Ben Mitchell

Hello!

I recently bought a large high pressure compressor at a junk yard and lo and behold it came with the alternator that had been used to drive it.  This was all set up as a mobile SCBA air fill station for a fire department and the alternator was PTO driven off the main engine to provide electric power to drive the two 20HP motors powering a pair of compressors.

So...  It's an older unit - probably manufactured around 1980, but the Hobbs meter on the generator control panel reads 290 hours so it's presumably had very little usage.  I can't test this thing or make any guarantees, but other than the bearings there's not much that's likely to go wrong.  It's a 12-lead unit.

If you've got access to a big wind or hydro turbine to drive it, or maybe a 6-8 cylinder engine driven off wood gas or something, this could provide tons of power.

New a unit like this lists at about $5000.  I'd like to get $1750 for it but am open to offers.  I will include the pair of control panels that came with it, though I have no idea how to use them.

Let me know if you're interested.

Oh, and it's in the SF Bay Area but could easily be delivered to the Lake Tahoe area if that's better.  Also happy to put it on a pallet and meet up with a carrier of your arrangement.  I have a forklift to load it.



-Ben

Hello,

I don't see a classifieds section here at Permies.  I've got an alternative energy item that someone might be able to use but I don't want to violate norms here.  Are classified ads permitted?

Thanks,
-Ben

Hello!

Please forgive me if I'm heading down the wrong path or should be able to answer my questions with the googles.  I've done a fair bit of reading/thinking but sometimes the best approach is to just bounce ideas off of people who know more than you do

I have a large workshop / garage of about 2400 sqft that doesn't have heat.  We live in the Santa Cruz mountains so it never gets crazy cold, but winter's coming and it's nice to be able to work without shivering.  I'm thinking about building a heating solution for the shop.

Biased as I am toward using stuff I have lying around, I'm considering using an abandoned 80Gal vertical air compressor tank as the body of this heater.  It's abandoned because it developed a small crack that I welded up, but ultimately decided didn't really make me comfortable in compressed air service.

I don't have the space to build a sizeable masonry thermal store the way one would in a residential setting, so I'm contemplating a hybrid system with a small thermal store to act as a bit of a thermal capacitor and then a fair bit of radiating surface for direct heat.

Images attached.

The concept would be that the square block section around the burner would be steel filled with sand, and that above that would be radiating fins.

Thoughts?  Is the thermal store even worth it at this size?  How do I size the burner, inner "up tube" and chimney out relative to the diameter of the compressor body (24")?

Thanks,
-Ben