Off Grid Living / Camping > Utilities

Who is using heat from liquid cooled gennies?

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rossw:

--- Quote from: ZoNiE on June 07, 2015, 08:20:50 pm ---Sometimes I wonder if it would be cheaper to power (and heat) a house with a genny running on piped in natural gas...
You get double the energy if you are using waste heat to heat the space.

--- End quote ---

It depends on your available energy sources and their cost.

A gas/petrol/diesel powered genset has a fairly low conversion of potential (chemical) energy in the fuel to electrical energy out, however if you can actually use the otherwise waste energy (heat) as in a co-gen setup, then the effective cost per kWh comes well down.

You don't get "double the energy", you merely lose less. (About 2/3 of the readily available power in your fuel is "wasted" when just making electricity).

As an example: a diesel genset takes around 200g of fuel per kWh of electrical output.
So that's 5kWh per kilogram.

Diesel fuel has about 48MJ per kilogram, or 13.3kWh/kg

The figures are going to be similar (but worse) for petrol or gas, due to the typically lower compression ratios and operating efficiency.

What's that old saying about "no free lunch"?

kurt:
our huge indoor sports center/concert center they have everything there from basketball to monster trucks to rock concerts  here in town used to run a grid tie natural gas cogen setup durring the heating season from what i heard payback time was reasonable but they use a huge amount of electricity and a huge amount of heat the cogen setup was sized so every drop of heat was put to use or it was not running. i do not know if they still run it or not that place has changed owners and been remodeled a couple times since.

solarnewbee:
The U.S. Navy does on frigates and destroyers to distill water and heat water for bathing, laundry and cooking. Now their moving to cavitation pumps for hot water.

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