Idle thoughts re generators

[The Natural Philosopher]

Go and buy a model steam engne and hook it up to a bike dynamo.

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

Aluminium burns very well. So does iron if enough air is blasted in.

Aluminium and iron filings=thermite=incendiary bombs.

Glass is admittedly different - its silicon oxide already.

Hence grind it down and use as sand.

[Neil Jones]

Does this actually happen, though? I read a piece in The Independent last year about glass recylcing which said that coloured glass currently ends up in landfill anyway.

[IMM]

Here they have a re-cycling scheme. I don't bother as it is needless.

[IMM]

The Stlirling has the edge on this.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I din;t think that they do require more effort. There is little difference between smashing up a tree and shredding waste paper.

It requires very similar effort.

In general, tress happening to grow in one place and mills and paper planst being located close, it takes less effort to transport, and then usually over purpose made raods pf low grade that do not interfere with other traffic.

Once made into paper, its bulk transport to paper suppliers. Not thousands of little journeys to collect. Its bad enough that all this papaer has to be dispersed to every man woman and child in the country - lets not repeat the mistake of collecting it all up again and bringing it back to the one or two paper mills.

It is agreed that bog rolls etc can use recycled paper, but the fact that this is as expensive as ordinary paper reflects the fact that the actual costs of using the free material do not differ markedly from the free trees that are grown and cut down to make ordinary paper.

Most paper is grown from trees grown specifically for the purpose harvested on very marginal land that is bugger all use for anything else. E.g. Scandinavia. No irrecplaceable tropical rain firests are used.

I agree. What is needed is a household bottle smasher that reduces them to sharp sand. I could use that. In fact for my garden a finely ground mixture of bottle sand, shredded wood and paper, and a bit of organic muck like potato peelings, would be the best of all possible mulches.

I was only pointing out that bottles are not especially hard to deal with. They degrade gracefully into sand.

Yes, but to be economic in a micro scale they are large and infrequent. Thus the cost of getting materials to them - borne by the taxpayer - is large.

Whereas local incinerators powering small generating sets and maybe heting shools, hostpitals and colleges, would be much better.

Only metals are worth recycling IMHO. And only toxic metals - Lead, Cadmium, etc - are really bad news to bury.

Not if you look at the locations and economies of scale of waste re-processing plants - which I did, briefly, once.

So someone has to sort them out. More expense.

Actually the whole of teh east coast is falling into teh sea. Onefeels that a few million tonnes of bottles dumped around there might actually stop it.

The provblems of waste disoposal are not being addressed properly, but the eco knee jerk 'recycle everything' is typical of the facile one dimesnional thinking of most political correctness.

My basic thesis is to rediuce the distance the waste has to travel as far as possible, and not pussy foot around.

(i)plastic gets burnt in CHP.

(ii) Organic materials either get burnt as above, or shredded for composting. That includes wood, paper, domestic and commercial food waste etc.

(iii) Metals get recycled as they are valuable enough and in some cases dangerous enough to make landfill not a good idea.

(v) Glass gets ground up into sand.

Asssuming you actually go there in the first place.

I am looking fowradd to teh time when Tesco Direct or Waitrose Direct bring the stuff in, and the bin men remove the residue. Ehy should I actually need to get in a car at all?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Don't confuse the little chappie. You know his brain has only got as far as 'two legs bad, 4 legs good'

[The Natural Philosopher]

I thnk you are optimistic there frankly.

I beg to differ. Its not the alternators that are the problem. I can show you a 2 oz generator that is at least 80% efficient. Its the engines that drive them.

I actually doubt the above, on nearly every point.

The reason that generating sets are usually in the MW capacity is that teh

capital cost per megawatt is lower for larger sets. Not efficiency per se.

Building a big condensor takes about as many man hours as building a little one. So costs do not scale lineraly with size.

When CHP in toto is looked at, if you can utilise the waste heat for something that saves electricity, inefficiency in the thermo-electrical conversion is not so serious. Water at 30C is almost useless for extracting mechanical energy from, but makes fine underfloor or undersoil heating for e.g. greenhouses.

I also challenge the 'more electricity is used for cooling than heating'

- this may well be so in e.g. the south west USA, but in my house the electricity all goes into heat actually - lights, cookers, computers - it all ends up heating the house. Ultimately all electricity ends up as heat one way or another, or in the construction of e.g. some material like Aluminium, which represents a potentially burnable material that would release iheat if burnt.

I think not. I think the base cost of generating in the most efficient sets is around 2p per Kw/h. Not far off domestic night rates.

[IMM]

Stirling for low usage is all of them.

Our troll is at it again. Please go back to alt.Yorkshire.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "IMM" saying something like:

Being driven by mains water. In your own description.

[IMM]

Read it again. No waste water. pay attention!!!!!!!!!!

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher saying something like:

No thanks. Tried it before and the washing machine got all clogged up.

[Pete C]

Money is no problem for me. The only reseach I've seen you quote is some 'expert' on the telly. Scientific reseach and watching telly aren't the same y'know....

cheers, Pete.

[Pete C]

I know. And?

cheers, Pete.

[Pete C]

Doubt it, can you find anything on the web that backs this up?

cheers, Pete.

[Pete C]

Well you need to plant the trees, then cut them down, collect them from halfway up a mountain/hillside and take them to a pulp mill. Although this is highly mechanised it is likely to require more effort than collecting paper from recycling banks.

As a lot of paper is imported from Scandanavia, this requires much more transportation than recycled paper. Also transportation of stuff for recycling is a vanishingly small proportion of road traffic, the traffic problems in this country stem from other causes.

If the majority of people bring it to recycling banks then it requires very little transportation.

ROFL!!! I would expect (or hope) that loo roll accounts for a very small proportion of paper use in this country! :))) The majority of pulp is used for newsprint and packaging and it is much more economic to use a high proportion of recycled material in it's manufacture. Making high quality products from 100% recycled material requires a bit more processing so the cost reflects that.

Sure but it would be better to grow higher quality wood for furniture, building and DIY than use matchstick wood for making paper pulp and everything else.

I'd expect that using ground glass as a gardening material garden has more safety risks than benefits!

Not in a landfill. Why chuck them away or incinerate them and use raw sand for new bottles instead of melting the old bottles down?

If most people would take stuff to a recycling bank then the transportation cost would be about the same as for using raw materials instead.

The energy gained by incinerating all waste is less the energy saving from recycling a high proportion of it.

Or incinerate I would have thought. Although modern incinerators operate within emissions limits it does't mean they are emissions free.

Well things move on...

Only if we want to pay someone to do it for us. Most people are capable of taking stuff to a recyling bank and it doesn't take more than a minute or two to put things in the correct bin. If people don't want to do this themselves and would rather pay someone else to do it through higher council taxes then that's their choice.

LOL!!! I would have thought that a few miles of eroding coastline is better than a vast tract of broken glass being washed around by the sea! Coastal erosion is a natural process, without it there would be no white cliffs of Dover. If it really is a problem then it's possible to build sea defences.

No-one expects us to recycle everything but it certainly worthwhile recyling more than we do, as is done on the continent already.

Transport isn't the main problem, anyway...

Sounds doable, but this still requires the waste to be separated, and once you go that far you might as well recycle what you can.

I was only using that as one illustration to show that extra fuel use is unnecessary. Most people make regular journeys by car at some point so with a _small_ amount of preplanning and effort could take stuff to recycling banks without going out of their way.

cheers, Pete.

[IMM]

If you know then why re you prattling balls.

[Andy Hall]

I've seen it being tipped at a landfill site. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me.....

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[N. Thornton]

When I spoke to the glass people they said broken glass couldnt be reused because the different pieces had different thermal expansion coefficients, and anything made with mixed broken glass would inevitably crack on cooling. Websites said the same thing.

That we cant do a lot with. There is also a lot of other stuff that needs disposing as well. Check out the local tip. Check out shop refitters skips, whole shopfuls of... nope, trade secret that. A lot of it is no use to anyone, but also a lot there are pracitcal ways to reuse.

Regards, NT

[N. Thornton]

Any old internal combustion engine plus a car alternator are the heart of any homemade genset. Lawnmowers appear ideal but have really quite short lives, so some old farm junk is a better long term bet if its salvageable. Mowers are fine if you only going to use them occasionally, but if you want it running 24/7 a mower engine wont last long.

For a fiver you wont get a wide choice of engines, basically anything that has an ignition system still on it and hasnt seized solid should do. Age immaterial.

On the carb side, the nicest idea I saw was a wood powered set that had basically no carb at all. IIRC the wood was burnt in a drum with the air sucked downwards throught it, creating wood gas, this was bubbled through water to filter it, went through long pipes to cool it, and fed the engine.

To start it you opened a drum bottom vent flap and lit the fire, and once it began to take hold crank the IC engine and close the flap.

Water cools the woodgas first, then goes through the cooling jacket, if the engine has one, then cools the exhaust output with a heat exchanger. Result: lots of boiling water.

Now you have a wood powered genset with leccy and HW output. Cost to buy a £10+, cost to run: nothing but time. A fun project if you want to play.

Regards, NT