Build my own power station

What you want is a home fuel cell: produces heat and electricity directly from natural gas. Perfectly viable and already marketed.

Lots more here

The reason why gas is cheaper than electricity is that the gas engine is inherently inefficient. I think commercial ones are up to 50% efficient: I don't think you'll get anything like that. An ICE might be 30% and a steam engine more like 10%.

If the OP hits 21%, which is doable, the electricity will cost the same 14p a unit in gas, but you'll get the extra heat free. It's done on larger scale, but a lot of mucking about for not a lot on a domestic scale.

NT

One of my former colleagues was hoping to develop, after retiring, a commercially viable domestic CHP source using a lorry turbocharger fired by natural gas driving an electrical generator in a unit about the size of a large boiler. I assume he was thinking about something like a "dyson" high speed motor as the generator. I guess it never got beyond the prototype stage.

Model aircraft turbines can be had BUT they are not very efficient.

And that's the problem. To turn that gas at 3p/kwh into electricity at

and a

if 'normal' means with all the bells & whistles huge power stations have. Without all that you'll get nowhere near. This is one of the problems with small scale generation.

NT

The two retail prices are quite closely tied together. If it were economical to generate electricity locally from gas it would be done that way. But a small generator is never going to be as efficient as a large one - specially when capital and running costs are included.

All been thought of years ago. You can buy one, a box that generates electricity and heat using gas.

I'd imagine a jet might be a little noisy though. The issue really is is it cost effective and what are the rules of doing this and maybe selling spare back to the grid? I bet the first thing your council would do is charge business rates if you started to sell energy back. Brian

There was one on costing the Earth a week or so back. I understand it did work but it had some drawbacks about replacing vital membranes or something. About the size of a washing machine. Brian

Golly gosh Brian. (Are you the Brian from the magic roundabout?) What took you so long?

Don't you think if it were cheaper to build a gadget that plugged into the gas supply and generated electricity the way a combi boiler generates hot water, we wouldn't all have one?

Why do you think we deliver gas to houses, instead of hot water?

There's this funny thing called a 'market' which means that until governments interfere, stuff that is cheap and works well and does something useful just naturally gets deployed, and expensive stupid ideas that are dreamt up by armchair greens and socialists,m never get to first base.

And big ideas that take a lot of money to deploy, can collect small amounts of money from people and add it all up and build big things. Thats called capitalism. And when the big thing (like a nuclear power staion and a national grid) does something better than lots of little things (like domestic electricity generators running off diesel), everybody benefits - as long as the shareholders don't get taxed by government of course.

Of course. Government is the enemy of the people. All government is a self legalising protection racket.

That's why we have a democracy, so we can limit their power somewhat.

But that's why they like to control the media and the education system. so you don't notice them exercising it.

You can get small jet engines from, f'rinstance, these people:

I've no idea whether anything like that would be suitable or not. They didn't obviously have prices but they were IIRC not that expensive.

Not currently offering any products. That's been the state of this field for last 15 years.

If you go to any of the trade shows, you will find lots of combined heat and power units. However, they can't be made small enough (in power output) and efficient enough for domestic use. Over the last 15 years, products have appeared on the market briefly, but rarely got past beta phase.

Why not just run an ordinary generator from gas? As long as you need the heat as well, you'd be quids in, ignoring capital costs. And noise. And safety.

Cheers

Well as the CHP in Denmark is testament to, you end up generating heat beyond your needs.

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...

efficiency, noise, capital cost, run cost, reliability, payback, failure to use the heat, anything I missed?

NT

smell?

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

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

Cheers