On Sun, 7 May 2017 09:16:05 -0000 (UTC),
(Andrew Gabriel) wrote:

In article ,
writes:


Does no one remember the calor totem from the 80s. It supplied the
electricity needs of three households but the achilles heel was engine
life was only about a year, 1100cc FIAT I think.

Cars (of that type) are only designed for 3000 hours use.
That gets you to roughly 100,000 miles at an average 30MPH.

Yes but the running regime was better suited to longer life. Modern
engines are much better, especially with synthetic oils, I scrapped a
transit engine with 100K miles on the clock after the timing chain
broke and there was no discernible bore wear.

Also bore wear is relative to mean piston speed, so running an engine
slowly would extend bore life. I know a chap in Reigate that runs a
lister 6.5hp rated at 650rpm as a chp unit and these thing last
indefinitely.

When I handed my pug 206 van back it had 305k miles on the clock and
no signs of giving up but that was over 13 years and only equates to
running constantly for one year at 34mph.

Nowadays with lithium ion batteries it should be possible to optimise
run time by charging batteries either side of peaks and running on
them for minor loads.

It's not a new thought: in 1974 I worked on an estate adjacent to the
owner of a remote cottage which was powered by a Lister startomatic
genset. The owner was a producer for the BBC and had connections with
the electricity research station just a few miles away. One of the
engineers (I only remember his name was Stuart) installed some
traction cells and a French sine wave inverter (it was somewhat better
than the monostable oscillator switched power transistor we had built
at college during the strikes of Heath's government a few years
before) to reduce the hours the engine needed to run and that was in
the days when TV's were CRT and consumed 200W, with modern kit and LED
lighting the loads will be less.

Conversely the National Trust have finally gone overboard for wood
energy and in qualifying for RHI have removed a number of oversized
chip boilers and replaced by new, these are for heat only, at one
property where a micro hydro electric scheme has been replaced rather
than backfeed the grid they have opted to use excess electricity to
power immersion elements in the thermal store.

I installed Aircon at home 12 years ago. It was for cooling my main
living area when working at home, but I actually use it in reverse
to heat the area in winter when working at home, rather than heating
the whole house. For first few years, I had it on a power meter, and
using it as an air-sourced heat pump cost very little to heat the
room all winter, vastly less than heating the whole house all day
with gas central heating just because I'm working in one room.
It only gets used for cooling a few days a year, but for heating,
probably 50 days a year.

Yes I remember you posting about it, I recommended the same for an
office we had in a portacabin adjacent to the main office. It was
heated by resistance heating but the boss would not approve the
outlay.

I don't know why the NT didn't opt for something similar with their
excess electricity.

AJH