wrote:
On May 28, 6:16 pm, David Nebenzahl wrote:

On 5/28/2008 9:59 AM Jeff Wisnia spake thus:


Our local gas utility here in Red Sox Nation has been running radio ads
aimed at homeowners promoting the Honda household-cogeneration
equipment, which includes mention of selling extra generated electricity
back to the utility, and gummint credits to help you purchase your
equipment.

http://world.honda.com/news/2007/c07...ld-Cogeneratio...

Anyone here have any experience with them?

No, sorry. Just a general comment: I was a little surprised to read the
description, since to me, cogeneration has always meant taking the
previously wasted energy from one process and recovering it. (The
classic example is using excess steam or other heat from an industrial
plant to generate electricity.)



That exactly what it is, how it's been used in commercial electric co-
generation applications and how it's used in this application.





Not that this isn't an interesting application, but it is really just a
way of capturing thermal energy from an IC engine that would otherwise
be lost, and using it to heat water.



That exactly what it is and how it's used in this application.




To me, a *real* cogeneration unit would be one that would capture heat
from gas appliances, say, and use it to generate electricity. Probably
not practical on a single-home scale, but maybe on a multiple-unit level.


Capture what heat from what gas appliance? Gas appliances like water
heaters, furnaces, etc turn gas into heat, so in any effort to
optimize them it makes more sense to just recover more of the heat as
heat, not try to turn it into electricity.




--
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute
conversation with the average voter.

- Attributed to Winston Churchill



Apologies if I have mentioned this here before, but at my first
injuneering job out of college in '58 I saw some running test models of
a refrigerator with an insulated DHW tank on top of it. The fridge was
gas powered like a Servel and the heat removed from the "icebox" was
dumped into the DHW tank. The name the company I was working for had
given those units was "Stator".

I don't think they ever made it to market, at least not in the USA.
Reasons I can think of were that they were about 8-1/2 feet tall and
ceiling heights in homes were coming down fast. Plus, energy cost so
little (relatively) back then that there wasn't that much incentive to
save it.

Didn't some of the olde kitchen stoves have a DHW tank associated with them?

Jeff

--
Jeffry Wisnia
(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)
The speed of light is 1.8*10^12 furlongs per fortnight.