eli5: Is charcoal we use for fuel the same as charcoal that my campfire logs turn into?
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Yes it is. In fact some of the cheaper brands just sell chunks instead of briquettes and you can see it’s pieces of wood.
Yes, but maybe no. They’re the same substance, and in some places you can buy “natural” charcoal. In the US, grilling charcoal is just compressed with some binders into the rounded square shape. Itsthe same substance with so.e processing to make it more dense, and hide that it’s an easily made product.
Isn’t a charcoal-ified log “spent”? Do charcoal pits produce different or better charcoal than my campfire or just more?
So it is but it’s a different form. They are both carbon. The difference is in your fire, most of the wood is burned away leaving ash and char. Char is the “not completely burnt” carbon. In charcoal you take wood and then heat it up really really really hot and deprive it of oxygen. What you are left with is the entire piece of wood being turned into char all the way through. That char is now charcoal. EDIT you can make char cloth yourself easily. Take strips of cotton cloth and put them in an altoids tin. poke a few small holes in it like the size of a push pin, close it up and put it in the fire. After a while take it out and you’ll see the cloth inside has turned to char. This stuff is amazing for starting fires.
No. Fuel charcoal is slow cooked in a kiln with reduced air flow. This changes the wood into carbon without burning it all up. It burns hotter than the charcoal produced from your open air wood fire.
There are also different types of charcoal, like lump or briquettes. Lump charcoal is from whole wood that’s been carbonized, while briquettes are from squeezed sawdust. Lump charcoal burns hotter than briquettes.
So basically pit charcoal and campfire charcoal are the same thing, just with a difference in how high the quality is as fuel?
They are similar, but not the same.
Charcoal is produced in a specific way – wood is heated up in a specific environment that allows a lot of the moisture and impurities in the wood to be drawn out, but without it actually catching fire. This leaves behind charcoal, which is a great fuel.
If you burn a log on a fire, it is fairly common to have some unburnt material left over after the fire has burnt out, which will be partially charcoal. The heat of the fire will have dried it out and started the process of creating charcoal, but it will have done it pretty poorly – a certain amount of the wood will have just caught fire and burnt away, while some of the wood will have been protected by the outer layers and not have been given long enough to turn into charcoal properly.
So the unburnt per partially burnt stuff will be great for starting the next fire, but won’t quite be the equivalent to a bag of properly prepared charcoal.
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