4,200 watts of Pure Sine Wave power

Mechanical engineer by training currently doing wide area network engineering. FYI, we're dealing with 110 VAC output from stock inverters. Higher voltages are used for other grids or higher power applications such as heat pumps, hot water heaters and electric dryers.

Really, my interest is in co-generation but if we started talking about it here, some heads might explode. <grins>

Bob Wilson

 

I'm just in awe of these guys.

 

Unless I'm bored or in a bad mood. Then I become sinister and have a bit of evil fun

Around 18 years ago, I had a brief summer internship after a couple of years in the Army. The client was a chemical plant producing precipitated calcium carbonate. They had a Honeywell TDC 3000 control system, running a fairly obsolete operating system, 210.M1

One sneaky trick with 210.M1, was if you went into the Hiway Gateway, and touched the red box on the screen "LCN RECONNECT," you would cause weird things to happen to the token ring control network

Every single node on teh LCN would then proceed to isolate itself, operate as its own virtual node, and the only recourse would be a warm boot of the process boxes, universal stations, and hiway gateways

There was one guy on the phone who was acting like a real tool. I was one building away, and had to take the LCN down for maintenance anyway. He called me, whining about something, so I told him to press Hiway Gateway, turn the master key from Operator to Engineer, and touch the red LCN RECONNECT box.

It prompted a couple of scary warnings, and I told him to proceed. Note, I had the speakerphone on, and a couple of engineers in the room had ear-to-ear grins. I remember this part quite well

"Ok, I'm waiting, nothing happened. I ... wait a minute, there's an error message, now there are red x's instead of numbers ... holy s*** I can't control anything HOLY S*** what happened? Oh my god nothing works HOLY S***! Click!"

The phone disconnected and we were rolling on the floor, laughing

Nothing really bad would have happened, so no picking on me for potentially causing the vaporization of a major city

We composed ourselves, calmly walked into the control room, and I yelled at the guy

"HOLY S*** what did you DO?! RUN!!!"

Oh, that still brings a tear to my eye

 

Turbine or recip? Talk Dirty to me, Big Guy

 

Awe, or fear?

 

We have a fairly efficient gasoline engine lacking only a dual-fuel mode, natural gas and gasoline, to generate both heat and power:

• dual-fuel - a connector for compressed natural gas to run the engine when 'plugged in' to the house. Ideally with a propane option.
• engine coolant pre-exchange - to bring in engine block heat to the house
• exhaust heat exchanger - to bring in space heat to the house

So the operational scenario is when arriving home, the driver backs into a Prius docking station. This connects the natural gas, electric power, and both heating interfaces between the Prius and the house. The car is 'rebooted' and then remains in a stand-by mode until needed.

About 5 AM or a time of choosing, the car block and system heaters 'come on' to pre-warm the car. Then about 30 minutes later, the car becomes the majority house power system. This allows the car to fully warm-up with the waste heat and extra power used to run the house.

The driver gets into the car, signals 'disconnect', the house reverts to grid power and the fully warmed up, car converts to gasoline to drive off to work.

The Prius 'docking station' looks like a small, standalone hut with a driver side, sliding door and possibly a front sliding cover. The goal is to somewhat isolate the vehicle from the elements so blizzard cold doesn't rob the precious heat nor summer heat cook the car. Think foam-and-fiber glass construction.

There would be no other 'storage' space since this is a car 'docking station.' Lights and other guide tools would facilitate backing into the docking station. If the car needs to be loaded, it is pulled out and unloaded outside of the docking station.

Bob Wilson

ps. Now to pickup all of the exploded brains ...

 

Now you're talking ... Mad Scientists all think alike!

Early fall, I happened to bump into a guy I knew who lived - literally - downwind from a major hog barn, around 45 minutes SE of Winnipeg. He claimed the hog barn operator told him that having giant holding tanks full of liquid pig s*** was the best, most efficient, way of dealing with it. Then to spray it on fields

Eeewwwww!

So I asked him why the hog barn operator didn't use a digester to hold the pig s***, which would produce methane. The methane could be used to run a microturbine powerplant, which is beneficial as hog barns are apparently huge consummers of electricity

So, with a microturbine power plant, not only would all the internal power demands be met, the excess could be sold to the grid. You take care of all that stinky pig s***, produce electricity, and even with cheap power rates here in Manitoba, a 5 year max ROI

So this guy carefully wrote down what I said, next time he met with the hog barn operator, launched into a dramatic spiel about it, and apparently their brains exploded. Or just about. They had no clue

So sad