In article ,
Clive Arthur writes:
On 06/05/2017 14:29, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Well as the CHP in Denmark is testament to, you end up generating heat
beyond your needs.

5Kw is about what a house needs and that's about 6.6 brake horsepower

A small steam engine fed from a gas powered boiler could do that. At
about 20% efficiency. leaving you wit about 25KW of waste heat. Oh dear.
Thats enough to heat the house 5 times over in the depths of winter...


Well, I suppose you'd size it according to the heating needs rather than
the electricity needs and use the grid as an AC accumulator. The
*average* household electricity consumption is about 500W, I think,
although the shorter term winter average (when you needed the heat)
would be more.

It's probably not practical, or it would already be done, and obviously,
only a small proportion of people could do it.

It was done - Whispergen and another I forget made domestic boilers
with 1kW electricity output. They weren't viable and the companies
abandoned the domestic products when the development subsidies were
withdrawn.

A set of 4 or 5 major domestic boiler manufacturers then setup shared
research into this field, but I'm not aware it resulted in any products.

--
Andrew Gabriel
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