Briquette Making - Pail and Tray

Since you will be mixing various biomass ingredients for briquette making, big plastic pails or vats are suitable containers for this purpose. The wide mouth of these containers will make it easier for you to mix the ingredients and transform them into a slurry.

Plastic Pail

For the actual making of the briquettes though, you may want to use a smaller pail with a handle. Using a smaller pail will allow you to move it around for getting the briquette ingredients. It will also be convenient enough to raise it on the sink counter. The briquette ingredients are easier to reach and get from inside a small pail (shown yellow, below) when filling up the mold.

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Briquette Making Machine Components

In a recent entry, I wrote about the workplace where I make my homemade briquettes. Biomass briquettes can come from various ingredients and so the entire process may be a bit messy. Use an apron to keep dry.

In the absence of an affordable commercial machine for home use, you could easily fabricate the various parts that will up the briquetting machine. Shown below are the parts of the homemade briquette making machine. The parts are numerically labeled and briefly explained.

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Preparing the Briquette Ingredients

In a previous post, I mentioned how paper should be prepared as a briquette ingredient. Two other ingredients I use on a regular basis are crushed dried leaves and sawdust.

Sawdust need not be broken down further. Just ensure that wood shavings and chips that typically come from wood planing processes are removed. Dried leaves need to be really dry and brittle that they break up when crushing with your fingers. A really neat tool is a mortar and pestle setup like the one below that's big enough to crush and grind huge amount of dried leaves into smaller suitable pieces. Of course a hammer mill would be convenient, but we're just talking of simple and no-cost tools here.

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Homemade Briquettes

In a previous entry, I discussed the common materials used for briquettes and in another, a background on some commercial briquetting machines.

The briquettes I create for our cooking are essentially made up of paper waste, sawdust and a little of other agricultural waste. The batches of briquettes I have made vary in color because of differing constituent mix. These briquettes are small and measure roughly 2 inches in diameter.

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Materials Used for Biomass Briquettes

The usual materials used for biomass briquetting are agricultural wastes. Examples of agricultural wastes include rice hull (shown on the left), corn husks, coconut shells, grass clippings, dried leaves, dried sticks and so on.

However, many non-traditional "wastes" have been incorporated into biomass briquette-making. Commercial wastes such as sawdust, paper and even charcoal powder have been used successfully in the production of biomass briquettes.


In the briquetting process that I've devised, I've had varying results in the use of some of the above mentioned biomass materials. Since the process involves compaction, the materials would behave differently when compacted.

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