Tim Sefton

We just released a heat engine for generating electricity.

We make a wood burning fire box for it but would love to see some folks retro fit the engine into their wood stove for a true Combined Heat and Power Appliance.

The engine is a stirling engine and runs off of externally applied heat (~400F). Heat can be from wood, natural gas, solar, bio-waste, or waste heat to name a few.

The output of the engine can be configured to between 100 Watts to 1000 Watts dependent upon the temperature and pressure that you run it at.

You can see some of the development at volodesigns-sterlingproject.blogspot.com or visit www.seftonmotors.com

We're hopping this can have an impact on the improving the use application of wood stoves for getting off the grid.



Tim

Al,
I'll take your "thinking outside the box" as a complement, thanks.

Regarding some of your other commentary, maybe I haven't supplied you enough detail for you to understand the design.

My intent of the post was not to review the design but to show what we've done that is working well for us and to share with the community.

To better explain here is what our rocket stove looks like in a bit more detail. (we do plan on insulating the feed tube, but not change the material).







If you want to see an early version of it in action - check out this video - good draft and no smoke.



Hope that helps - always open to improvements, just be kind !
Tim

Thanks for all the info on Rocket Stoves !
It was a big help in designing our rocket stove that powers our heat engine.
We used a 6x6 steel J tube with secondary air added about 3" into the riser (probably shorten that a bit on the next iteration).
The J Tube is mounted into what we call the Fire Box (55 gallon drum) that the head of the engine sits in.
Here is picture of the fire box with the rocket stove mounted to it.



For more info check out our site at www.seftonmotors.com or our development blog at volodesigns-sterlingproject.blogspot.com - one of the videos on our development site shows the engine running on a small rocket stove (4x4 JTube).

Thanks again for all the advice !
Tim