Agriculture Business Week

Learn how to prepare your own uling!

Charcoal made out of the modified pit method can be used in making charcoal briquettes. Charcoal briquette is charcoal duct compactly massed by a binder of cassava flour, corn or sweet potato starch.

As fuel, charcoal briquettes have higher heating value than wood or plain charcoal. They are almost smokeless when burning and give off intense and steady heat. They can be used in blast furnaces to replace coal in the smelting of iron ore since it is compact and dense.

Aside from their use as fuel, charcoal briquettes can be converted to other industrial products. In the chemical industry, they are used in the manufacture of carbon disulfide,. carbon carbide, sodium cyanide and activated charcoal for purifying air or water.

Materials and equipment
To make charcoal briquettes, you need well-charred charcoal made through the modified pit method and cassava corn or camote starch as binder.

Procedure
Charcoal briquettes can be produced manually or mechanically. For a small-scale briquette maker, the manual method will suffice. The method is simple and can be easily applied in places where coconut abound.

First, prepare or have ready smokeless charcoal. This type of charcoal is shinny and gives a metallic sound when tapped. Powder the charcoal in dust particles by hammering with a mallet or wooden hammer or by passing through a hammer mill.

Cook cassava corn or camote starch under moderate heat The starch should have a syrupy consistency which is either too thick nor too thin. This will be used as binder.
Mix thoroughly the charcoal dust and binder in a pail or any available container. When the mixture has reached an even consistency, knead it in the same way as making dough for bread.

Mold the resulting mixture into desired shape and size using the hands or an improvised wooden molder such as a sungkahan.

Dry the briquettes under the sun. Better yet, oven cook them in an improvised tapahan type dryer using pieces of wood, coconut shells or other suitable materials are discarded as waste.