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I looked at one online today. It has 24 amp hour battery capacity. Lead acid. A trolling motor battery has four times that. At 50% usage, you have 12 amp hours. That means you can basically run 100 watts for one hour.
Lead acid batteries deteriorate over time if they are not cycled on a regular basis. There is a good chance that the solar generator will be dead the first time you pull it out to use it unless you leave it plugged in and it had a trickle charger built in. The panels are so small that to charge the battery full would take a day or two anyway.
If you just want the ability to run small appliances it would be better to just buy a couple of golf cart batteries and an inverter and keep them fully charged with a trickle charger at the house.
Not quite as portable but you would have much more capacity for maybe $300.
When we had the boat we used to plug a light into a timer to draw down the battery on a regular basis to keep the chemistry active. Guys with campers do this also. They pull the batteries in the winter and hook them to a Battery Tender. A simple timer and a lamp hooked to an inverter to draw them down. A 100 watt bulb makes the math easy.
Just remember wet cell batteries outgas when charging and require ventilation.
Oh Great! Then there is the safety aspect (outgassing and ventilation) one also has to worry about.
I wish I could just get a kit to make a Johnson motor with magnets and figure out how to harness that energy and send it to my appliances. It seems like at least some people have figured out how to do that but I can never find anything that answers all my questions or actually shows a house running off of energy produced by a Johnson motor. All I can ever seem to find are people building them or showing them running after they built them.
Utterly fascinating scam in the way that it has been carried out. They have foreseen the use of search engines to ferret out if this is a scam and bought up the websites that would be used - like hojomotorscam.org, and liberally used the word scam to trip up the searchers.
Additionally, LISTEN to the video and hear how he covers his butt. He clearly says the efficiency is 23% ABOUT THE SAME AS AN INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE. Other than overestimating the average Carnot cycle efficiency of IC engines, he specifically is stating that the motor is a motor. If he had said the efficiency is 123%, that would be over-unity and he could be successfully sued.
Other points: You can't "send" potential energy. That is a contradiction in terms.
"Impedance is very important, the wires have to be big." Fluff. Any high current transmission of electricity requires a large wire with low impedance, or the wire heats and the impedance (aka resistance) increases. That is why your toaster works without burning out. He is inferring that there is a lot of current, which is possible, but unlikely given the wire size in those windings.
EUD EUV monopole like in vacuum tubes. Nothing comes up on EUD or EUV energy. I'm very familiar with vacuum tubes and the closest they come to monopole is a simple vacuum tube diode, which doesn't produce energy, merely allows a transfer of energy only in a single direction.
On monopoles and motors, those are definitely cool, The April 1916 Popular Science (pp 624-625) gives a good overview, including expected output.
At the end of the video, note how he closes with (These are) "Experimental kits for understanding what this energy is." Which is another CYA statement.
The patents themselves are for motor configurations - NOT for dynamos or generators.
I really have to wonder why those in rural areas with plenty of timber don't consider returning to some type of steam engine driven home energy as a back-up alternative or gassification as opposed to solar. Timber is a renewable resource afterall.
Not trying to change the subject. It is just that solar can be soooooooo expensive for a larger system and the solar generators give relatively little power.
High pressure steam is just too dangerous, the efficiencies are incredibly low, and in some states may require boiler certification and operator certification. I'm a history buff and the horrible steam related accidents pepper that time in history. Wood gas is a little safer, but working with carbon monoxide is not for the careless either. The technology that was proven to work safely and reliable was that of the atmospheric engines. They aren't terribly efficient and are limited to a couple HP in common use, but will burn just about anything.
High pressure steam is just too dangerous, the efficiencies are incredibly low, and in some states may require boiler certification and operator certification. I'm a history buff and the horrible steam related accidents pepper that time in history. Wood gas is a little safer, but working with carbon monoxide is not for the careless either. The technology that was proven to work safely and reliable was that of the atmospheric engines. They aren't terribly efficient and are limited to a couple HP in common use, but will burn just about anything.
Depends on the form of the prime mover used to convert the steam to motion. A piston/cylinder is pretty inefficient, however bladed or bladeless turbines can readily achieve steady state efficiencies of 95% conversion of energy in the fluid flow to rotational energy, once you tap that energy though you're then down to 90% at most of 95%, put in a generator and you're probably looking at 60% but if we assume a high efficiency generator of say 85% (which is already achievable at room temp) of 90% of 95% or a total loss of ~27%, which isn't too bad although that would be costly, I'd budget for about 45-50% losses for the overall system.
The advantage of a turbine (in addition to the efficiencies) is also you need not use high pressure steam, you can use low pressure steam, or even convection to drive it, so long as it's a fluid and you can get or make the right turbine you're good to go. One second advantage is that you could use a condensing turbine and eliminate the need for either venting steam, or having an external condenser to retain water (since it costs energy to pump water it's more efficient to retain it in an overall cycle view too).
You don't need to go all the way back to James Watt to use steam power
There is no question that turbines are more efficient than piston type engines. The closest that most of the public gets to owning a turbine is the turbocharger on some autos and a few air tools (which use the turbine as a motor). Turbines for power demand care and super-clean gas/fluid. (Exception being the Kaplan turbines used in waterpower.) Scavenger engines look great in theory, but don't provide more than a fraction of the energy of the prime mover, and with a turbine just adding another blade set likely beats the additional cost.
The issue with steam - especially low pressure steam - is that all engines are limited by the Carnot cycle. The greater the difference between the hot side and cold side, the more energy available. When you get into wet steam, those differences are small.
I've been around the block a few times on the subject of home energy. If you look at power usage patterns and the requirements for recharging batteries, a few things become apparent. Lead-acid batteries might be great in storing power, but they have horrible characteristics in needing a bulk charge, finishing charge, trickle charge, de-sulphating charge and use of only the top 10 to 20% of the capacity. Edison cells waste power but are much more forgiving, which is why trolley systems used them in preference to LA cells. LION is expensive, Ni-Cads still have limited life, and so on.
Why my emphasis on batteries? Because you can't have a generator wasting energy for long periods of time while demand is low. Turbines like to work flat-out. Piston engines can be comfortable working in idle mode, which can be very useful when dealing with batteries or low-load conditions.
Why my emphasis on batteries? Because you can't have a generator wasting energy for long periods of time while demand is low. Turbines like to work flat-out. Piston engines can be comfortable working in idle mode, which can be very useful when dealing with batteries or low-load conditions.
Halleluia!
I have stressed batteries for so long, always falling on deaf ears. The capacity of the batteries in amp-hours determines what you can run off your system. How you charge the danged things, is another matter altogether. You can argue about that all day long. You can use solar panels, wind turbines, steam, generators, or a bicycle for all I care. But your batteries are the heart of the system! I don't care what else you have. If you're wasting too much time on how the batteries get charged, maybe you should re-think your system, and what you want to run off it.
I agree -- batteries are the heart of any truly off-grid system. No matter how you're generating power, you will rarely be utilizing all the power that is being generated, so you need to store the surplus for use when you aren't generating... otherwise you're just wasting power (and fuel in a combustion generator system). You can normally get by with less generation sources if you have the appropriate storage sources.
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