Stove Lite

[wooduser]

http://www.stovelite.com/


I see there is a manufacturer of lights powered off the heat of a wood stove, like the "Eco Fan."


Anyone have one of these and care to comment on it?

 

[bholler]

http://www.stovelite.com/


I see there is a manufacturer of lights powered off the heat of a wood stove, like the "Eco Fan."

Anyone have one of these and care to comment on it?

There are allot of people working with teg. The stuff with stoves is cool but there are other applications where waste heat could be used to make power.

 

[Rickb]

There are allot of people working with teg. The stuff with stoves is cool but there are other applications where waste heat could be used to make power.

Can you elaborate on this some more? Seems something interesting to look at. Any links?

 

[bholler]

Can you elaborate on this some more? Seems something interesting to look at. Any links?

Well for one they are used in space missions. But there are various teg generators on the market nothing major yet but if the tech is taken far enough imagine lining cooling towers with them to extract more power from that waste heat.

 

[wooduser]

Well for one they are used in space missions. But there are various teg generators on the market nothing major yet but if the tech is taken far enough imagine lining cooling towers with them to extract more power from that waste heat.

I'd like to see a decent article on the practical possibilities for this. With a thermocouple in a gas furnace, the thermocouple has tom actually be in the flame to generate a very small amount of power. Equally important, the other end of the thermocouple an inch and a half away needs to be at something like room temperature. It's not just the heat that generates the electric current ----it's the difference in temperature that's critical.

So putting something like the eco fan on top of a stove to get the fan to turn raises the question of how you keep the other end of the thermocouples cool---- the natural tendency would be for the whole thing to get hot, which would make the voltage go away.

And then there's the issue of the really trivial amount of power such an application actually produces. Typically very small, I'd imagine.

But those are just my guesses. Engineers have pulled plenty of rabbits out of their hat in recent centuries, and who knows what they might pull out now?

Even with their limitations, it might be keen to have the light powered by having it sit on a hot stove. Throw in some extra features like a digital display of the surface temperature of the stove...


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