I’m trying to see if I can make my own activated charcoal diy, from bonfire charcoal and if it is equally as good as the purchased activated charcoal.
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Tl;Dr, no you can’t use the stuff in your fireplace to make activated charcoal, and it would take quite a lot of effort to make it on your own.
A lot of people in these comments are conflating charcoal and activated charcoal. Charcoal is made by taking biomass, usually wood, and super heating it in a way that starves it of oxygen to drive off everything except the carbon. What is left is charcoal, a lightweight carbon skeleton of the wood that was there before. It’s porous, but not nearly as porous as activated charcoal.
In order to make activated charcoal, it needs way more surface area. Waaaaay more. A quick look at Wikipedia, charcoal has a surface area of 2-5m^2 /gram, where as activated charcoal has 3,000 m^2 /gram.
Making the charcoal to begin with is kind of a hassle, unless you routinely need a lot of it. Then making it porous enough to be “activated” is also going to require a lot of work. Unless it’s a fun thing you want to do or you need to have truly mind boggling quantities of it, it’s almost certainly cheaper and easier to buy it premade.
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