Direct vs Indirect charcoal making

[Rikadyn]

Last night, lacking fireworks of my own to light off, I decided to spend the evening making charcoal. Used a steel 5g bucket as a retort, and loaded it with scrap wood from around the yard.

Went well, besides being a little nervous when the retort began sounding like a jet dragster staging.

Today went out and opened the kiln and broke up all the charcoal, then looked into the fire pit and scooped out all the coals out of that.

Question is, which method actually is more effective in making charcoal?

[MattBower]

If you do it right, the end result of both is nearly pure carbon. So they're pretty much equally effective. I think your real question is which one is more efficient -- which one gives you the greatest mass of charcoal per mass of wood put into the process -- in which case the answer is the retort. Which is why people have been making charcoal in limited-oxygen atmospheres for thousands of years.

[ThomasPowers]

uhhh; those limited-oxygen atmospheres for thousands of years were all direct method and not retort though.

Retort takes less skill and produces a very clean out put.

Direct method takes more skill and watching but is easier to manage for large ammounts of wood

[781]

I would hate to make charcoal 5 gal at a time.
I use 55 gal barrels and burn 3 at at time using 2 by boards as the fuel.
I use the direct method and start with the lumber sticking out ot the barrel about a foot. After an hour or so of burning it has shrunk down into the barrel.

I would think retort would be less offensive to neighbors as the smoke is burned as fuel correct.

In my method the barrels smoke for a few minutes until the wood is going good but I dont have close neighbors to offend

[Greebe]

I have used the retort method based on this website. Charcoal Retort
This is a very good design from my experience and turns 90% of the wood to charcoal first try. The pieces that don't convert completely can be tossed on the top of the next batch.

Check it out.

Greebe