Fireplace insert power?

Well, yes, but the energy lost in conversion is going to bite you badly.

Basically, you want to take heat, then through a number of intermediate steps convert it to electricity, then back to heat.

Each step will loose some of that energy so that the final output will be considerably less than what you started with.

I can think of two things that would be better.

1) Use a wood pellet stove insert.

2) Run a whole house fan periodically to distribute the heat uniformly through out the house.

I have done that successfully, but I found an even better solution. I moved to Florida. Right now my pool is a chilly 82 degrees and we have been having a cold spell with highs only in the low 70's.

I think there is a " Law " in the USA where you cant use steam, somebody was telling me this the other day.... something about " Safety " ??????? in the home use>?<

Are you saying it is not legal to use steam boilers for home heating anymore? I doubt that.

He's probably right about the use of private boilers. They have to be closely monitored and to leave it up to chance as to having a responsible owner is too much risk. An exploding boiler would not just affect the home it's in but the neighbors as well.

They use steam in Virginia. I used to be stationed at Dam Neck, Virginia, near Virginia Beach, they had steam pipes routed everywhere.

I think what you are referring to is called in the UK a back boiler.

The heat from the fire is used to heat water for use in a central heating system, been around decades, if not centuries!

John.

They still use steam in the Northeast US. It's a residential boiler system. Boilers smaller than a certain size are NOT OUTLAWED in the US, an need no inspections. Lynx Motors makes a small boiler system, engine and 1600 Watt generator. I wanted to throw out an idea and see if it might have applications. Thanks for the info.

James

It would certainly make some better use of all those BTus that just go up the chimney otherwise. What does the cost of the hardware look like with respect to the amount of power that might be generated?

I would not feel comfortable sitting in front of a fire with a built in steam boiler, even with all the safety controls fitted.

Would it be more practical to use hot water for heating unless you really need electricity or have a distance problem to where you want to transfer the heat.

This certain size is mostly described as the power content or gerenrating capacity of the boiler.

There are severe problems with steam: corrosion eats the system from the inside and you will find yourself replacing the boiler tubes and other equipment regularly.

Why not looking for a Stirling insert. They do exist and simply turn heat into movement, which can be transferred to electricity.

This is how a nuclear reactor works. It's the same process for a boiler room.

Water is turned into steam by a heat source. That is just to get the steam moving. It is then SUPERHEATED to turn a turbine. It then passes through a condenser to form condensate that is then used again to create steam and the process starts all over again.

The biggest problem you would have is building a system that can sustain the pressure created by the steam through out the system because steam damages your body a lot faster then fire does.

What would you use for a condenser? Power plants have condensers that consists of about 700 copper tubes each submerged in a body of water, like a lake or the sea. Eventually those tubes wear out and have to be replaced and it involves replacing all the tubes because it's impossible for them to pinpoint one particular tube that is leaking.

I don't think a fireplace insert is sufficient enough to produce the SUPERHEATING needed to turn the turbine that you would use to turn an alternator or generator for that matter, it's not big enough.

Well a good alternitive is a corn burning fire place insert. you could use the heat from the exhaust and still get heat from the main room blowers. Golden grain makes a great stove.

"Rube Goldberg" anyone?

I agree that the energy loss in the whole system would be so much that, unless you are desperate, you would not want to do this.

You guys under the name "Guest" you should go register. You never know if it's the same person posting or if you're talking to yourself, or if one posts a good post and another posts a really stupid one and everyone else thinks it's the same person.

Yes you are reinventing the wheel,it not the most efficient way to generate electricity just from the stand point of safety, because, all the controls you would have to put into place. if you want to generate electricity from a fire place insert I would look at thermal electric devices, the most efficient is to use the hot water to from the coil you place in the fireplace and circulate hot water in a baseboard system.

James,

I'm not a boiler expert but I have been researching home built steam generation. My understanding is that you must have a steam collection area above the water level, and as I can best recall you wouldn't have that with those fireplace insert tubes. Kurt

Be careful of how much heat you pull from the fireplace. You want enough left to prevent excessive creosote buildup in the chimney, otherwise you will have more heat energy to deal with than you expected.

I would expose the steam piping and place the steam engine and alternator in the center of a room. Even if you do not generate enough electricity to heat your house, the waste energy from the small system you propose should do the job.

I don't think the electricity is to heat the house. I think it's more along the lines of heating the house from the fireplace insert and at the same time harnessing that heat to generate electricity to keep the lights on and watch TV and surf the internet at the same time.

I don't think the way to go would be to turn an alternator, but to charge a bank of batteries and power the house off batteries. You only need 10 Twelve volt batteries to produce 120v of electricity.

Janissaries, re-read hastingselectric's original post. His ultimate goal is to power heater strips.

Oh, I keep coming back and reading the new posts and forgot what I read in the original post.

Kind of like I tell you a story and pass it along after awhile the story changes.

What a waste of resources, burning wood is a waste in all respects.

He's talking about using an insert. That doesn't mean he's burning wood. He could be burning pellets or corn. Those are really efficient because they are set up much like central heating. The heat is piped to all the rooms in the house.

Now maybe instead of wanting to run steam, if he were to rig up a turbine that rotated from the rising heat to create electricity, that would be something.

hi there ;

burning wood heats the house all winter , FREE , all the

wood was destined for the dump / why not burn wood /

as to the original post , using a water loop with check valves

aka . ALASKAN BOILER would werk to move heat around /

as to running a turbine a VERY SMALL ONE , DRY STEAM ONLY

SUPERHEATING WOULD BE NEEDED /

WET STEAM could be used for a piston engine /

a water tube boiler would steam up quickly and respond to small
changes in fire / fire tube is slower /

lots of werk to build and operate /
electricity is not easy to generate ,been there done that /

One of the by-products of burning wood (and almost anything else) is...anyone...CO2. You guys are shooting yourselves in the foot. The ides is to burn things under stringently controlled conditions and anything left goes through a bag house and then a scrubber. Power plants are able to do this much more cost efficiently than your next door neighbor no matter how fanatical he is.

I think is not a good idea. There will be a lot of waste of energy (talking about electricity).

For heating the house I was thinking in Solar energy. There are a lot of ways to convert solar energy in heat energy. I think you can figure out the way to store heated water.

You can use this system to run a Stirling machine. This way you can turn heating energy into Electricity.

They have windows that you can install on your home that converts heat into energy. And I think they are expensive too.

Hi All,

Had a back boiler in a wood burning stove - and it was great.

The heat was more than sufficient, hot radiators in all rooms,
and loads of hot water from an indirect cylinder. All worked no problem.

The downside was the wood. Cheap yes, almost free; but it took days
to cut to size, handle, and brought every crawly you can think of into
the house. If you can live with the work, the cumulative dust in the air,
and the crawlies; with a good system (proprietary) you will be happy.

In the end, we just could not live with the downside, and we are on
a liquid gas boiler (LPG) now; clean, no effort required, and low cost
- but not as "free" as the wood stove. Your choice.

What I would have like to explore - before dumping the stove
(has any member done this?) is to use the heat from the stove
(somehow) to work a Stirling engine! - which I think is a good idea!

These are supposed to be very efficient, and, correctly applied, could
maybe, I think, be the answer you need for electric power generation?

Hope this helps.

jt.

Have a free web page on: mfnb.at.

yes i plan to install the pump after the heater core but still want high temp pump incase of over temp may also install holding tank to allow alittle extra safety margin in case of over temp. a pump with seals would fail sooner?yes

Most pumps that I have seen in a typical oil fired hot water system have the actual pump section standing off from the electric motor. The hot water, and it should be water at that point in the system...not steam (if you have steam at that point, ALL the water in the system would have turned to steam and I believe by that time the integrity of the rest of the system would have failed catastrophically), will only be 212 F at most (or up to 250 F or so if mixed with glycol). These are similar temperatures as seen in automotive use heater hose and with the design safety factor employed for that usage, neoprene seals in a circulation pump should not present a problem.

If the seals are ceramic or carbon, don't EVEN worry about it.

andy redesign is costly and this is a cobble job using mostly free materials to redesign would cost over 300$ the copper i used cost me 0 what i am realy seaking is a small high temp capable pump and moter if it were a dc motor 12v i can use a spare 80 watt solar panel that i have on a tracking mount, i have searched many hours for such a device i am thinking under 1/2 amp draw would be acceptable realy it would not have to move much more water than that ? (hopefuly)any way total system capacity is under 2.5 liters the hot side is 10 turns around a 6 inch chimney the heater core is 2" by 6" by 7 3/4" i would have used more sutible materials except this year we have seen a 8k increase in our health care insurance lack of availabe funds is an issue this year how about it, ever heard of a small pump 12v low current temperture tollerant also good pressure tollerant would be a good thing, i have access to appliance parts for cheap.

You will have to work out the costs of running the pump say for 3 years usage and the copper redesign costs over the same period.....with no electrical costs......and of course, try an factor in the costs of the problems if you have a roaring fire and a lot of heat and the pump goes down in the middle of the night and you have no spare and you may need to get the garden hose from the garden (snow?) and put everything out with a lot of water......

Always factor the worse case scenario in. I always build with as little as possible in moving parts and ways to "stop" if something goes wrong........as I have put in blogs with regard to solar hot water systems, put in shades to stop the solar effect if and when you need to repair or replace on a hot day......

The ONLY water pumps worth using are just that water pumps for a central heating system, made to last years and years and placed in the cool return, not the hot supply. Fitted with two valves to allow removal and replacement in situ, a ready and tested spare placed within a few feet......marked correctly for electricity and water....if a DC pump, then make sure it does not have a commutator and brushes, but is of a brush free design.

The thick copper pipe with no pump designed for convectional flow is hard to beat against a defective pump at 2 am in the morning and 20 gallons of near boiling water all over the place.....but everyone should make his own choices in such matters....

I would suggest a few weeks "think through" before doing anything at all......I do it all the time, it saves time in the end and eases the work load.....write everything down and read it back....think safe.....

hi everyone,

i recently bought just such a pump. problem is that i am not home for a few more months. so, i can not give you model number or anything. but the specs i remember are that it handles temp to at least 200 degrees F, runs on 12volts, pulls 40 watts. i bought it from "Real Goods", located in Hopland, california. cost was approximatly $200. best of luck.

In drag racing they use a 12 V water pump to circulate hot water from a recently run car in order to cool down the engine. Many cars don't use a driven water pump during a run because of the horsepower loss. They would be available at racing parts stores or through Jegs or any of the other suppliers that advertise in hot rod magazines. I don't know prices, but I'm guessing $25 to $50.

If the entire system is on only one floor, a convection system would be difficult. The hot water needs someplace to rise to in order to get a circulation going. A slab home with one level...unworkable. A slab home with two levels...workable. A basement foundation home with any number of levels...workable.

I have a basement foundation with two levels, gas fired hot water system. When the power goes out for a long time (like an ice storm), I can light the pilot and with that little bit of heat can get the house to slightly better than absolutely unbearable. It keeps the pipes from freezing though. That's when I drag out the kerosene heater. At least I can make coffee on top of it.

You are quite right, designing a convection system for just one floor would be a pig, possible, but still a pig, especially if you had long runs that would run nearly horizontally....

I admit I did not realise that the original Blogger only had the one floor level to play with.....my apologies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroCHP

Firstly, there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about heating with wood, any wood. This is good and is carbon neutral. Even if the wood rots, the same amount of CO2 is returned to the atmosphere. So burn it first and get some good usage out of it!!!

Fossil fuels are no longer carbon neutral and add to the CO2 in the atmosphere......Coal and oil products. Acid rain is another byproduct of excessive CO2 in the atmosphere.

Heating with electricity is almost a total loss, the heat from something has already been used to make electricity, turning it back into hot water or steam is just a further loss....

Use Bio products to heat like straw or wood, cheap and replaceable and as I said before CO2 neutral!!

Conversions always cost on efficiency......so try not to convert....

Sorry, I wasn't aware that there were two very different kinds of CO2, the good CO2 and the bad CO2. I've never come across a list of what to burn and what not to burn.

Quite right Jaguar.

Fossil fuels are the remnants of decayed plant life, so the CO2 is 'locked up' in the fossil source, whether it is gas or coal etc...

Wood that is burnt whether new wood or fossilised wood both introduce CO2 into the atmosphere...

Far better to let new wood decay and become fossilised with its CO2 lock up in it.

John.

as wood rots, it produces methane gas, a far, far more 'greenhouse gas' than carbon dioxide.

Everything organic produces methane gas.

The clothes you are wearing right now is producing methane gas.

The people reading this are Farting - methane gas!!

No, these people wouldn't be so rude as to do that while posting on these forums are they?

I would, but I am selective.

You are right, but who will wait millions of years......unpractical....at best!!

Then you have a lot to learn my friend.......

Fossil fuels - oil, gas etc are not good CO2.

Bio fuels, wood, straw, pellets, maize are all good CO2....they do not add to the levels as they take as much out of the air when growing as they put back when burnt or rotting....it balances out.

nice post / thanks for the extra insight /