Charcoal Moisture Prevention

As someone who frequently grills out, the biggest pain is to have damp, unusable charcoal that has to be thrown out. As predicting the weather is completely out of my capabilities, I felt it necessary to build something to save my charcoal if I happen to leave it outside for too long in the rain, or to prevent my charcoal from ever being at risk of dampening.

Of course, any idea that I have must follow some constraints. First of all, the solution must be capable of keeping all of the charcoal dry. The solution must also be capable functioning inside a house aswell as functioning outside.

To construct this you will need:

spherical glass container (1.5ft in diameter),

Copper Wire,

concrete base (1.5ft x 1.5ft),

. wooden slab (1.5ft x 3.0ft),

. 6 wooden slabs (1.5ft x 1.5ft)

.metalic pipe (2inch in diameter)

First, I decided to do what everyone does when a problem arises: I googled the problem. By doing this, I stumbled upon the easiest method of drying charcoal, which is letting the sun dry it out. This solution was very practical for many reasons. For example, I only ever can grill out when its not raining, and the sun is usually out when its not raining. This solution also requires zero implementation and effort on my part; just leave the charcoal and come back when its dry. Although this is will be very helpful, I still needed to account for something like a cloudy day, or drying charcoal inside our house while it's raining.

Another similar idea that came to mind was to heat up something under the charcoal, sort of like a stovetop, to heat up the charcoal faster. This would help with drying charcoal inside, as sunlight would be less effective. The most effective metal to do this would be silver, but copper is also an option as it's much cheaper. By using Sunlight and using a metal wire/pipe to heat up the charcoal, it would be no problem to remove any moisture. Now the only thing that I had to do was prevent that water from re-entering the charcoal. After constructing an early prototype, I had a rough vision of a solution.

Another idea that came to mind was to put the charcoal into a vacuum to prevent all the excess water from re-entering. While the idea sounded cool in theory, it was not at all a practical way of drying charcoal. The cost and effort that would be needed to construct a vacuum chamber and a motor to create the vacuum are just not worth it when it comes to keeping some charcoal dry. I also had a far better idea in mind.

In my search for an effective way to prevent any moisture from recreating my current predicament, I stumbled upon dehumidifiers. A dehumidifier works by taking moisture out of the air, with the two major types being the condensate dehumidifier and the desiccant dehumidifier. The one that sounds most practical for this problem is the condensate dehumidifier. The concept is that a cold surface/area causes water vapor in the area to condensate. This leads to the water being removed from the air, thus solving my problem.

After bringing this all together, I finally created a design that effectively removes humidity from charcoal, while also preventing it from re-humidifying. bnFirst, I made the walls surrounding the base of the structure glass. This was to allow sunlight to help heat the charcoal whenever it is sunny outside. Next, the copper wire is laid out within the base of the design, to help heat the charcoal from the bottom. At the top, there are two metal pipes on each side of the glass. The pipes are blocked from the sun to help prevent them from warming up, as their purpose is to cause the evaporated water from the charcoal to condensate outside of the glass structure. After this, the water can fall from the metal pipe onto the ground, where it won't affect the charcoal. Because the inside portion of the design is heated, the water will not condensate inside where the glass is, preventing the charcoal from dampening again. With all of this combined, I have successfully created a design that will prevent our charcoal from ever suffering the fate of being too damp to use.