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Upcoming Events Next Open House: 5-7pm 6/14
July Open House: 5-7pm 7/12
Next Workshop: August 9-11
APL at the San Francisco Exploratorium August 20 11-3
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Learn the intimate details of our cutting edge gasification technology and bring our story to life for potential customers. You’re not just selling a product off the shelf – our personal scale energy solutions are experimental machines with new and exciting updates happening every day. Bring us your enthusiasm for green technology and alternative energy solutions.
Responsibilities Sell our products! Learn both the big picture of gasification and the minute details of the complex machines we produce, and then share that vision with our customers. Stay organized as you contact and follow-through with a wide variety of qualified leads. Prepare sales invoices and shipping quotes. Answer customer questions thoroughly, from the complex to the simple, understanding that we cater to a community of enthusiasts. You’ll straddle the line between sharing the basics of gasification with the uninitiated and fielding questions from scientists. Attend trade shows and conferences and be willing to meet with customers all over the world.
Qualifications Excellent verbal and written communications skills. Enthusiasm for research: ask a lot of questions, observe our products in action, and constantly increase your knowledge. Personable and adaptable communication style: you will be speaking with farmers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and tinkerers [...]
20kw Power Pallets on the floor
The shop floor at APL continues to fill with more good stuff. Here’s the scene from a couple weeks ago as we were finishing a round of 20kw Power Pallets. The 4 pictured units were later shipped to Indonesia, Italy, Mexico and Brazil. We’re blessed with interesting projects at nearly all of our end user sites, and usually some lucky APL engineer gets to fly out and meet the machine and people on the other end.
About half of the current Power Pallet shipments have a follow up trip to the user’s site. Many of the power pallets are going to demonstration or testing sites where someone wants to explore a larger deployment, and or set up a high value use that will likely lead to more good things. We’re excited when people approach us with interesting projects like this, and we try to make a trip to their site to ensure a successful start.
Some of these lead to workshops around the delivered machine, and proposed project. If you would like to hold such an event and/or exploration at your site, you are encouraged to contact us and propose a plan. [...]
We are still searching for the perfect candidate for this position. Maybe it is you. Maybe you can point us to him or her. Or maybe you have a list, forum, twitter account or some other venue to repost which might help to surface the right candidate. Any input and/or fwds are greatly appreciated. jim
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ALL Power Labs is looking for a manufacturing operations expert to create and manage the next stage of our production solution. We are fast outgrowing our current DIY based methods, and need to quickly implement a more scalable, higher volume solution. This will require deep skills across international supply chain management, multi-discipline production processes, fast design-to-market iteration, and the information systems that make them possible.
Our core product is now as complex as a small car. This position requires skills across a wide set of industries including sheet and cast metalwork, powertrain, electronics, and finishes.
************************************************* ALL Power Labs is a Berkeley, CA based start-up specializing in biomass gasification equipment for small-scale, distributed power generation. In APL’s 3 short years over 300 gasifiers have shipped to over 40 different countries and 50 universities and research institutions.
You can find more information on [...]
Welcome back after a quiet late summer sans Geknews posts. Sadly, quiet on this end didn’t relate to the long planned trip down Baja. Rather, we’ve been face down in the details of scaling our 10kw and 20kw Power Pallet production, as well as sprinting towards the finish of our first 100kw shipping container based system.
This of course is not a problem, and we thank all of you for making this adventure more interesting with each passing month. The challenge now is just keeping up with the growth in interest and all of your notes. We’re now 15 people full time at APL, and it still is not enough.
Here below is some new news from the shop and beyond in GEK land.
New GEK v4.2 Fabrication Instructions (in process, feedback needed)
If you’ve looked, you know- the “current” GEK DIY fabrication instructions are a bit of a mess. They’ve been in terrible need of a version update, and they’re not very easy to follow anyway. This summer the locals undertook on a big project to redo the instructions from scratch, and do so over the most current GEK sheetmetal set- the v4.2. The first draft of these are now [...]
We’re now in the midst of our Father’s Day Gasification workshop at ALL Power Labs in Berkeley, CA. We have about 75 people here from near and far to wander down the rabbit hole of biomass thermal conversion.
For those of you not able to join us, we have a webcam on the 10 kW Power Pallet endurance run. You can watch the progress here: http://www.gekgasifier.com/webcam/
We plan 50 hours over the next several days with datalogging of the wood chip fuel in to power out particulars. We started yesterday afternoon and ran straight through the night. So far 24+ hours constant run without issues. We pulled the filter apart at 24hours and were happy to find it nice and clean. No bell reduction bell packing either, which has lately been our biggest challenge on long runs. Some minor tweaks to grate design seems to have cleared up the problem.
We have the full datalogging regime up and running so we should soon have a good set of info on fuel in to power out particulars, as well as system temps, pressures, and gas composition numbers. The fuel we are using is chipped cedar from the local landscaping supply [...]
Father’s Day Gasification and Biochar Workshop: June 17-19, 2011
Opening Intro & Lecture: Friday, June 17, 7:30 – 9:30PM Weekend Build, Run and Test: Saturday and Sunday, June 17-19, 11am – 7pm
Location: ALL Power Labs, 1010 Murray Street, Berkeley CA 94710 Cost: Free if you are a GEK or BEK owner, either through self build or purchase. Otherwise, $100 for weekend. RSVP to the forum here. Buy your spot here.
Our summer workshop is fast approaching- June 17th – 19th. Many of you have already RSVP’ed and are flying in from the 4 corners, but there is still room for more. So come join us for a quality Father’s Day weekend of wrenching, rotating machinery, and guided tour down the rabbit hole of biomass thermal conversion. The workshop begins with a Friday evening talk on the science of gasification and pyrolysis, and the new engineering solutions embodied in the GEK gasifier and BEK biochar maker. Saturday and Sunday are full days of building, running and testing the physical particulars. Come prepared to get your hands dirty building and running machinery. We learn through both talking and working.
We’ll have 4 projects going in parallel for this round [...]
The first edition of the 10kW GEK Power Pallet combined our Tower of Total Thermal Integration with a Kohler v-twin engine. In October of 2010 we began production of the second version, which used a Kubota 3-cylinder industrial spark-fired diesel designed specifically for use with a gaseous fuel, and a Meccalte genhead that could be configured to the requirements of the user’s energy network. This engine, when governed electronically, is stunningly smooth and quiet. Here is a feature-by-feature breakdown of the innovations that have been incorporated into the current Power Pallet line:
Control Panel Mount The Process Control Unit and Oxygen Sensor readout are mounted in a NEMA box, which in turn sits on a control pedestal at the front of the unit. Also on this pedestal are the on/off switch, hour meter, and keyed ignition. Stainless Steel Hopper The biomass hopper is now available in 55-gallon stainless steel with a port window.
Combined Exhaust/Flare Stack With Glow Plug The engine exhaust and startup flare are mounted on the same stack. A glowplug in the flare automatically ignites it whenever the PCU detects gasification temperatures without engine operation.
Bosch Oxygen Sensor detects exhaust mixture A Bosch Oxygen Sensor detects the [...]
In 2008 ALL Power Labs introduced the Gasifier Experimenter’s Kit, bringing small-scale gasification to the home tinkerer and lab-scale researcher, providing a gasifier that runs common home generators and small vehicles.
In 2010 we introduced the Power Pallet, a complete integrated power system scaled to the common real-world platform of the 4×4 cargo pallet. It filled the 10kW-20kW niche in the world of biomass gasification.
The natural arc of our development is that we scale our next product to another common vessel, the shipping container. ALL Power Labs has received the first 100 kilowatt diesel generator that we are are integrating into a shipping container in order to offer a 100kW GEK Power System. Our clients are the University of Minnesota Morris and the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in cooperation with Cummins Power Generation operating under a DOE grant from the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). The purpose of this project is twofold:
1) Develop a relevant shipping-container based biomass gasification unit for the U.S. Agricultural market
2) Provide a gasifier mated to a modern diesel engine with precise ignition control in order to experiment with the unique combustion characteristics of syngas.
This unit will include a CHP [...]
*** FATHER’S DAY GASIFY WITH DAD WORKSHOP ***
Join us at ALL Power Labs June 17th through 19th for our next Gasification and Biochar Workshop in Berkeley CA. This is Father’s Day weekend so we hope you will consider planning a father-and-son/daughter trip to All Power Labs for our workshop.
It has been too long since our last workshop. Our first quarter 2011 workshop in the Ivory Coast was canceled due to political unrest. Then we found ourselves too busy building in-house to have one in the spring. So we’re now giving you lots of notice for our summer workshop. We also hope to announce some European workshops for later this summer, but dates are still vague at the moment. We plan to host workshops in Belgium and Italy, corresponding with the delivery of Power Pallets to each location.
The Berkeley workshop will as usual involve multiple projects across many fronts of biomass thermal conversion. We’ll be doing training sessions and long runs tests of the Power Pallet, biochar production with the BEK, Lister spark conversion, possibly more gas-to-liquids work, and other things not yet known. I really want to get the gasified Honda running again. Maybe i can convince [...]
It was a historic day at All Power Labs– we had a visit from the two Toms of biomass thermal conversion. Tom Miles was in the shop getting to know the 10kW Power Pallet for a project in Alaska. Tom Reed was in California visiting his grandson, and decided to stop by to make sure the kids weren’t messing up his hard won work.
Tom Miles is the founder of www.bioenergylists.org and a well-known figure in the biomass and stoves world. Tom Reed’s work at the Biomass Energy Foundation goes back well into the 1970s when he laid the groundwork that most of us learned about gasification from. We were honored to have such forefathers of our industry on site and tickled to watch them fiddle and banter with Bear as they talked theoretical auger angles and increased microscopic surface areas. We hung on Tom Reed’s every word as he described over lunch his hopes in the 70s that someone would develop a functional and inexpensive gasifier generator kit from his research and saw his 30-year wait end as he watched us start up the Power Pallet.
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Packing the Gas Filter - Power Pallet
Wow, two of the Power Pallets that will be heading to Uganda are being funded by...