Woodfired TEG generator - Yes, I'm crazy.
Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2016 7:56 pm
We heat our home in Detroit exclusively with wood. Furnace in the basement ( with two coils for heating water, one on the inside of copper for running in the summer time, very minimal wood is burned, and a PEX coil outside the furnace for winter running with the copper coil drained and disco'd for obvious reasons).
Been mulling over cost to benefit on various forms to go off-grid 100% with minimal need for an expensive battery bank.
Wind? Sure, it's windy here, but the city might mind 6 turbines on my roof. Only house on the block, but still....
Water generator? Need to drill a well first...and aquifer is a whole 'nother issue...
Steam? Already burning wood, add a little water and a few pieces of plumbing and a steam turbine and....yeah...ballistic speed metal through my living room floor.
So, I'm at Peltier modules.
I'm thinking of these: http://peltiermodules.com/?p=product The TEC1-12730HTS to be specific.
Now, if I run 39 of these, external to the woodburner, and send a tube through the heat exchanger to gather my hot side temps, and adjust that air temp with a small DC induction fan switched to the same thermostatic switch for an RC car servo to damper in cool air to maintain the proper operating temp, and running water at approximately 14 to 20 Celsius over the cool side, then run all of that through a few pure sine way inverters....
Shouldn't I end up with around 4kw ( or 200amp @ 120volts AC )?
Mind you, I'm no engineer, but I know my way around a soldering iron. Built my own WiFi CCTV system from Raspberry Zero computers and a few components.
I guess my approach to this is just "Use a bigger hammer", but it looks like for less than $800USD I can go offgrid and just maintain my municipal connection as a back up in case I don't get up early enough to reload the furnace.
Any thoughts?
Been mulling over cost to benefit on various forms to go off-grid 100% with minimal need for an expensive battery bank.
Wind? Sure, it's windy here, but the city might mind 6 turbines on my roof. Only house on the block, but still....
Water generator? Need to drill a well first...and aquifer is a whole 'nother issue...
Steam? Already burning wood, add a little water and a few pieces of plumbing and a steam turbine and....yeah...ballistic speed metal through my living room floor.
So, I'm at Peltier modules.
I'm thinking of these: http://peltiermodules.com/?p=product The TEC1-12730HTS to be specific.
Now, if I run 39 of these, external to the woodburner, and send a tube through the heat exchanger to gather my hot side temps, and adjust that air temp with a small DC induction fan switched to the same thermostatic switch for an RC car servo to damper in cool air to maintain the proper operating temp, and running water at approximately 14 to 20 Celsius over the cool side, then run all of that through a few pure sine way inverters....
Shouldn't I end up with around 4kw ( or 200amp @ 120volts AC )?
Mind you, I'm no engineer, but I know my way around a soldering iron. Built my own WiFi CCTV system from Raspberry Zero computers and a few components.
I guess my approach to this is just "Use a bigger hammer", but it looks like for less than $800USD I can go offgrid and just maintain my municipal connection as a back up in case I don't get up early enough to reload the furnace.
Any thoughts?