Solar Systems

[Brian Degulis]

why would you want to connect your genset cooling system to a water heater ? if you are running the genset, you may as well turn on the water heater.

Because instead of putting aditional load on the genset that requires aditional fuel your capturing the energy that would otherwise be dischaged out the exhaust and wasted. So you get free hot water and as a bonus you make Al Gore very happy.

Brian

[Pascal]

do you really think the load from teh heater is really going to make significant difference ? 1/4 GPH ?

on the other hand, many boats have oversized gennies... mine does... and the challenge is actually to get a big enough load on the genny !

[neosin]

I think the idea of using the wasted Genny heat to warm water would be a good idea. You'd have to put inline some type of valve to cut it off when you don't want it, etc. But it would use the wasted energy. if you are really good you could convert it and make a ice maker off the energy...

[q240z]

on the other hand, many boats have oversized gennies... mine does... and the challenge is actually to get a big enough load on the genny !

HA! What did I say about gensets being good at wasting energy? lol

I believe it's been discussed here already, but for $500k you can go solar, dead quiet running at 6kts, and have AC*. For the life of me, I can't figure out why they'd use electric for cooking.

http://dsehybrid.com/index.html

*ymmv, probably not all 3 at the same time.

[Brian Degulis]

do you really think the load from teh heater is really going to make significant difference ? 1/4 GPH ?

on the other hand, many boats have oversized gennies... mine does... and the challenge is actually to get a big enough load on the genny !

Sure not a big diffrence and a long time to balance out the cost. The post was more about weather or not it can be done.

On our boat the water heater is located in the stb engine space if we run for 7 hours or more we don't need to turn the heater on. The heat radiating of the engine is enough to warm the water and that's on an insolated tank. Imagine how much better a simple un insulated aluminum tank would utilize that waste heat?

Brian

[krush]

In Antarctica there is a new science outpost being built. They almost exclusively heat the entire place with the "coolant" from the diesel generators in the power station.

Only on super duper freezing days do additional boilers need to be run. I saw this on the discovery channel.

If you start thinking about wasted heat as free energy, you can do all kinds of creative things with it. Fuel used to be dirt cheap, so in the past nobody gave a damn about running the generator to make electricity to heat hot water when you could use a fraction of the fuel to heat the water directly.

[Boss Lady]

My RV refrigerator uses some type of ammonia based refrigerant that is heated with LP gas and then converts the heat energy into cooling. Now that would be a good use if we could make air conditioning off of waste heat.

[Skip]

I put a 3KW pro-sign invertor and 600 AH of batteries in my 53 Hat. I have a very old refrig that works great but is an energy hog. I get about 6-7 hours out of the invertor bank before it alarms on low voltage. I recently put in another 200AH of batteries, which should get me up to 8-9 hours- more than enough to run all night without the genset. This setup allows us to open up the boat at night (temperature permitting), and to run during the day without the genset. When we arrive at anchorage, we use the genset to cool down the boat and recharge the invertor bank. We like the system we are using.

One of the problems I am working around is a Westebeake 12.5kw genset with 11,850 hours on it. I have lost some compression in one of the cylinders, but switching to 40 weight oil has reduced oil consumption in the genset. Even when I have to replace the genst ($22k quoted price), I think the invertor will help stretch the life of the generator. If you do a lot of traveling (like we hope to do in retirement), running the genset 10 hours a day will quickly pile on the hours.
Skip

[Pascal]

your fridge must be a real hog !! mine is pretty old too, at least 10 or 12 years old (GE with freezer on top) and i get 20 hours out of 8 GC batteries (880AH), plus some lights, TVs, etc... something isn't right with your setup.

22k for a 12kw genny ?? you can get a 12.5 Isuzu for 8k.... removing/install cant' be more than 15 to 20 hours or labor... I have the 18kw Isuzu Norpro, it's a great unit.

http://www.gopower.com/products/582/...ine-Generators

as i mentioned before, installing a Freedom 30 inverter reduced annual genny run time from 1200hours to 300hrs or so. huge difference...