Bamboo as TLUD Fuel

“I think that one of the best ways to use bamboo as a fuel is in the form of chips which are easy to handle, compact to store, and very suited to be burnt in TLUDs, and TLUDS are easy to make and versatile.  To make bamboo chips we use shedders and bamboo is often thought of as being hard on shredders aka. chippers, the silica content is sited as causing the blades to blunt.  In my experience the blades don’t dull any faster chipping bamboo than wood.  What does cause a problem is some species of bamboo breakup and go “stringy” the fibres wrap around the machine shafts and jam up the works.  A recent realisation for me has been the fact that dry bamboo can be chipped much easier than green.  It is more brittle and doesn’t go stringy as readily. This is a huge discovery because it solves the other logistic problem of drying.  When we chip green bamboo it starts to compost very quickly because of the nitrogen in the fresh leaves and the moisture. This decomposes the carbon which is not want we want if biochar is to be the end product.”“In preparation for last year’s bamboo construction workshop we cut culms that were left stand in the clump to cure and dry.  This technique has been very successful because only one of the culms we used for the construction and a few other culms stored here there have been attacked by borers.  It has been over a year now so I am quite happy with that result but back to biochar.”

“When I started to prepare fuels for the biochar workshop, there were still culms cut for the construction workshop sitting in the clumps.  The bamboo was dry and in good condition. It is so much easier to pull culms out of a clump and drag to a pile when they are dry and so much lighter.  I then got contractors in with a big shredder that made short work of chipping the bamboo, covered it with plastic, and bingo, a pile of fuel.”

Hans