I would love to buy a kiln that needs a bit of fixing up, but I can't find any in my area. I found a few but never got any responses from the sellers.
I'm not overly concerned about the energy consumption, I also play around with lifepo4 battery packs and solar so either way the energy is essentially free. I do understand what you're saying about why plaster is a no go and will look into a refractory source locally if I opt to build before I get lucky and find one cheap or free to fix up.
Frost, I'm not looking into photoelectric generation, and all this experimentation is just for fun. There is a variation on graphitic carbon nitride that is suppose to hold 10% hydrogen by weight at ambient temperature, so my plan is to build a moderate sized dry cell setup to keep the gasses separate so I can expose this stuff to straight hydrogen and then play around with fueling small engines with it. Might work, might not, it'll be an interesting journey either way.
Arkansas would be a bit of a trek for me from georgia, Irondragon or I might well take you up on that lol. My chickens don't give me much free time for travel, I've got 20,000 of them lol.