frank li wrote:[quote=David BaillieAs far as wire thickness. 10mm2 for North America translates to between 8 and 7 Guage my chart says up to 60 amps... for 10mm2
Cheers, David
I think the chart you have is for automotive, marine, or rv, standalone machine with wires in free air or other situation.
At least in the us and in or on buildings a number 8 conductor is only good for 40a max at 60°c it is a reason to use machine tool wire (MTW) or THHN and specify 75-90 deg°c rated enclosures and accessories.
I commonly install #6 THHN for the ac output of large inverted arrays. It allows me to have smaller conduit, terminate in most terminals and carry up to 20 more amps.
So, a homerun may come to the service entrance on #2 or larger from 350-400 feet away and use #6 to loop through the disconnect and down or over to the mains panel or load center carrying 65-75 amps depending on the other equipment.
Makes the master electricians scratch their heads! But i handle company electricians just fine
Yes we use 40 amps for #8 60 amps for #6 as well. The poster mentioned 10mm2 cable. I pulled from a bad table there. I still think he's better off with the 3 strings of 2 due to the controller max voltage. I'm trying to wrap my head around the example you listed. AC arrays for us are usually within 200 ft. We get limited in canada to 2 percent loss so the cable costs would be crazy further out.
Always a pleasure.
Add your Open circuit voltage of the panels in the string then multiply by 1.25 as a safety margin. (cold sunny days the voltage goes higher). There is also a ratio of array voltage to system voltage so what is the voltage of your battery bank? You are really close to the threshold with strings of 3 so unless your system voltage is 48 volts I would suggest 3 strings of 2. As far as wire thickness. 10mm2 for North America translates to between 8 and 7 Guage my chart says up to 60 amps... for 10mm2
Cheers, David
That is a very reasonable unit Frank. It's always been my problem with heat pump they were always too big. I have 1200 sq ft of very well insulated space so large equipment would be a waste. I like the air to liquid option to avoid the refrigeration sub... it would mesh well with my radiant floor.
S Bengi wrote:This annualized solar banking is wonderful for the arctic circle/alaska with 1hrs of sunlight in the winter vs my 9 hrs of winter sunlight.
it would be interesting to know how that project is going. That one and was it whispergen? Made a lot of headline 3 or 4 years ago. So we are talking apples and apples the 35 percent number is supposed to be the amount of energy converted to electricity? Or the electricity plus recovered heat added together? I ask because you see the 80 percent claim sometimes and that is what they do and it kind of fudges the numbers. Complexity rears its head there again since those high temps would mean exotic materials, aerospace level machining, high cost etc. Those high temp stirlings were what I had in mind when I talked about cheap solar knocking a lot of wind out of the sails of competing technologies.
Fascinating conversation. I'd love to know what the engineers can come up with. There was some videos of a large displacement low temp differential Stirling posted by a Japanese university... no link handy.
I admire your desire to build something epic but solar electric combined with air to air heat pumps will give heating or cooling or electricity storage all in the same package at a fraction of the cost without the need to invent anything or store 100000 litres of water. A reasonable amount of storage helps balance out those over hot or cold days. Solar thermal is in severe decline with the drop in solar pv prices. As to a heat engine, while the promise of cheap long lasting heat engines has been a holy grail for 40 years none have ever materialized. Every few years you see prototypes or youtube videos in labs but they fail to launch for some reason. With cheap PV a lot of the energy has gone out of that work as well. I tend to favour simple hybrid systems myself with multiple elements for redundancy. I don't want to be a downer though. Your math works, the cost and complexity though...
Cheers, David
If its a gasification boiler efficiency wise you are head and shoulders above what standard wood boilers can achieve already. I think controlling your usage will result in better results then modification. It will work far better with dry wood which should be obvious but many people used to the old outdoor furnaces that " can burn anything" will try to burn anything in an efficient unit and have horrible results. Matching your call for heat to the intensity of the fire will go a long way to increasing efficiency as well. Also those gasification boilers are most efficient at full load so if there is any way you can incorporate in home storage that would be a good thing to do. The simmer, heat up, simmer heat up common in forced air linked systems is what kills your efficiency numbers...
Top of head... Cheers, David
Nice find Frank! I've lost track of how many hard valences I have been asked to remove over the years during Reno work. The valence that encases the top of vertical curtains keeps the air from flowing behind and down. They were standard once upon a time in an era of expensive home heat, maybe they should make a comeback. I have tight fitting wood blinds myself but my windows are double pane low e . I have thought I might build storms for them this year another element ripe for a comeback... there is always room for improvement.
Cheers!
Its good to know I'm not the only OCD dismantler out there. I think what you are describing sounds like the fan collet? that goes over the axle shaft is worn and slipping under load; Probably due to the torque of starting and stopping. If it was me I would try to drill straight through and put a pin of some sort. All the way through so the load is split between two points. Its plastic so there is a good chance it breaks in the process.
Have fun, David
There are a lot of good threads on nife batteries on the Yahoo group 12VDC_Power . Steve Spence is the moderator. You have to subscribe not much action these days but a huge back catalogue of info. There is an old guy in Texas called Lawrence who posted a lot about 50 gallon nickel iron batteries. It's not that easy a lot of conditioning is required to get the batteries to the point of taking and giving up a good charge. Your efficiency will suck at first until you work them in. It's a fun rabbit hole though...
Hope that gets you started.
Cheers, David
After long consideration I can tell you my next battery bank will be flooded lead one more time. I sized my bank for less than 30 percent discharge and at that rate expect 10 years of service based on published literature and a very long track record. I'm seven years in with no real loss of capacity. Priced out nickel iron was 3 times the cost, lithium was 4 times to achieve the same storage capacities even accounting for smaller banks due to deeper discharge and all the other slight of hand methods battery sellers use. Will a made in china nickel iron last 3 times as long as lead acid? no answer, will the flood of new lithium products last 4 times longer? no answer... I hate questions without answers. I think nickel iron has had its day due to poor charge efficiencies as for lithium I quite like what is published but will wait for the industry to shake out more hence the pledge for one more round of lead acid. Once the electric car numbers go up the market will be awash in used battery banks. While not perfect for all people the availability of used product will drive down the price of new products. As to money down the road setup a dedicate infrastructure fund and deposit all that lithium cash and wait. you will gain interest and sit on it and at the end of battery bank 1 (which you might find too small or kill due to the learning curve) you will still have the funds to purchase batteries and then some. Infrastructure wears out replacement is inevitable so plan for it.
Just my few thoughts on the matter. Best of luck with your homestead choices.
David
very interesting. I'll have to take the time and dive in more deeply later. I'm playing devils advocate here. What is the advantage of using sulphuric acid alternatives? I understand that current lead acids wear out but that always seems like a matter of economics to me not failings on their parts. The batteries could be built for refurbishment and reconditioned as they once were instead of as a throw away product. If the best alternative electrolyte is 25 percent the effectiveness that means 4 times the resources for the same capacity. Would the energy invested in refurbishment not be less then all the additional resources devoted to the larger bank?
Cheers, David
I believe your pump is too close to the check valve. With a 14 ft water column behind the valve and the pressure of the spring on top of that the pump can't overcome the pressure with just its tiny reserve of water at start up...If you installed 3-4 ft of 1.25 or 1.5 inch hose after the check valve the pump would have a reserve of water to build up a vacuum to overcome the back pressure from the check valve. That is the most common cause of the problem you describe.
Cheers, David
The problem I see in the scenario is for the northern hemisphere in locations where shutters are of most use winds are usually out of the East west and north none of which are great solar angles especially mounted at 90 degrees on a wall. You would gain some on the south wall. The Ideal angle as a rule of thumb is latitude plus 15 degrees for winter time. Every 15 degrees off that ideal angle expect 5 to 10 percent less production off the panel.
Cheers, David
Rakibul Hasan wrote:Nice Tips as i am mechanics it will help me !! here i submit Car head Gasket blown articles can you please tell me is it possible to make it my self and how ?
Head Gasket Blown Symptoms: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions
For making gaskets for gasifiers I'll put a bead of red high temp silicone on one face put a layer of saran wrap and put the other face on. I lightly tighten the bolts and walk away for 24 hours. If it worked well I can undo the bolts and I have a perfectly formed gasket adhered to only one side. We're pretty rural here so our hardware stores still stock sheets of gasket material.
Unstable and dangerous at speed for sure but maybe possible. Those rear steel wheels would be detachable then the front two wheels seem to go into a fifth wheel type hitch. I also see two front jack feet for supporting it just like a fifth wheel trailer. I think it is an art piece myself.
This is an older thread but I just saw it. I believe in building for future wants and needs but starting conventional. There are countless variations of LED fixtures and retrofits at this point designed around conventional AC which has made the fixtures durable and fairly cheap. Yes you run into some power loss due to converting to a lower voltage but its usually less power loss then you suffer from moving low voltage power longer distances. By Doing that you do not run into any of the code problems about non compliant switches, boxes not rated for DC, uncertified bulbs, and poor quality control that is common in the consumer product world of low voltage LED. Having said all that if you are wiring a home with an eye towards the future making sure all the lighting circuits remain separate in the main board is a good starting point. Should the tech catch up to aspirations separating out those circuits becomes easy. We wired in dedicated 12 volt plugs into key parts of the home when we initially built which was completely code compliant as long as you used a different plug variation not used anywhere else in the house. I originally ran all the lights on 12 volts but found the quality of the bulbs at the time so bad I installed a small inverter to the lighting circuits and switched to ac clf bulbs. Today that would be ac led bulbs instead. The damn cfl refuse to die though so there are a few stragglers left around the house over 12 years old. Those 12 volt circuits remain unused as the inverter world changed and they became much more efficient and the price of solar panels dropped so the losses to an inverter became negligible. For tiny homes or dc only situations different rules would apply. I would focus on 24 volts myself as there are a lot of commercial LED tech heading that way. As to the poster above technically all electrical systems in ontario in homes must be ESA inspected regardless of township status... Its a big province though and enforcement is rare in very rural areas.
Cheers, David
peter, would it be possible to post some links specifically about your power monitoring software and equipment. We use the ted gear at work but I'd love to play with some arduino toys for it.
Thanks, David
It sounds like you are sucking air... compress the ground around the Sandpoint as much as possible and run the pump for a few hours. You are trying to get the sand to collapse around the casing sealing it up. A possible scenario is the screened sandpoint end is not totally in the water table. It is possible your screw fittings on the Sandpoint sections are leaking as well. You could have something blocking the jet as well. Hard to diagnose. I use a piston pump or a diaphragm pump on my Sandpoint they are more forgiving of air in the line. A jet pump sucking air can't generate pressure to shut off. Check you priming screw is tight as well.
All I got... let me know
So Joshua, The site you listed above sets off many of my detectors. A good check is to punch in the company name and "review" or "problems"
If you want to go the diy route might I recommend Missouri wind and solar: https://mwands.com/ They are a larger company and have tonnes of how to videos and reference pages. You will pay less for a comparable product. I've bought some stuff from them. Peter is right though for wind more blades is mostly not better. as you add blades yes you gain torque in low winds, but you loose the advantage as the wind picks up and they start interfering with each other causing turbulence and cavitation which either shakes it to pieces in months or ruins its output. Next is if a company does not provide a graph showing production versus wind speed for their product they are trying to pull a fast one. At a guess at a 5 mps I would guess less then 50 watts of production per hour. So that is the choice most wind companies make; do I try for 10 hours per day at 50 watts per hour or 2 hours per day at 500 watts per hour... The industry tends to be settling on a 3 blade configuration for 500-1000 watt units and anywhere from 3-9 on the less than 500 watt category.
So, that helps. since you have consistent wind or no wind I would say a pwm controller with a dump load matched to the turbine would be the way to go. We generally use the whisper 200 and whisper 100 turbines and the matching controller. A dump load is a way to use the energy from the turbine in situations where the battery is full. Solar panels can just be disconnected with no ill effect when batteries are full. Wind turbines would spin themselves to death if there was no load on the turbine hence the dump load. The most common ones are dc heating coils. Sometimes the diversion/dump load is a water heater.
Cheers, David
Hi, you are right you will need a second charge controller. Depending on your wind profile a pwm controller with a dump load . should be fine. If you have gusting wind that dies down an mppt controller with a voltage clipper and a dump load is better. You can easily blend 2 controllers to one battery bank. If the sun is out and it's windy the wind turbine controller will put the load to dump.
What kind of well is it? If it's a drilled well I would recomend a deep well submersible pump not a jet pump. They do make them in 120 volt models as well. Grundfoss makes a nice slow start unit ideal for off grid. If you have a good inverter id stick with ac pumps. If all you have is dc you can get a dc deep well pump but they are very pricey. Anything over 25 ft on a jet pump you would have to use a 2 pipe system and even those at 90 ft... not sure. I've seen as deep as 60ft. They are beasts though very power hungry
Hi Joe,
As usual Frank covered most of it but could you quantify the amount of generation we are talking about? I see two reasons you want to ac couple
1 multiple locations you want ac at or concerns over line loss with the dc. We recently used morningstar's 600 volt mppt charger and it's working well one year in. That location array was over 300 ft to the battery bank with less than half the line loss ac would have had. Next would be the wind turbine. Usually the small ones are 3 phase ac rectified at the batteries either on an mppt controller with a clipper or just a straight voltage regulation type. The ac grid tied turbines are... tricky more so as you get smaller.
I have found the name brand inverter chargers more problem free then the comparable ac gear and more flexible towards input sources. For chargers if 1kw is your target I like the iota chargers myself.
Cheers, David
So Beth with 20 ft of suction lift you are approaching the limit of how high a standard jet pump can lift water before the pump. Do you have ac power at the house? If you do you position a standard jet pump as close to the source of water as possible run a suction line to the river, put a foot valve on the end prime the line and start the pump. The first run will be hard to get it primed but once set up you just leave it there and pump as you need it. If it's more them 25 ft of lift from river to your yard you would have to use what is called a 2 pipe jet pump specifically made for higher lifts. Or you position the pump closer to water and run a power cord to it.
In solar the only good pump I know that can do the work is the dankoff pump positioned close to the water with a panel and linear actuator https://www.altestore.com/store/solar-water-pumps/surface-solar-pumps/solar-slowpump/dankoff-slowpump-1322-24-24vdc-surface-pump-p452/ Really expensive though propably more then a season of municipal water... for now.
Cheers , David
Hi Jessie your least expensive option will be a new generator unless you need solar for the house. Running your pump probably uses between 2 and 3 kw Hr per hour of run time. On solar you would need an inverter that can start that beast probably a 4000 watt rated unit, a battery bank big enough to take that kind of a power draw and a solar element able to recharge the bank after you draw it down. Those 400 watt unit are interesting but mostly designed for camping tiny homes and light device charging.
Cheers, David
The shurflo is a good pump but that extremely efficient watts per gallon pumped rating comes at a price; they wear out. Add in the linear actuator and they wear out faster. The dankoff 24 volt pump is a much better long lasting beast but it's pricey https://www.altestore.com/store/solar-water-pumps/surface-solar-pumps/solar-slowpump/dankoff-slowpump-1322-24-24vdc-surface-pump-p452/ I have seen old school off grid setups with them well over 20 years old and running fine. You could go the jet pump route instead but expect to use 2 to 3 times the power to pump the same amount of water. More if you go ac and the linear actuator wont help. I like piston pumps myself but they are crazy expensive new and require maintenance but mine are over 50 years old.
Shameless plug:
https://permies.com/t/89196/Piston-Pump-refurbishing Cheers David
Hi Donald. So you have a sandpoint with the spike and the screen? attached to a 2 inch galvanized pipe which you hammered in correct? The next step usually is to put a check valve at the top of casing directly and attach it to the pump. Then you extract the air with some form of priming pump (I use a guzzler hand pump) and it pulls water. From the description above you inserted another line inside the 2 inch casing. That is not how sandpoints work. Think of a sandpoint well system as a straw in a milkshake. you have put another smaller straw inside and are sucking so you get only what is in the big straw or what can seep in. You want to use the 2 inch casing as the straw to build up vacuum and"suck" out that water from the porous ground... Sandpoints are very common here. Mine in the greenhouse goes 10 ft down and will pull 4gpm as long as there is electricity to run it...
Hope that helps
David B.
thanks I had not seen the bill Knauss unit before... Yup you have to watch out for the dark side... Once charcoal gets a hold of you it does not let you go. I meant upsizing the riser not the fuel canister. As you mentioned though you are achieving a good hot burn anyways. Keep on cycling
Cheers, David Baillie
I think you might have seen Gary Gilmore's keystone stove... He had an exhaust fan in the garage for his videos by the way... I did notice in your videos the kind of lazy flame. That would account for the low temp you are talking about. I don't get that at all when I do my double 50 gallon barrel tlud burns or my 5 gallon propane tank tlud. I think you are on to something insulating your riser. Maybe increase the diameter as well to force more updraft. A super heated charcoal layer should clean up that soot. With that high temperature come metal fatigue of course... Charcoal gasifier users for running engines are less concerned about the heat capture then running the engines cleanly. I make most of my engine charcoal in a wood stove myself and cover it in a pot. I had a co monitor next to it all winter just in case. Never had a problem. I don't quench it because I don't use it for biochar. For engines the charcoal is better if not fractured from quenching.
Lots of tlud talk and charcoal enthusiasts at www.driveonwood.com
Sorry Jason but the is no way that can affect the combustion pattern of a MODERN fuel injected engine. High pressure gasoline is misted into a turbulent air pattern already. Maybe, Big maybe the gadget could have an effect on a small engine with a carburetor but more and more of those are going down the fuel injected electronic ignition road as well. If you don't believe that look at a small engine from the 1980's and compare it to one today. Fuel consumption is a third less easy. An inverter generator is so fuel efficient it approaches the theoretical limit of the energy content of the fuel. I don't have time to go through an hour of video but the focus seems to be on old clunkers. Fuel efficiency today is big bucks to car makers despite all the conspiracy talk. The big problem is not energy efficiency its over powering. The car companies have taken all the efficiency gains they have made over the last 40 years and plugged it into heavier, faster vehicles that they charge more for... That is where the efficiency savings went.
Cheers, David
Nice! 2 hours of untended burn time and a load of biochar. Tlud's don't get much love around here it seems. I play with charcoal gasifiers and that is how many of us make our fuel. Efficiency wise they rate about the same as a RMH except for the roughly 25 percent left as biochar. They do burn very clean thanks to the secondary burn and glowing char layer. I would love to see some metered tests done putting them head to head. I think the only suggestion I would have would be to run your air intake from outside to the stove. Two things will happen. You will not depressurize the building and force it to pull cold air into the house. You will eliminate the risk of backdrafting into the structure.
Cheers, David
I thought I would share. As so many of us are off grid pumping water efficiently is of utmost importance. Sure you can do the RV pump for very low head wells without much back pressure but they wear out pretty fast. Then comes the Jetpump a beast that although is very simple with little maintenance will consume 1kW Hr to pump 5 GPM and has a starting rating of 2kW. If you have a shallow well Piston pumps are a great answer. Extremely long lived and easily maintained they will pump greater then 5gpm using slightly more then 300 watt Hr with a starting wattage of 450watts Here is a link to my restored and running Duro 255. Forgive the horribly neglected garden in the shot. Cost of the pump used: $70 rebuild kit $20 probably good for another 60 years. It was fairly easy to restore as all the main fittings were brass so they released easily. A third the energy for the same water flow at the cost of some maintenance...
