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One unit: heat, water and electricity

10/20/2009 - 12:46
logguy
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Posts: 34
 Joined: 2009-09-22

I've seen wood-burning units that heat your home and/or hot water, but never one that makes use of all of those wasted BTUs to generate electricity as well.

If I were paranoid I'd think that there was some sort of conspiracy out there that finds and obliterates any and all web links to finished single-family home power/heat/hot water contraptions that people come up with--because I have actually run across at least a half dozen BROKEN links around the Internet that supposedly led to folks' websites who had actually perfected one of these complete heat/water/power unit solutions.

IF YOU KNOW OF A COMPLETE SINGLE_FAMILY_SIZED UNIT that supplies power, heat and hot water, please post the link here.

*I'm not interested in partial solutions such as biodiesel, wood gas, etc, that do not supply power as well as heat and hot water. I'm talking about a unit that provides a complete solution and is based with a wood-burning unit.

Thanks much

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si vis pacem, para bellum
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Comments

10/22/2009 - 22:23
StressMan79
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LHBA Member
Posts: 1008
 Joined: 2006-09-26
heat and power

this can be done, at least on a large scale. The U of Iowa has a coal power plant. The power is really secondary. Coal burns too hot to just make hot water, so they make steam, run it through a turbine and then use the hot water through radiators all over campus. The plant runs more in the summer, b/c they use ammonia cycles for A/C, and use the heat to drive the cycles.

But, I don't know of any family size unit... I would think about it, but I don't know of any small (5-10 KW) turbine for sale... Find me one of these, and I'll try to make it work.

Another problem with making one of these units is people want to burn wood. Wood doesn't burn hot enough to make good steam in the quantity you are looking for, and you'll get mostly waste heat (probably 10x as much waste heat as power... you might be able to make it work if you had a bunch of coal/heating oil... Hmmmmm....

-Peter

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LHBA member since 2006