Thanks for the comments. I will put a note in the video description area correcting the definition of TLUD.

I have been experimenting with about ten different wood gas stoves, and always dump the char into the bucket of water. Usually, I pour the liquid with the pieces of char into another bucket with a screen over the top to catch any pieces larger than about 1 cm. This second bucket with the fines and ashes gets tossed on the compost pile (six dump truck loads of chips mixed with cow manure). I save the larger pieces of char in large barrels and sacks in my barn for future use in some larger gasifiers (for ten hp engines) that I have been building on for some time.

Some of these chunks of char are used in cooking tasks where I want to simmer rather than boil the food.

However, since I have a good supply of hardwood (Mesquite) I probably use less than 1% of my char for cooking. Perhaps 25% ends up in the compost pile(s), and the remainder is stored in the barrels and sacks.

(estimated half a dozen 55 gallon (200 liter) barrels.) Last year, I built my version of the Anila stove using a 20# propane bottle. I guess it might be called a retort! It makes large amounts of beautiful charcoal from larger hunks of hardwood, while burning the pyrolytic gas under a very large pot or pressure cooker. My goal with this retort was to make high grade charcoal while making complete use of the flame for cooking, and producing no visible smoke. It uses a ten dollar ceiling fan speed control to vary the amount of forced air.

It works very well, but has too much ¨firepower¨ for normal cooking for two old retired people. (It will work well to reduce large amounts of cooked tomatoes into tomato paste.) I keep this high grade charcoal separate from the finer char produced by the cook stoves.

My Woodgas Campstove XL gets used about 60% of the time because I have a pot shroud that fits around the stove and the pot that makes it very efficient, especially when there is wind. I don´t get much char from this stove because I use it for things like rice and beans that need longer cooking times, with low heat toward the end. I have hardwired an old waterproof flashlight equipped with two D cells into the fan, and I use the flashlight switch to run the fan. (After several hundred uses, the factory installed connector got so loose the fan did not run all the time.) I let the fan run until the stove completely cools down, after dumping the char and ash into the bucket.
I am saving the char and charcoal because it is used in the starting of engine grade gasifiers. It can also be used in the gas filtering stages. Also, once I have converted the wood into char, the sub-tropical bugs stop digesting it...

As you probably saw on the evening news, there are many large wildfires destroying houses and vast amounts of rangeland here in Texas. All open fires are banned, with large fines and the possibility of two years jail time for violators. So, for the time being, I have shut down my outdoor kitchen...waiting (with my cows) for rain (and grass).

Ray