Homemade Briquettes
Process in a Nutshell
Here’s the process in a nutshell: you take shredded paper and ground up leaves and/or sawdust mixture; soak the mix in water until the paper is mushy, then press the mixture into briquettes, let dry and use for firewood. It actually works well. We saw this on National Geographic’s Doomsday Peppers and decided to give it a try.
Paper
You start with shredded paper. In our family, we shred everything that is made of paper and has any personal information – it is part of our “operational security” and a means of protecting our identity from theft. Our shredder is a crosscut model, because the strip shredders are inadequate to destroy the information from a determined adversary who is willing to dumpster dive and painstakingly reassemble the strips. One note: software is available that takes scanned strips and digitally reassembles them – scary. So, we use a crosscut shredder. Sandy takes the shredded paper and stores it in a 55 gallon barrel. We find the paper shreds are fluffy, so we take a scrap of 2×4 to help compress the paper into the barrel.
Natural Combustibles
Next, you need leaves. We rake them up in the fall, using the tarp technique: rake the leaves onto a tarp, then you can drag them, lots of them, easily. We prefer to let them dry in the sun, or do the raking after they are dry. We use a electric motor Harbor Freight leaf shredder while the 120 VAC is readily available.
Add leaves to the shredder slowly; the machine uses a yard trimmer string and does a decent job grinding the leaves. The process is dusty, so wear a dust mask and eye protection. We cobbled together some scraps of plywood and a couple of bungee cords to hold the shredder over the top of a barrel, and this works nicely. The halves of the mount fit into the barrel for storage. We keep the shredded leaves in a 55 gallon barrel. In a true TEOTWAWKI you could grind the leaves by hand, but the machine does a nice job for the time being.
Start with a 55 Gallon Barrel
Make a plywood topper/template.
Attach a leaf shredder.
And shred some leaves, getting about 1/2 barrel full.
Recipe
We tried a 100% paper briquette. It burned too quickly and was difficult to light. We tried 75% leaves and 25% paper, and found they were too smoky and burned too quickly. The best ratio is about 50/50 natural material (leaves or sawdust) and paper. The resulting briquette is firm, lights and burns well, and is not too smoky. We found that a typical kitchen 13 gallon white trash bag of shredded paper mixed in a 5 gallon bucket with water and half bucket of shredded leaves makes 16 briquettes. One other note: we tried a leaf mix that was heavy with pine needles. This was a mess! The pine needles did not shred, they did not become malleable when soaked in water, and the resulting bricks were a crumbly mess that we ended up burning off in a burn barrel.
Process
Take half and half mixture of paper and leaves and mix them dry because they stir more easily. At a yard sale, we found a stainless steel paddle used in commercial kitchens that looks a lot like a boat oar. We use the paddle and a concrete mixing bit and heavy drill to stir the mixture. Then add water, mixing the mixture again and get it fully saturated. What makes this process work is getting the paper wet enough and soaking it long enough that the mix becomes mushy. In this consistency, the paper mush acts like a glue to bind the natural materials (leaves or sawdust) together; a little like paper mache’ projects of our childhood. It takes about a week of soaking for the mixture to get that pasty consistency. During our testing, Nick forgot about one bucket for several weeks and was dutifully distressed by the rotting smell when he opened the container. Perhaps a small amount of pure chlorine bleach in the water might keep the mold at bay? Not forgetting about the mixture works even better! Anyway, we braved the smell and used the mix anyway: they dried nicely and didn’t stink afterwards.
Then we sit a 5 gallon bucket inside the barrel and fill the bucket about half and half, leaves and shredded paper. You are cross cut shredding all of your mail, old bills, and anything with your name, address or other personal data right? Here’s a good use!
Next, add water and stir well. I used a paint stirring rod attached to a drill.
So we end up with a real gooey mix of ground up leaves and shredded paper.
The Press
For our first attempt, Nick made a press from red oak, following a video found somewhere, but the shape was inefficient and process was very clumsy. We found this on Amazon.com and it’s the bee’s knees!
Take the softened mixture called “slop” and fill the store bought press. The instructions show the user pressing the bricks by hand, but put the press on the ground and gently squeeze out the water by stepping on the levers; this way it uses your leg strength instead of upper body strength. The briquettes are very fragile at this point, so lift and carry them carefully to the drying rack.
The Drying Rack
The drying rack is made from two rolls of hardware cloth and a couple of treated pine 2×4’s ripped in half on the table saw, assembled with water resistant sheet rock screws and a staple gun. Originally, we designed the drying rack dimensions based on multiples of dimensions from the finished briquettes and to accommodate 11 * 16 briquettes (16 per 5 gallons, and 11 * 16 for a 55 gallon barrel) but when we started unrolling the hardware cloth and cutting it, the process was frustrating because the hardware cloth was difficult to unroll, cut, and work with. So, the resulting dimensions for the drying rack became 2 x the width of the hardware cloth, so would not have to cut it on the long side.
We found the best way to cut the hardware cloth was with a pair of hospital scissors (shears, really) that are able to cut a penny.
We had originally planned and tried to use fence staples; however, they proved to be awkward to use, so we grabbed a staple gun and finished the project. Because the shelves of the drying rack became wider than originally planned, we increased the distance between them. Your briquettes need moving air to dry efficiently, but your arms also need to be able to reach inside the rack with wet and fragile briquettes; hence the shelf spacing. It works very well for us.
End Result
So here is one of the earlier runs of briquettes; they show a variety of mixture ratios. These are dry and the edges tend to flake a little, but all in all, the briquettes hold together well and burn quite nicely. We estimate the briquettes burn completely in about an hour. We mix them with firewood and store bought pressed sawdust bricks to keep our cabin cozy warm.
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