I'm a first time gasifier owner who just received an M-2 ready to run. I wanted to go slow and get familiar with the machine, so I thought I would start first to light the gasifier and flare the gas.
On my first attempt, I had the blower plugged into 120VAC with no speed control, could not light a flare, and had trouble with the torch blowing out constantly.
On the second attempt, I used 24V battery on the fan, and had a stream which would burn with a torch but not sustain a flare. I emailed Matt and realized I made a very obvious mistake, in my rush to flare I did not plug the gas-out port.
On the third try, with the gas out port plugged with a rag and duct tape, about 2 minutes after lighting the gasifier I tried flaring and it started up instantly, and very strong. In fact maybe too strong and I should try a lower voltage on the blower, so I shut down the blower after only about 20 seconds of flaring, very excited to continue tomorrow and hopefully try running a generator soon. I will update this thread with any other mistakes I make as a complete beginner.
My next question, are there any materials besides sawdust that work for the ammobox filter? I could spend a bit of time making sawdust, but I have other things on hand such as straw, peatmoss, shredded paper, maybe even pine shavings, would any of these things work or is saw dust the way to go?
I've read a lot of threads on DoW forums and seen the posts where "building a gasifier for the first time" and scroll through 100s of posts across years+ of people trying to get this right. So I was expecting gasification to be a really big learning journey for me before it runs right. But you really made it too easy :P
Now I get to focus on collecting and processing wood and running an engine instead of trying to build a machine.
On the topic of temperature sensor, have you already figured out what works there? Thermocouple I'm gussing. Certain length of probe? And does the probe stick directly into the charcoal, or should you use a thermowell?