openspaceman

@neiln said much the same but didn't elucidate, I gave an example of why it may be. Impractical in my case as the hot air would go straight up the stairs. As I said I first tried just sucking warm air through a flexible pipe from over the stove and blowing it into the next room but it didn't work, the air didn't get much warmer than 25C and the next room was too cold such that the radiator was needed. It is only since I changed, this summer, to the set up in the picture above that delivers 40C air into the room that it was able to keep both rooms up around 20C and the rest of the house around 17C when the temperature is down to 5C outside. So far this year the temperature has only been below freezing at night for three or four days. Today it was 17C outside and still 14C now but I lit the stove, at about 17:00.

It's Andrew mate 😉 I was more worrying that the duct might melt or worse. I'd be fairly sanguine about temperatures below 100C but wood repeatedly exposed to higher temperature actually becomes easier to ignite even it it started out dry. We had the example of a kiln catching fire when the operator put the same load through two drying cycles, this was because the heating tubes were hot enough for the radiant heat to get the wood up to 200C even though the convected air in the kiln was only 120C. Because the kiln had some scraps off wood (sawdust, bark, splitnics etc). that had been in the kiln for many cycles some of these had darkened and as a result absorbed the radiant heat well and the surface charred. Nascent charcoal catches fire at just over 200C. As the temperature rose quickly because the dry wood was no longer giving off moisture a fire took hold. My fan is 10ft away from the stove and draws the air out of the convection vents via the two flexible exhaust pipes and then into a plasterboard duct before it reaches the fan. If the drying room is fairly well sealed and a bit above room temperature, say 25C, then I found an dehumidifier worked well and was gentler on clothes and boots than other methods. Nowadays, as I don't come in muddy and wet, we leave the drying cupboard doors open and seldom switch the dehumidifier on. Sounds good, I hope you have plenty of DPM and insulation under the screed the pipes will be embedded in. I'm not overly keen on heat pumps yet because of the capital expense but a ground source heat pump under or next to a stream could be another matter as long as it's not meltwater at 0C.

That's right in terms of fan power requirement because the power required to move air is directly proportional to the volume of air moved against the resistance. The volume of cold air has more mass than the same volume of heated air but to benefit from this the cold air would need to be ducted all the way around the stove and into the duct serving the next room which, in my case at least, is impractical and the electrical power required is a small fraction of the energy delivered by the fan as warm air. Fine as long as the warm air is not allowed to get too hot. Yes and there is an effect, the Coanda effect, that shows if you discharge it horizontally from a flat nozzle it will hug the floor for some distance before it starts rising, not something I have tried yet. Yes and with mine I think it delivers the same heat as a 6 by 3 double radiator which we used previously to heat the room. Do you have a dehumidifier in the drying cupboard?

Yes they just happen but if there is a "cost" to the living thing in growing the appendage then then others without that mutation will out compete them. As we see this in generations of elm there is likely an advantage but what it is I haven't a clue.

I cannot see that being a problem, even if it were you could reduce the fire size by putting a couple of firebricks on the inside of the combustion chamber. In my case because all the hot air coming out of the convection ducts gets routed into the other room, if the fan is on, the stove doesn't put so much heat into this room I use as an office. My arrangement passes air at 40C into the other room via a duct constructed of plasterboard and sealed. My only worry would be if the air were any hotter than that. I have a thermometer at the outlet and have never seen a higher temperature. Mine also vents into the other room at floor level.

It would because those TEG ones are less than 1W. The inline centrifugal fan I use is 6" 150W but I use it on the lowest of 4 settings. I had it previously as it powered my 100kW vortex burner and saved buying new. Similar to this Vent Axia 150mm 6" In-Line Centrifugal Duct Fan (SDX150) | CEF WWW.CEF.CO.UK Motor Insulation Class B protected to IP44

I dreamt of getting one of these and I think they were still in production then, in the 70s. The reality is I was never going to grow a business to support all the kit I wished for.

I'm surprised at 4 years old but it answers your original question

I tried just ducting air from the room the stove was in into the other room via a 6" pipe and it didn't have much effect whereas connecting two 2" pipes directly from the stove convection vents to the next room about 10ft through a wall and under the stairs is very effective, although the fan noise is a tad annoying. You are confusing me with mentioning a thermal store, if you have underfloor heating then there is no need for a water filled thermal store because the concrete slab the plastic pipes run through acts as a heat store. Also your LPG stove burns gas at 2000C to heat water to ~90C and this is still too hot to go into the pipes in the floor slab, so a manifold blends this down such that water going into the slab is no more than ~40C and it leaves the slabs say about 25C whence it returns to the boiler. In principle there is no reason the heat from a back boiler cannot be plumbed in at this return point (but the back boiler will need a waxstat on it to prevent the cold water making it too cold). It will need a plate heat exchanger to keep the two flows separated as the combi will be pressurised and the wood boiler will need to be vented in case of a circulating pump failure and will need a feed and expansion tank somewhere vertically above the wood boiler. Yes it can as long as it cannot boil dry but a plain wood stove with no back boiler is cheaper and simpler. Yes thermal stores are for systems that burn in daily batches and need lots of extras to get the heat out of them, maybe good for blocks of flats or hotels but not so much for homes. It does sound as if a simple stove is likely to be best for you.

Yes I think a skyline as well is best but you can highlead with a pulley running on the return line and keep a bit of tension with the brake to keep everything up a bit. In fact I was hoping to modify my simple highlead carriage with a wire rope clamp which could be triggered by the choker man and then released by the pull in line resetting it but a health glitch in November meant the work went ahead without me, so the mod didn't get done. The trouble with a simple highlead is that everything falls to the deck when you release the carriage and pulling slack becomes a nightmare.

So many questions This is one situation where underfloor heating is not such a good idea as there is a long delay between putting the heat into the slab and the radiant heat from the slab becoming comfortable, similarly it continues giving out heat after you no longer need it. I am a great fan of it but even though this house is occupied much of the time the expense of ripping up the floors is not justified as the warm air from a single woodburner heats the house. This makes sense but I cannot see the need for such a large stove, also you will need to provide a dedicated combustion air supply. I would think so but then I live in sunny Surrey and Scotland is a bit wetter and colder. Why not consider a stove with a back boiler and link that in to the under floor pipes or a few radiators? Not something I'm keen on as mentioned in another post. Hot air systems do work but wet radiators are the norm here, The advantage of warm air is that it heats up quickly and is the norm in much of America, though I never experienced it there (it was 38C in the shade when I was there)

Noting what @slim reaper says about the legality you just have to consider the physics of this; the stove casing is the heat exchanger so if the flue gases are so hot that there is more heat to be recovered the stove is being over driven. The flue temperature should be just high enough that the vapours do not condense in the chimney. Logically a fully insulated chimney will not lose much heat and so the flue gases only need to be marginally above 100C. In fact I run my little 4kW stove with the flue gas temperature 18" above the stove at about 115C, below this there is likely to be some blackening of the firebricks and a bit of whitish smoke from the stack. I think the rated output of the stove is when the flue gases are at 250C but I don't ever get it that high and it would be wasteful to do so. Even so with the little manifolds I made to blow warm (40C) air into the adjacent room it has meant I have used no other space heating this year yet and the room with the stove is less hot, more comfortable.

Of course a rescuer will likely have performed the LOLER check prior to coming to work. I still have climbing ropes from up to 50 years ago which I kept for odd jobs and never used, I would be interested in testing them to see how much the performance has dropped, at least one is cable lay nylon.

Do you have a citye for that? I would think a thin metal sheet with an inch air gap just between the beam and the stove would be enough as long as air can pass up behind the steel but I haven't checked any regulations.

I doubt anyone other than the Environmental Health or Building Control of the local authority can condem anything. Download Part J of the Building Regulations and compare the distances from your stove or flue to the nearest combustible surfaces and then think about what mitigation is necessary.

That sorts that one out then

I guess you would need to work out the run time and power requirements of the machines, is the current inverter a single phase input and a 3ph output? We used these a lot on the biomass boilers I worked with for the feed augers when there was no 3ph available but they tended to be only 3/4 hp motors and only one per boiler, the rest being constant speed induction motors. I think they are only readily available up to 2kW but they get around the demand for a large start up inrush current to some extent by having a soft start at lower frequency initially. How do big wind turbines produce 50Hz? do they use inverters? If you must have a large 3ph diesel generator to run the workshop then consider putting a plate heat exchanger in the coolant and running it into your buffer tank, many diesels used for stationary use will likely have been used in boats and a water cooled exhaust manifold may be available. It comes back to my earlier point that if you must satisfy the peak power then you will not run optimised for much of the time. When I first looked into off grid power in the 70s one could get hold of little (probably weighed two tonne) triple expansion steam engines that ran ships electrics from coasters and trawlers which were being scrapped and I always fancied one of them gently swooshing away , later on a visit to Kew Steam Museum I saw the 5kW (IIRC) mini turbine that used to steal steam from the main boiler and keep the lights running, made about 1905 I think. I wonder about using a flash boiler in the combustion chamber of a biomass boiler and converting a turbocharger to an impulse turbine and doing something similar using a 400Hz alternator from and aircraft to avoid having to step down the gearing too much. Yes TEG seems to be too far off mainstream to be cost effective. Caterpillar had a 5kW TEG running off the exhaust of a big rig in America, it eliminated the alternator but I cannot find any reference to it now.

@donnk you haven't been paying attention go to the naughty step.

Yes I think this is a reasonable ball park for where the heat goes, bigger diesels will be about 40% conversion to rotary motion. You will have a good idea of the actual cost of electricity produced by your set up and my point was that during winter it is a shame to waste that exhaust and coolant heat if you are heating a building. The further point is it can be better to run a generator at its efficiency sweet spot for a reasonable time, say at least an hour, and satisfy your load plus charge a battery even though there are inherent losses in charging a battery because optimising running the genset can make up for these losses. Obviously for 3/4 of the year I'm optimistic my solar PV will supply all my needs now it is backed up with the battery but would like a renewable source of non grid electricity at this time of year. A bit of a warning of what might become a long term issue when the weather doesn't keep the windmills turning is that the wholesale price for electricity is now 3 times what I am paying on my fixed deal and also more than the cap for those on variable tariffs. Of course this is unsustainable for the electricity retailers .

I've started back at the beginning as yours is a different case from those people without a grid connection at all. Also you are looking to run a 3ph generator to do tasks your current electricity supply will not manage. Apart from the generator bit you are similar to me in wishing to reduce costs. I don't know what your standing charges are but mine are about £100 for gas and £100 for electricity per year, this is low enough for it not to be worth doing without a connection, even at 3% ROI that would only justify investing £7k in an alternative and you're not going to get much for that. I cannot comment on the powerguard system as I haven't dealt with generators for 30 years apart from small ones for power tools and welding, which are petrol powered and only used occasionally and briefly where the fuel cost isn't worth considering. @Justme gave a figure of 0.6litre of diesel per kWh of electricity produced IIRC, as a litre of gasoil contains 10kWh so a conversion of 6kWh of heat to 1kWh of electricity doesn't seem so good. No one other than I has admitted to trying to make use of some of the waste heat. What I do have experience of is the inefficiency of running a generator all the time electricity is required and this tends to be inefficient because the generator is seldom loaded to its optimum. This is where inverters and battery systems make more sense. Yes run the generator when there is a load but bring that load up to the optimum for the generator by charging a battery. I hope @Canal Navvy can give us some real world experience especially about Victron and open source because I am a bit disappointed in the proprietary system running my inverter-charge and 6kWh battery (BTW the PV output has bombed since 6 December when the solar PV output fell below my consumption from the grid and since then has averaged only about 15% of my usage). Small scale generation tends not to have a good rate of conversion to electricity but if my demand were more than 6kWh/day, such as charging an EV, and given I have a gas connection, I would be looking at running a little 3cylinder SI engine on gas, recovering the heat for the house and charging car and house battery at optimum load, and this should use about 270grams of gas per kWh, so just over half the energy of the example above. Yes a thermal store would be needed and the genset may need to run a couple of times a day. In terms of efficiency I feel this would be more economic than running my little diesel car but capital cost of an EV means I'll stick. Also the capital cost of replacing the generator engine every few years would be less than depreciation and O&M cost of a conventional car. At present I am interested in just reducing my electricity imports a bit more, especially for these few months when the solar PV is not enough. I could invest in more PV panels but want to investigate a better winter production. This is why I liked some of the ideas in the link @Stere cited. The drawback of TEGs is they don't convert a lot of the heat passing through them into electricity but there is a decent match with home heating and potentially from wood. The high (ish) temperature TEGs from the example operate up to 300C (cheaper ones seem similar devices but the solder fusion temperature lowers their top temperature to below 200C and hence lowers the conversion rate). As wood burns at up to 1600C but typical firebox temperatures are around 800C some though needs to be given for exposing the devices to over high temperatures, this will tend to make a woodstove running at 4kW (e.g. the size I use) considerably larger. This big problem is to get the required delta Temperature will mean a coolant will have to extract all that 4kW at around 30C. To use heat at 30C for house heating means you are almost bound to have underfloor heating. In practice I expect I would like to see my fire and enjoy the radiant heat coming through the glass so 2kW passing through the TEG may be more realistic, it means only 100W of electricity would be available at best and the cost for the TEG alone would be £750 before the stove manufacture costs were added in. However 100W for 16 hours is 1.6kWh although only a fifth of what I need to be independent of electricity imports at this time of year and I wonder how much the water pump would use.

In that case I'll probably have problems too if I ever recover my A55s. I have a clutch to do and have this bookmarked: Brake & Clutch Materials - Auto & Industrial Friction Services WWW.AUTOANDINDUSTRIAL.CO.UK Brake and clutch relining service for Automotive and Industrial, Classic and Vintage brake and clutch linings, Drum...

I think Tom only mills western red cedar on a regular basis, have you worked there?

I understand a bit about electricity and electronics but couldn't actually design a system, hence I went for an off the peg solution but see below You are so right, the system I have is not well integrated because the grid is needed to energise the system and itself can vary in Hz and voltage, the PV panels depend on the sunlight and the inverter-battery system cannot communicate with the grid or directly with the panels, so it senses current on the various inputs and there is a delay which on poor days results in anomalies where the grid charges the battery or the PV exports to grid. Overall it should deliver 80% of my electricity needs and I suspect if you could still get the installation below £10k it would give a return without any feed in tariff, especially if electricity reaches 30p/kWh. I have a gripe with Growatt in that it is web based and apparently hosted in China plus the App is highly intrusive and I will not have it on my phone. Also there is some oriental fuzzy logic going on and I, for now, cannot prevent it charging the battery from the grid, this would be a good thing if I had an off peak electricity tariff but I don't. I guess the 300Wh it charges itself will reduces to 2400Wh when I get it back. I think one could save £2k by building the battery and management system with LiPo cells and only have to integrate PV and battery.

I think it's the Highway Authority and that is often delegated to the Local Authority This depends on what you mean by "tolerated", the thing is if the entity who was in a position to give permission, or their successors in title, since 1905 has acquiesced in allowing the practise then a prescriptive right may be gained in time "by fiction of lost grant"IIRC. In this case no such chance exists.

and why not?