mitch ranu

Glenn, Thank you for the feedback. My house is actually a 27' diameter yurt that is located in the Santa Cruz mountains. I am planning to add on to it later.. say about 400 sq ft.. I am considering to move the chimney and put the rocket heater in the addition at that point. Do you think the 6" would still suffice? I just looked online and it looks like 8" pipe is way more expensive >.<. By about $500-800 more!

hello, i currently have a regular wood burning stove that i want to hook up so that I can get another heat source going asap for my family (our current radiant floor heater is very unreliable)

so my question is, if i get some sort of duraplus chimney through wall kit + 12' of triple wall stove pipe, can i reuse it with a rocket mass heater if i put one in at a later date?

my current stove uses a 6" pipe, will this be reusable or should i get most of my pipe in something bigger like 8" and get an adapter for my iron stove?

Steve, I use power for a lot of things, I realize I live off grid and *should* cut back on some things but I feel like there must be a renewable solution somewhere that can help me feel like I'm still on the grid by storing the electricity/energy I want so I can use it during the night.

For power I mainly use my computers for work, my partner uses tv, the recirculating pump and lights.. While that's a light load in the summer I will want to run the AC at night. Which is huge.. As well as I'd like to add landscape lighting around my property (not the solar kind since there's shade in a lot of places) and possibly provide electricity for future dwellings for friends/family or possible tenants. So something scalable would be great and if 15kwh can be stored in 300 gallons that could scale by me using electric elements and solar water heaters during the day to keep even more water hot. Currently I can already heat my water with propane.. My bigger problem is the 400 watt per hour nightly draw I'm using and that my batteries can barely get me through the night at that rate.

Dillon, I've been reading more about hot water storage you suggested. I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts, especially on how I would convert from heat into electricity.. Are there tried and true systems that folks have used or is everything hacked together? I have plenty of room to store hot water.. This would be so much better.. and possibly cost much less then batteries.. Maybe I can put the tanks in the ground to insulate them?

Re: water pressure -- My water tank is already up hill but requires a pump still.. The tank is about 200 feet from my yurt and the water falls down hill a little via gravity and then back up a bit to the pump but altitude of the final spot is lower then the starting spot.. albeit about 10 feet??? So maybe a 30 foot drop then 20 back up. How high up would my water tank have to be to provide adequate water pressure?

Dillon, On the surface that sounds really great.. Water is cheap, safer than other options, and tanks should not be expensive.. I'm into it..

How would I convert the heated water back into electricity?

I will have to measure the pump.. It does seem to use a lot of power.. That's a good tip. Overall through the night I only seem to use 400 watts on average per hour.. I think there is something wrong with my meter though as sometimes randomly for one hour a day it will jump up to 14kwh that I used for that hour.. which is ridiculous! There's a bug somewhere.. So saying that overall I think I use between 15kwh to 30kwh. So figure somewhere between 8-12 kwh per night.

So a 300gallon tank could give 15kwh, if I get 5 of them would give me 281.25kwh?

80 * 3.75 = 300 gallons
15kwh * 3.75 = 56.25kwh
56.25 * 5 = 281.25 kwh ??

How long can hot water be stored? I mean that's almost 10 days of power I could have stored.... I feel like I might be doing the math wrong here!

Would I put the "end" of a stirling generator into a hot water tank and then that would create the electricity?

This would also easily give me hot water for my house (??) without having to use my propane -- which I would LOVE as not just because of the cost but because I understand it supports fracking..

Could I heat the water back up using a fire under one of the tanks in the event the water cools down? Well maybe not so simply but essentially?

I would also love to stop buying gasoline for my generator.. Carrying it up and down my mountain almost 3-4 times a week is painful and expensive.

allen, thanks again

i did some reading on swells, i'm unsure how the water would be accessible to send through a micro-hydro.. swells seem to hold the water.. but in the ground?

agreed -- I want to avoid lead acid batteries as much as possible

looking forward to your insight on the stirling generator/well idea.. would be great if this was the solution!

thanks
-Mitch

Hey guys! Thank you for taking the time to help me ponder my options.

Steven, I definitely feel like I've been getting a crash course in electrical engineering!! I sold the Outback VFX3648 inverter that came with my property and replaced it with two newer model Outback VFXR3648A inverters for a total of 7,200 watts. So far I'm still deciding how to wire them up finally. The idea with the second one was yes.. more power, but also the ability to charge my batteries twice as fast (and run my generator less!!) and then also to power up my well pump which requires 240v.

What do you mean by the swale being better then falling water? I think my drop from ridge top to pond would be about 100 feet.. pretty solid no? The pond is already full with a pond liner.. I actually had to top it off a couple of times during the summer from the well. Unfortunately there is no stream running to it unless i'm in a VERY heavy rainfall which only happens occasionally during the winter.

I don't have a lot of land to store another pond/swale up hill from my pond but I could try.. there are a few options but they take away from some of the usable open areas of which I only have a few. How big would it need to be to store about 20kwh ?

I've been looking at the stirling generators and I'm really curious about using them. I do like the idea that a fire could power it using wood (of which I have plenty) and then maybe that fire could be set up to warm up my house too.

Allen, I'm located in the Santa Cruz mountains

Steven, The generator charges the batteries back up and the batteries run the re circulation pump for my radiant floor heater for my Yurt. The water for the floor is heated with propane from a large tank outside. It sounds fancy but it has a hard time keeping the place warm on a cold night and also takes hours to get warmed up. I recently added insulation panels to the Yurt walls and they seem to be helping at a 3 on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the best.


Are there alternatives to storage? What about some sort of kinetic energy capture system where I lift large stones using sun/electric power during the day and let them "fall" slowly? I just feel like with all the acreage I have (over 20) that I have the space to design something fun/wacky solution to this.

One of my back up options is those Aquion batteries.. it seems like they could work for me but they are currently back ordered until February.. they also seem costly.. I could use them and figure out the funds but if I have just have to spend a few thousand to build a swale that holds 20kwh vs $15k for 20kwh using the Aquion batteries.

Also the swale idea could help me with cleaning up the pond/adding a filtration system... two birds.. one stone?

Steven, I watched the video about Sunpulse but I'm unclear on how I would use this with my extra well? If I could tap into it for electricity that would be really great.. It seems like it would be the lowest fuss/maintenance solution. Also it's location is very close to my batteries/inverter/electrical panels. So that would be a BIG win!

hello! It's been a long time dream of mine and I just moved off grid to my own property this year! first post.. love this forum so far

i've got a bunch of solar panels that came with the property and an aging solar battery bank - the batteries don't seem to hold much of a charge - i know there are a few things to bulk charge them and try and bring them to back to life. while that's in motion i'm looking into alternatives for energy storage

i have a very good size pond.. about 170k gallons, and a ridge way above it, i'm curious about pumping water to a tank up on the ridge and using micro-hydro to capture the energy -- i saw a great post on this forum about it so moving on to another way to use it..

could I use thermoelectric to use my pond as a giant battery by capturing the temperature difference between the pond and the outside air? i read about converting it to a solar pond but that would involve temperatures of over 130 degrees Fahrenheit which would make it unusable for anything else (like kayaking and swimming which is how we use it during the summer).. ?

another option is that i have a second and unused well on my land. could i somehow use the temperature difference between water at the bottom of the well and the outside air to generate electricity?

fly wheels? i saw a lot of information about them but not how to build or buy one in expensively.. also they seem dangerous -- all that stored energy in a fast spinning contraption that could "fly" off in any direction at any time.. ?

-- currently i have 2,000 watts in solar panels and have another 4,000 sitting on my driveway ready to be installed, i will have more then enough solar power and i need somewhere to store it..

i've been looking into hydrogen fuel cells as well but the only commercial solutions i could find seem like they would cost me up to $40,000 which is way out of my budget!!

i would LOVE to find a really neat alternative to storing energy - as it is.. at the moment i can not get through the night without having to run my generator to survive and keep the house and family warm

thank you in advance,
mitch
a new permie!