by maikeru

[Mukrakiish]

Edit: made seperate thread instead of hijacking.