Micro CHP Unit??????

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NNYorker

Feeling the Heat
Mar 18, 2008
262
Upstate N.Y.--45 min. to the Canadian border, eh!
Anybody ever heard of such a thing? Currently on the www.outdoorboilers.com website. This is Phillip Dougherty's FOURTH internet storefront: www.adobeboiler.com ,www.enterpriseboiler.com , www.royalmountainholdings.com , and an oldie but goody the current www.outdoorboilers.com . States " Our prototype Micro CHP unit is fabricated. Entertaining investor inquiries. The unit generates electricity from excess heat. Not available for resale! "

If anyone has followed my sour story about Adobe Boiler and Phillip Dougherty on the Boiler Room you know his sales tactics history. You know how they say history repeats itself. Phil currently has an ongoing "Inventory Clearance/Reduction sale--CASH ONLY SALES by the way.....Hmmmmm.......Buyer Beware!! Last time I checked his Foreign/Out of State LLC in Nevada was revoked, AGAIN.
 
Combined heat and power = CHP.
 
The vendor may be dodgy, certainly sounds like it from past comments, but the CHP concept does have some merit, though I'm not sure just how wonderful it is in reality...

Essentially the idea is to take the fossil fuel you would otherwise have burned just to heat air / water in a furnace / boiler, and instead use it to run a generator to produce electricity at a level that can carry the house while the genny is running, and maybe produce a bit of surplus to spin the meter backwards, on the same deal as the solar power "net metering" concept... Like with doing grid tied solar, this requires some extra fancy control circuitry to make the frequencies match in phase, shut the system down in case of grid power failure, and so forth...

Then collect the waste heat from the engine / genset cooling system and use that to provide the house heat... In theory the CHP unit is supposed to provide the same heat to the house per unit of fuel that a conventional system would, but also provide electrical power as well...

Don't know how well it works in practice, seems to me like it's possibly a bit of a violation of the laws of physics as it appears that they are getting more total energy in the form of electric + heat than the fuel potentially has, but I could be wrong...

Downsides are higher costs than conventional units, and increased maintenance - as the engine needs oil changes and other such upkeep as one normally associates with an IC engine...

Sounds nice on paper though...

Gooserider
 
CHP is becoming more popular in commercial scale buildings in areas where electricity rates are high and building owners often supply heat - NY City is a good example. These systems typically only efficiently scale down to about 100 kW of output power. The heat can either be used to augment heat from a boiler, or can be used to drive a commercial scale AC system in the summertime. These types of systems usually run on natural gas and can achieve better than 70% total efficiency. Obviously, you need a pretty steady base load of electricity and heat in the building to make it worthwhile.
 
By the rep of Adobe, I would be very skeptical.

To date there are no commericially availlable small scale CHP plants that run on wood. Arguably, there was a company in iceland that sold thermoelectric modules that could be used commerically on wood stoves, but they appear to be out of business and the units they sold put out very low wattage (20 or 30 watts). Its too bad as it was an intriguing possbility to supply enough juice for a pellet stove to run with no external power.

Sunpower offered a prototype system several years ago that used a Sterling engine but, they are not on their website.

There are two natural gas units in commerical production, Honda makes one and Whispergen make one. Both are expensive and basically produce a small amount of electricity as a byproduct of heating water.

There are a couple wood gasifier generator prototypes out there but they tend to be one offs made by backyard enterprises. Its not that hard to build them, but they require lots of maintenance and can be dangerous as they basically are burning carbon monoxide.

The current best hope is Dean Kamen's Slingshot generator, they are claimed to run on anything that burns.He was shopping around the design to be produced by some other company, most likely in the third world, but to date I dont think they are in production.
 
peakbagger said:
By the rep of Adobe, I would be very skeptical.

To date there are no commericially availlable small scale CHP plants that run on wood. Arguably, there was a company in iceland that sold thermoelectric modules that could be used commerically on wood stoves, but they appear to be out of business and the units they sold put out very low wattage (20 or 30 watts). Its too bad as it was an intriguing possbility to supply enough juice for a pellet stove to run with no external power.

Sunpower offered a prototype system several years ago that used a Sterling engine but, they are not on their website.

There are two natural gas units in commerical production, Honda makes one and Whispergen make one. Both are expensive and basically produce a small amount of electricity as a byproduct of heating water.

There are a couple wood gasifier generator prototypes out there but they tend to be one offs made by backyard enterprises. Its not that hard to build them, but they require lots of maintenance and can be dangerous as they basically are burning carbon monoxide.

The current best hope is Dean Kamen's Slingshot generator, they are claimed to run on anything that burns.He was shopping around the design to be produced by some other company, most likely in the third world, but to date I dont think they are in production.
Click to expand...

I agree on the rep of Adobe, which is why I was careful to make the distinction between them and the concept of CHP in general...

I also pretty much agree with your assessment of the current state of the industry, it doesn't seem likely to me that we will see wood powered CHP on a commercial scale, everything I've heard about gasification is that it has to much "baggage" to be practical, and steam has to many safety concerns and doesn't seem to have the efficiency for common use...

Gooserider
 
Seems to be a recurring theme with anything associated with Phillip Dougherty--whatever is the latest flavor of the week, he will be selling, and I use that term lightly, it. Indoor/outdoor wood boilers, solar tubes, CHP units.

Skimmed over some of LLigetfa's sunpower site reading. Interesting ideas/uses. Seems as if the military/NASA applications have to be perfected yet; but Phil has a prototype for you to "invest" in. I know everyone has to start somewhere and great things have come from lone inventors but.......I'm still waiting on some news about the 120MPG SUV Phil and Royal Mountain Energy are "promoting"----I.E. looking for $$$$$$. Like P.T. Dougherty said "There's a sucker born every time I sell something online".
 
I've heard about CHP for a couple decades...one of the guys at the original Tarm importer told us it was gonna happen any day now...in 1985.

As mentioned, it is already big for certain commercial and industrial jobs...heck, I think I just read that Foxwoods is putting in a BIG ONE.

Not many for biomass, though.....

Didn't Honda have one of these tied in with a fuel cell car?
http://www.hondanews.com/categories/1048/releases/4880
is one Honda Model of Micro-CHP......

CHP is more complicated than it seems at first, but will probably eventually be a great solution for residential use with nat gas.
 
Forget the source offhand, but I think there are already outfits selling residential scale units, IIRC one of them is in AU, and I think there may be some Asian units as well, but the sites I found didn't make them for US power, just that weird 50Hz stuff they use overseas...

Gooserider
 
Micro CHP is available in Europe with both Sunmachine and Atmos producing wood pellet machines using stirling engines. We are at present testing a thermal oil version using a standard Dunsley yorkshire boiler as the base stove. It also uses thermal solar for summertime use. Cannot say whether the technology would be approved for US use.
 
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