1 hour ago, DeepBass9 said:

Isuzu bakkie...

And they do purr so beautifully. 

On 13/04/2016 at 8:25 AM, DeepBass9 said:

Now it purrs like an Isuzu bakkie...

Best sound in the world.`

On 4/5/2016 at 6:22 PM, DeepBass9 said:

 

I have been building a hot water circulation system onto my generators cooling system to circulate the hot cooling water through radiators in the house for winter heating. On cold cloudy days I run the generator for power, and a by product of the power is 150l of hot water in the coolant tank. Apparently for an engine about 1/3 goes to power generation, 1/3 goes to heating coolant and 1/3 goes out of the exhaust as heat.

I am using a fridge thermostat to control the system which drives a geyser circulation pump. 

Once the coolant temp reaches 45 degrees, the pump switches on and runs until the water drops below 35 degrees. Yesterday I ran the generator for 3 hours, the coolant reached a maximum temp of 63 degrees and the hot water circulated in the radiators for another 3 hours after the generator was switched off. The generator produces about 2Kw at the inverter, so maybe 3kW at the crank so the engine was producing 9kWh over the period. 150l of water raised by about 40 degrees gives about 7kWh of water heating (1.16wh to heat one liter of water by one degree centigrade). So I have therefore almost doubled the energy efficiency by capturing the waste heat. The next step I suppose would be to try and capture some of the exhaust heat. 

New radiators cost at least R7k each, and I couldn't find any second hand ones, so I built them out of copper pipe.

The first is a bit of a sculpture, using the form of a labyrinth, and the second a bit more conventional. I still need to finish the building and then apply some brasso, but you get the idea. 

Clever, very very clever!

Friend of mine who's wife wants a fire on cold nights has taken steps to use the chimney heat to assist the geyser in heating water. With small kids bathing early, lekker evening around the fire, it is working like a charm.

That's another project of mine, to catch the flue heat from our wood stove and heat water with it. Also a winter project as cooking on the wood stove becomes more popular as the weather gets colder, and it gets easier to convince the kids to do the cooking...   

DeepBass9, I like all your idea's.

Perhaps start thinking how to combine all of these water system into one, like the Europeans do.

Every bit of heat (wood stove, solar panels, genny) is pumped into a single large storage vessel, say 500L to 1000L.

From this tank you run the central heating and hot water. Hot water is taken from the top and central heating from lower down.

 

Great work and keep it going!!!

I had though of that, but the genny had a leak on the head gasket and exhaust gas was getting into the cooling water, so there is a bit of soot residue in the tank so I don't imagine is will taste very nice!

Also I am busy renovating a part of the house so it is easy to put in the heating pipes etc, but to retrofit will be a big job as the kitchen and bathrooms are quite far apart. Perhaps in a colder climate it would make more sense, but this is really only going to used over the coldest winter days, which are 2 or 3 months only, if that, and not every day either.

I'm not planning to run the generator specifically for heating, as we have fireplaces for that, I'm just trying to prevent the warmest room in the house in winter from being the generator shed! 

Awesome skills there DeepBass9

I want to purchase some copper pipe in the next week to see if I can make a camping water heating system. I've already purchased the !2V shower pump.

The copper pipe I want to use is the pipe they use in gas installations 

@Clint You can also try soft drawn copper pipe. I used it many years ago in a bio-diesel reactor. The nice thing is you can bend it easily. It works well if you want to turn it into a coil.

I've heard the place to get that is air conditioning or fridge repair places, if you find some let us know as that will be easy to wrap around the exhaust to make a heat exchanger.

If you weld one pipe (smaller diameter which is longer) inside a larger diameter pipe you will make a water jacket which will be very efficient at heat exchange as the water will be in contact directly with the exhaust whereas a copper pipe is not going to be as efficient as there will be a smaller area of contact . If I remember correctly the Lister exhaust has a BSP thread so easy to fit. It will rust but the saving of using galvanised pipe versus copper will more than compensate. Our old donkey boilers use to be a 44 gallon drum with chimney passing through the middle. Not a very large fire would cause the donkey to boil and then you had hot water for two days.

 

Thanks a lot for the info guys.I will let you know how it goes.

23 hours ago, Chris Hobson said:

If you weld one pipe (smaller diameter which is longer) inside a larger diameter pipe you will make a water jacket which will be very efficient at heat exchange as the water will be in contact directly with the exhaust whereas a copper pipe is not going to be as efficient as there will be a smaller area of contact . If I remember correctly the Lister exhaust has a BSP thread so easy to fit. It will rust but the saving of using galvanised pipe versus copper will more than compensate. Our old donkey boilers use to be a 44 gallon drum with chimney passing through the middle. Not a very large fire would cause the donkey to boil and then you had hot water for two days.

 

Hmm. I wonder if the water in the jacket would boil? Probably quite a large outer pipe would be required to prevent that. It would also be a possible problem with a copper coil. That could cause problems.

If you set it up as a thermo-siphon it should not unless your holding tank is too small. I had a water cooled 6/1 and the water temp after a day running was about 50^oC for a 44 gallon drum. I never had a radiator and the water would thermo-siphon starting about 2 minutes after the engine started. Before I started with solar I was going to use an engine to heat water for a cottage in the veldt. 

I guess it will be try it and see. It will be at the same level as the thermosiphon through the water jacket so if the pipes are the same size it should work. 

On 5/11/2016 at 1:19 PM, DeepBass9 said:

I guess it will be try it and see. It will be at the same level as the thermosiphon through the water jacket so if the pipes are the same size it should work. 

Do keep us posted!

Happy anniversary to me! 1 year off grid! 

Finally, after a year Eskom arrives to get their transformer. Everything else they will leave, so I score a bunch of 8m gum poles, about 500m of cable and other odds and sods. Even the old manual electricity meters! I think I might hook one up to my genny to measure kwh produced. What can I use the other 2 for? My MPPT measures solar production. Anyone want one?

The kids have already claimed a length of cable to make a foofy slide.....  

I replaced the injector pump on my Lister and voila! The governor governs properly all of a sudden! Under load it now wanders between 49.6 and 50.5, much better than before.  Got my Eskon kWh meter running as well......

I now have my second array of panels up and running so I now have the following:

2x2 Enersol 300W panels into a 40A Microcare MPPT - 1200W  Currently lying on a roof pointing south, inclined at about 5 degrees. In time I want to make tiltable frame for this array

2x3 Yingli 300W panels into a 60A Microcare MPPT - 1800W Array is fixed at 35 degrees facing north.

So now at 10AM, the small array is producing 950W and the big array 1150W.

One small issue (may not be an issue) is that the 40A MPPT reads a higher voltage than the 60A MPPT by 0.2V, so when the 60A is in float mode, the 40A is still in boost mode. When I check with a multimeter, the 40A MPPT is probably right. So I can either do nothing, or adjust the boost and float voltages so that they 'agree'. I'm not sure which.

What I have achieved here is some small amount of system redundancy, so if there is a problem with one array or MPPT, it doesn;t mean that I have zero solar power.

*edit* now 10:40AM and the 60A Microcare is at 58.0V and starting to limit the amperage so is charging at 600W. The 40A MPPT is reading 58.3V and still charging flat out at 1050W. Is this OK do you think? 

Some monthly stats of power production from various sources. I added another 1200W (array 2) of panels during January  which is why the efficiency has come down, I am producing more that I use, at about 10kWh per day. Array 1 is 1800W. No diesel usage since Nov. The wind I am not measuring currently, so that is just a guess. I will install a kWh meter on the wind genny again soon.

 

Just finishing off an upgrade to my generator. I removed the 8 litre tank and fuel filter mounted on the head and replaced them with a 50 litre fuel tank and more modern diesel and air filters (well, more modern than the felt fuel filter and oil bath air filter that it started off with). As well as a shiny new injector pipe, ain't she beautiful! 

Ready for keeping us warm in winter, since with my larger solar array it will probably not be needed much for power.

Now to clean up all of the spilt old engine oil, diesel and grease. Sigh.

22 minutes ago, DeepBass9 said:

Just finishing off an upgrade to my generator. I removed the 8 litre tank and fuel filter mounted on the head and replaced them with a 50 litre fuel tank and more modern diesel and air filters (well, more modern than the felt fuel filter and oil bath air filter that it started off with). As well as a shiny new injector pipe, ain't she beautiful! 

Ready for keeping us warm in winter, since with my larger solar array it will probably not be needed much for power.

Hell those Listers lekker to look at! There is only one problem with them , they never give up!