Re: F**K!
- From: "J. Clarke" <jclarke.usenet@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2008 11:35:29 -0500
Bruce Richmond wrote:
On Feb 2, 2:54 am, Rob Kleinschmidt <Rkleinsch1216...@xxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Feb 1, 8:08 pm, Bruce Richmond <bsr3...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On a personal level I've been playing around with the idea of
building a mini solar power station. A few parabolic reflectors
can
focus enough heat to produce steam for a small engine running a
generator. The power could be fed back through my electric meter
turning it backwards. It's all on the up and up. It's called net
metering. The power company is required by law to let you do it
for
renewable energy sources.
I think you'd do better with photovoltaics myself unless
you live in the desert and want to do some serious inventing.
If you did go with that scheme, you might want a stirling
engine rather than steam. Lower maintenence. If you
needed a tracker, that's more moving parts to worry
about and maintain too.
I have looked at stirlings and may go that route. Biggest problem I
have with them is lack of solid information on actual efficiency.
Yes,
I know they can run on the heat from the palm of you hand, but they
aren't do any real work when doing so. They are just overcoming
their
own friction which must be all but eliminated for it to run at all.
To make any significant power you end up working with a huge engine
or
one that requires a very high temperture input and isn't all that
efficient. One site I found that has since gone away had a project
for getting power from hot springs where the water was just below
boiling. The engine was biger than a man and litterally weighed a
ton, all to produce 300 watts. Here is an example of a 5 hp
sterling
that you power with a fire of your choice.
http://www.stirling-tech.com/stirling/stirling.htm
Again it is huge, and what percentage of the energy of the fire is
actually recovered? With steam you work with higher pressures so
the
machinery is smaller. And there is all kinds of info out there
about
real steam engines that have been built and run for years.
The thing that always impressed me about steam engines was how tiny
they are for the power they produce. The high pressure turbine on a
destroyer will easily fit under the hood of a car and produces
something like 15,000 horsepower. Of course it has two boilers that
wouldn't fit on an 18-wheeler feeding it steam but the engine itself
is tiny.
Whether steam or stirling I will probably build the engine myself.
I'm a machinest and have access to a fully equipped machine shop.
I'm
aproaching this more as a hobby than a way to save money or the
world. I'm thinking of using something like this for a collector.
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/Stirling/Heat.html
Shouldn't cost too much to build. At 1KW per M**2 with a 10% system
efficiency I can see the possibility of taking care of most my
electrical needs with a half dozen of these. I have plenty of room
for more if needed. The great thing about doing this using net
metering is that I wont have the expense of a huge bank of batteries
that you would have in an off grid situation. Just run the meter
backwards when I can make power and let it run forward when I use
more
power than I am making.
Photovoltaics are more of a plug and play deal.
Put 'em up and forget 'em for a decade or two.
Yeah, all it takes is lots of money ;-)
We lived off grid about 10 years or so, running a mix
of genset and solar coupled to a battery bank and
inverter back in the late '80s and early '90s. Run something
many hours a day and you spend time maintaining it.
PV is almost zero maintenence and getting cheaper
all the time.
I've been keeping an eye on it. The cells printed on rolls of
plastic
look promising but right now it's all being bought up by power
companies for big projects.
--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)
.
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