A friend of mine recently "donated" a shredder for my use. After rebuilding its carburetor (hateful things, carburetors!) and re-lapping stuck valves, changing gaskets and cleaning GUNK out of the fuel tank, it's running fairly well again. (It still needs a replacement throttle return spring, but I'm trying to solve one problem at a time . . .)
I used the machine for a couple of hours this afternoon and made a few observations. Plant stalks contain quite a bit of water. The huge sunflower and corn plants we grew this summer reduced down to a surprisingly small pile after going through the shredder. I'm left with quite a bit LESS material than I'd initially believed I would have. Compacting all of that "yard waste" takes up far less room, and the shredded plants will compost more effectively in tiny pieces than they would with their stalks intact. (Keith likes to say that bacteria have no teeth!) The resulting pile has a strangely sweet aroma. (I know that cellulose is basically plant sugar, but I really had no clue that it would smell like it could ferment "as is".) However, the 3 horsepower shredder uses quite a bit of fuel for such a little engine. I burned nearly four liters of gasoline in two hours of operation, whereas the engine in my truck (running at part throttle cruise on the highway and probably cranking out about 25 horsepower) can take me about 40 kilometers down the road at 100 km / hour, or roughly 20 minutes of driving, on the same amount of fuel. Therefore, my supercharged, fuel injected truck engine requires .4 liters of fuel per "horsepower hour", while the shredder needs .67 liters of fuel per "horsepower hour". That's better than 25% more fuel being burned to get the job done. (Low compression, carb technology is likely the culprit here, coupled with the fact that on the freeway, my truck engine isn't exactly working very hard, whereas I had to have the shredder running full tilt in order to handle the big sunflower stalks.) It seems to me that an electric motor would be far better suited to the task than is the very noisy gasoline engine. Perhaps a low speed diesel, with its high torque, would do nicely as well. Either option seems superior in my mind, as it bothers me on some level to burn fossil derived gasoline for the sake of my "organic" garden . . . Of course, the same thing could be said of rototilling. I'm certainly not going to invest in one of those tiny horses I've seen around here to do that job for me. robert luis rabello "The Edge of Justice" Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ranger Supercharger Project Page http://www.members.shaw.ca/rabello/ _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
