Apparently, Redditch Borough Council reckon they can save about £14,000 per year by taking the waste heat from the crematorium and using it to heat the water at an adjascent swimming pool - but union officials brand it as "sick and insensitive". I think it's a brilliant idea meself!!
I've often wondered about power stations and cooling towers - surely something could be done to put the heat to good use there as well?
Sod 'em. It's not as if much of the energy actually comes from the stiff, anyway - unless you're candle-like, like me.
Croydon Power Station, now the site of an IKEA store, used to provide heat to homes in the local area. The problem was the cost of the associated infrastructure.
Colin Bignell
I agree. In Denmark its done extensively - CHP waste burning district heating schemes.
They want to close them all because they cant back up wind power.
Other ideas I have had was building industrial grade greenhouses next to power stations, where the heat could be used to grow out of season salads and the like. Or pineapples. YUM.
If I had a way of burning all the junk mail that comes through the letter box, I a sure it old save me hundreds a year in heating.
I've wondered that. In fact, if I did get some boiler that could enviromentally burn junk mail, and I could dispose of the ash - then I could actively set about making my postman deliver me some more....
Does the postal service charge if ye start receiving an abnormal amount of post?
See this chap:
I presume you've signed up for the MPS and TPS?
That's always the problem. They cost much more to maintain than the fuel they save, so where they have been installed, they run for a few years until maintenance charges start mounting, then they're abandoned.
It can make sense where you have a single co-located consumer of the heat, but fanning out to multiple homes is never viable for long.
union
brilliant
I can't see anything wrong with it most of the heat will have come from the gas used rather than the deceased. I'd not be bothered about about the contribution I could make to others enjoyment after I've gone.
There is a rather large set of greenhouses somewhere in the country that take the waste heat and gases from CHPs to grow tomatos. Not only is the heat used but (some of) the CO2 absorbed as well. I might be thinking of this place:
It most certainly is ..many pats of the world use geothermal this way, or wast heat of some sot.
It costs no more to lay a hot water main than a gas main.
And with energy prices escalating, maintenance should not be a huge expense overall.
The real problem is that whilst ether are any amount of oiks in suits trying to sell stuff you don't need, there are very few people, and they are not paid well, that can fix anything at all.
I saw a bloke on't telly that's done exactly that in Teeside - his greenhouses utilise heat and CO2 from the nearby power station to produce tomatoes all year round.
Mathew
I suspect that the main problem of the Croydon district heating scheme was that it was too far ahead of its time and limited by the technology and materials available in the post-war period.
Colin Bignell
Debatable. Yes, I know the bulk of the cost is in the hole-digging, but you'll still need twice as much pipe and a respectable amount of insulation to make it worth it.
Worse, most places already have the bulk of their infrastructure in place - adding another layer on top can be quite hard. Just replacing gas mains where they already exist is a pain in the arse.
Then there's the metering - I presume you'd use a flowmeter and a record the difference between flow and return temperatures.
Then there's adapting existing systems to accept fairly low-grade heat input.
That said - bulk users close to the source and, ideally, new-build. Yeah, that'd work well enough.
In message , Skipweasel writes
In a hard winter, will this lead to a lot of involuntary euthanasia among the swimming fraternity?
Surely the problem is that most people don't want to live near a power station, nor crem for that matter. The heat would have to be carried a long distance.
Peter Scott
In which case one could consider a heat pump or two to extract the low-grade heat from the cooling water. Hmmm, I guess you'd need some intermediate stages with different operating fluids to firstly get above
100C so you can boil some water, then above 600C so you can superheat the steam and feed it into the normal flow driving the turbines.Presumably that's not economic otherwise it would have been done somewhere, by somebody.
Combined heat and power systems are very much in fashion these days, as they are claimed to be eco-friendly.
Colin Bignell
Or they could open a quick-service pizza restaurant.
Owain
Maybe if they built the crematorium next door to the old peoples residence the crem could warm up the residence and the residence would conveniently supply the... ;-)
If you're going to that trouble, you might as well just raise steam straight from the furnace.
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