Brilliant video as usual. The DC to DC converter has to be switched on using the on/off front panel button before the output voltage and current will be displayed, and can then be adjusted. I made the same mistake...
I have no suggestion to help with this experiment, but its very interesting viewing for a technically minded person. The new experimental test piece is a beautiful bit of work. 👌
Thanks for trying these. I've been wondering about doing exactly this with a Peltier module that's been laying around from an old cooling project. I didn't expect much out of it, mainly just an entertaining answer to my curiosity, but it would certainly be nice to eliminate the need for an external power supply.
You were on the right track with that DCDC! Your open circuit voltage of 6.03V dropped just a bit down to 5.88V when you had a load on there. At some load resistance there's going to be a peak power output. If you could draw 2.0A at 4.0V, that's getting you closer to the 20W or so needed to run the heater? Seems like you need a chunky variable resistor to find that sweet spot; 5ohm 25W would be good... Rad project, I have a couple of these heaters installed; in my old VW and a friends cabin, neato to see someone hacking them like this!
It's looking a lot less likely. In the end we might be able to replace some of the charge in the battery, but probably not the 40-50W of the heater running.
@@DavidMcLuckie I’ve been meaning to use a similar idea on a wood burning stove to charge the battery while heating the van but the small amount of power they produce it would be a lot of outlay for not a lot of charge.
I did some experiments using 4x peltier elements on the exhaust of a paraffin pressure lamp. After seeing a similar soviet design as a power supply for a valve wireles set, for use off grid. Admittedly, the peltier elements I was using are not optimised for heat generation. (Seabeck effect.) It needed a PC fan to cool the cold side. I just about generated enough power to drive the fan !
A project I'd luv to see is a 1 or 2 KW Inverter Generator modified for direct AC drive of the 3 phase generator coils for starting the engine. With additional circuitry (similar to hybrid vehicles), it could become an automatic on-demand RV battery charging system. Small engine fuel injection (although now quite rare) could improve reliability and efficiency even further (as is the case with larger car engines).
PS: Perhaps an R/C airplane brushless ESC would be up to the job of driving the Delta coils when switched into circuit with a triple relay. Don't know how much voltage would be required ... maybe just 12 volts would do it with the ESC throttle set to idle speed.
What you need is an exhaust with an afterburner leading into an exhaust powered turbine with an alternator with a bridge rectifier, that will do the trick, you may have to have a diesel injector in the exhaust, but a blue flame out the exhaust would look pretty.😁😁😁
I'm not going to lie, I was amazed to see the bulb light up, I was feeling quite skeptical about whether there'd be enough current for a tungsten lamp, it'd work great for some LEDs I'm sure though, buuuuuuuuut, yeah, 'tis a wee bit pricey a setup for a fancy LED lamp... :D
I just stumbled on your project. I started messing with the same idea 2 weeks ago. Mine is quite crude yet but I've been able to pull a consistent 5watts out of my last test( using 3 40mm TEGs). What I've found so far is to use a cheap boost converter that has no display( displays draw power) and a mppt solar charge controller. Also look for the lowest temp TEG units. I'm guessing the ones you have are for higher hot side temp which have very bad efficiency at these lower temps. I've tried the cheap ones you showed here and the solder on the wire connections melted off. I think the best bet is to modify the heater to put the TEGs right next to the burner but i havent had the time or money to buy another heater and mess with it. Good luck and if I discover anything new I'll chime in with it.
Your DCDC, you need to press the on off button, that turns the output on and off :D Also there will be a maximum power point for the generators. Much like solar panel MPPT charger controllers try to solve; to much current will drag the voltage down and hurt overall wattage. Youll have to deek around with the output current / volts (take note, hell maybe even put it on a graph). Although you need 14.4v so I guess all you can play with is the current. Make sure they are all in series for minimal voltage drop. That setup the guy made was awesome, very well made. What temp does kingspan melt at? Looking forward to the next episode.
Maybe if you have a small intercooler or radiator laying around you could modify it somehow to attach the Peltiers? Intercoolers have nice fins in them. Interesting experiment, keep it up.
according to the datasheet and the output voltage of the TEG, the temperature difference between hot and cold side is just 20K. More water flow could yield more voltage and thus power. love your videos !
the only thing i can think to suggest is to use the tecs almost directly on the burner, so have a square burn chamber, then directly line the outside of the burn chamber with tecs and have a huge heatsink and fan/ waterblocks cooling them, how hot the tecs will get im not sure, but i think testing would be required, as they cant get too hot, but the burner in the burn chamber can be angled away, these are my thoughts, also as efficiency is key when you only have a small amount of power available possibly the impeller and motor design isnt best, i have a feeling that you can get alot more air movement using less power and a more efficient impeller but again i am not sure
Just got mine yesterday ! The amount of heat is ridiculous ! 1) could one use an old Heating radiator with the exhaust to use that wasted heat ? 2) Could I use a mix of diesel and used (filtered) cooking oil ? And if so will it run ok ? Together with Big Clive and Ralphy you are one of my favourite Scottish RUclipsrs !
Are the Peltier junctions stacked to increase the voltage? The voltage stack efficiency decreases with heat differential so it can be plottable using the area of the Peltiers, medium of heat transfer, and possibly intermedium of next layer mounting (preferably copper). From memory the loss between stacked junctions loss in voltage gain between each layer relative to the heat dissipation. There is a potential each Peltier junction has a sweet spot before the inevitable losses occur. It is all about the coolest side C efficiency and if it can give the stacked cooling needed. In my case for a CPU that runs very hot, I was not in the range needed. But this seems interesting! I found that if my benchtop source was running at let's say 100C my temperature differential needed was 0 C to maintain 50C. This was 2012 tech so... let's experiment! Cheers
I think you really need max power point tracking or, simpler, setting. You could possibly do it with a boost converter but take the feedback from the input rather than the output and back to front it so that as the input voltage falls below the. Set point it turns the mosfet off allowing the inductor to pump more voltage to the output.
Tecs work of heat differential, given one side is 90c I doubt that passive cooler is going to get any heat away quickly causing your hot and cold side to both be quite hot. I think that's your problem. A simple way to test this cheaply is to connect a CPU cooler to your tec to try and cool down the cold side (Yes, you need to power the CPU fan, but it's just a proof of concept. You could use the inlet air to pull cool airflow over the CPU cooler)
For a £/W comparison, you should only just replace the three expensive TECs with the cheap ones in that fancy heat exchanger. That way you cut out all other variables except what you are testing for. If the results are the same, or better, then time and money can be expanded on heat exchager design. If not worse, then you have saved that time and money.
DAH!! Maybe the exhaust gas is not even hot enough ever. Maybe it will never get hot enough. They usually build the heaters to to be efficent... and not have wasted heat going out the exhaust pipe.
What we need is to replace the cheap Chinese heater with a plutonium core as a heat source. I will look and see if I have a spare in my shed or a model gas turbine with a steam generator......nurse my medication please!
Man, you spent a lot of money to find out that physics works. I like that. But I wouldn't do it this way. As I said in a previous message, the exhaust gas has a low density and a high temperature, so, it contains a small amount of energy. You could measure that energy by passing the exhaust pipe through water and find out how much energy remains in the water. And then multiply by 15%, which is the efficiency of a TEG (as far as I remember). Cheers!
I immediately thought of something like this when I found out about these heaters. but Ive had no luck with thermoelectric heaters. they are fragile, use a tun of power bairly do any cooling. and in my attempts to get them to actually make electricity.. terrible. shame this never worked.
there is 2 kinds peltier. one to cool (TEC) and one to heat (TEH), i am guessing you are using those to cool TEC in this experiment. are you running the element in series/parallel. TEC thermo-electric cooler TEH thermo-electric heater.
No. There are two kinds. TEC thermo electric coolers & TEG thermo electric generators. TEC just heat or cool either side depending on which way you connect them to the power supply.
This is exactly the stuff I get up to in my spare time. Turn the exhaust heat exchanger into a mini boiler and add a steam turbine to generate power. Alternatively give up as this seems a busted concept and fit a solar panel 😂
Why not just convert diesel heater to a jet turbine with a power driven turbine disk in exhaust stream. Then you hook PT disk to a DC motor and now you have a good power generator. And a good heat source. Oh this looks like a model airplane turbine with a PTO.
Oh no how disappointing 😭😂 The way I see it is that the TEGs are 5% efficient so to get the 50w output from the TEGs we need to redesign the diesel heater with the TEGs inside,so then a 8kw heater can use 1kw of heat to create the 50w needed to run the heater and we still have 7kw of heat coming from the heater, I imagine that if we have a temperature of 600 degrees on one side of the TEGs and 0 degrees one the other side of the TEGs the TEGs should be around 300 degrees which should give the maximum output of 25w per TEG. I need to learn how to cast a new designed aluminium head for the heater with flat surfaces for the TEGs and send it to you 🤔
Yep thinking the same here. I would have guessed the best chance at making this work, would be to have the TEG molded in the internal heat exchanger body of the heater. IF the 5kw heater has to transfert 5kw from the heating flame to the circulated air, I think we could hope this heat transfert, going trough TEGs in the heat exchanger could possibly yield 50W (1%) of usable electricity ? There could be the problem that TEGs are much less good at transfering heat than the actual aluminium cast radiator, thus a lot more heat would be wasted trought much higher exaust gas temperature😖. IF this would be the case, much more combustion chamber/radiator surface area would be needed, and an appropriate number of TEGs added to cover that surface.
I was just thinking, he could grind all the fins off the back half of the heater itself, and make it flat, and then put the TEGs on that. Also could use the existing fan to cool a heatsink on the cold side of the TEGs if you could make a larger shroud around them.
Let me see if I can translate from US to Scottish. These things are fuck awful in- efficient. Like 5% electrical comes out of the heat what goes in. Sooooo, lots of heat going in, you have to get lots of heat out from the other side. Soooo, it's all (95%) abooout the cooling side. And you have to have an electrical load on the TEC units from the get go, to get things going. Fans or cooling water to get the fucking hot heat away.. From the hot side.. On the cooler side. Good luck.
DC itself doesn't work through a transformer, only AC. That DC to DC box does the magic that can turn low voltage to a higher one and vice versa. Had I only known the on/off button is actually the output on/off button.
That was a laugh and a half...300 quid and dog knows how many hours in building stuff for 1.4W...you'd get more power with a solar panel inside the shed!
You're overthinking the whole thing use the exhaust gas to power a hydroelectric generator all it is doing is rotating the same way water would or if you were to blow into one of them drill powerd water pump 🤔 like a "turbo"
yeah there are ones made specifically for power generation. are these those? idk why people are on the steam turbine idea. do they know how much steam youd need to make to get 50w out of it. or how much water youd blast through youd be better off trying to heat exchange the exsaust from a jet engine and use its starter as a generator.. but forget about it being quiet. if these Peltier devices cant do it then there is no hope. for this heater design being self powered.
Impressive! Lots of work and ingenuity, but wouldn't copper have been a better conductor? You need to move a lot of heat rapidly and copper or bronze seems to be a better choice to do just that.
Yeah those heat for electric exchangers are at their best crap. Anytime I imagine building something like this it's always minimum 20 plus of these but when looking at free heat source but even at 7.00 each I figured I'll never get my money back in savings.
DAH... CONDUCT A TEST FIRST!! Dah!! Take a $10 common plumbing propane torch... Attach the magic white square volt generator cube to a blank aluminum plate. Carefully/gradually heat the back of plate as high temp as possible. Hook up volt meter to magic white volt generator. DAH!!... what is highest volt possible. Will the magic generator cubes EVEN produce desired volt you ar seeking.
Thermoelectric power is simply a bridge too far to generate much of any usable power. Back in the 60s and 70s long before decent solar panels were available, certain remote sensing stations opted for propane powered thermoelectric power supplies. I acquired one surplus, and they were quite pitiful, using a 10,000 btu burner to produce 50 watts with a proprietary (at the time) TH module, DC-DC switching boost power converter, and 75 pound copper finned heat sink. It cost $10,000 when new. Efficiency of new modules like yours have not improved, even though costs have dropped greatly. The entire output of your 8k heater would not be enough to generate sufficient power to overcome their low TH efficiency and operate your project, even if it did have adequate thermal coupling .... nice try though!
Stop making the box out of aluminium' use steel it may take longer to start generating but it will keep generating longer when it stops . It will also get hotter. Fins Inside should still be aluminium. The fact the pipes are so hot you can't touch them shows the heat is there.
That's what I was thinking, most of the heat is lost through the manifold pipes. It would have been interesting to see them insulated. It probably would not come close to the power needed but would still show the potential. I run my heater at around 1 kW so getting 12 Watts at 12.4 volts from it would be enough. I feel it could be like a dog chasing it's tale though.
Brilliant video as usual. The DC to DC converter has to be switched on using the on/off front panel button before the output voltage and current will be displayed, and can then be adjusted. I made the same mistake...
I have no suggestion to help with this experiment, but its very interesting viewing for a technically minded person. The new experimental test piece is a beautiful bit of work. 👌
Thanks for trying these.
I've been wondering about doing exactly this with a Peltier module that's been laying around from an old cooling project.
I didn't expect much out of it, mainly just an entertaining answer to my curiosity, but it would certainly be nice to eliminate the need for an external power supply.
You were on the right track with that DCDC! Your open circuit voltage of 6.03V dropped just a bit down to 5.88V when you had a load on there. At some load resistance there's going to be a peak power output. If you could draw 2.0A at 4.0V, that's getting you closer to the 20W or so needed to run the heater? Seems like you need a chunky variable resistor to find that sweet spot; 5ohm 25W would be good... Rad project, I have a couple of these heaters installed; in my old VW and a friends cabin, neato to see someone hacking them like this!
Watching eagerly, was hoping this was going to be something we could try but with each video I’m thinking it may be above my pay grade 😂
It's looking a lot less likely. In the end we might be able to replace some of the charge in the battery, but probably not the 40-50W of the heater running.
@@DavidMcLuckie I’ve been meaning to use a similar idea on a wood burning stove to charge the battery while heating the van but the small amount of power they produce it would be a lot of outlay for not a lot of charge.
Really enjoyed that series.
I did some experiments using 4x peltier elements on the exhaust of a paraffin pressure lamp. After seeing a similar soviet design as a power supply for a valve wireles set, for use off grid.
Admittedly, the peltier elements I was using are not optimised for heat generation. (Seabeck effect.) It needed a PC fan to cool the cold side. I just about generated enough power to drive the fan !
A project I'd luv to see is a 1 or 2 KW Inverter Generator modified for direct AC drive of the 3 phase generator coils for starting the engine. With additional circuitry (similar to hybrid vehicles), it could become an automatic on-demand RV battery charging system. Small engine fuel injection (although now quite rare) could improve reliability and efficiency even further (as is the case with larger car engines).
PS: Perhaps an R/C airplane brushless ESC would be up to the job of driving the Delta coils when switched into circuit with a triple relay. Don't know how much voltage would be required ... maybe just 12 volts would do it with the ESC throttle set to idle speed.
What you need is an exhaust with an afterburner leading into an exhaust powered turbine with an alternator with a bridge rectifier, that will do the trick, you may have to have a diesel injector in the exhaust, but a blue flame out the exhaust would look pretty.😁😁😁
I'm not going to lie, I was amazed to see the bulb light up, I was feeling quite skeptical about whether there'd be enough current for a tungsten lamp, it'd work great for some LEDs I'm sure though, buuuuuuuuut, yeah, 'tis a wee bit pricey a setup for a fancy LED lamp... :D
You could save a lot of time testing with a controlled heat source. Use a clothing iron as the heat plate to see what power you can get.
He certainly could have done that, but it's more fun this way and we have a video where he gives us a grin on our faces😊
I just stumbled on your project. I started messing with the same idea 2 weeks ago. Mine is quite crude yet but I've been able to pull a consistent 5watts out of my last test( using 3 40mm TEGs). What I've found so far is to use a cheap boost converter that has no display( displays draw power) and a mppt solar charge controller. Also look for the lowest temp TEG units. I'm guessing the ones you have are for higher hot side temp which have very bad efficiency at these lower temps. I've tried the cheap ones you showed here and the solder on the wire connections melted off. I think the best bet is to modify the heater to put the TEGs right next to the burner but i havent had the time or money to buy another heater and mess with it.
Good luck and if I discover anything new I'll chime in with it.
A very clever viewer of mine is modifying a heater body for us to test further. Stay tuned.
Your DCDC, you need to press the on off button, that turns the output on and off :D
Also there will be a maximum power point for the generators. Much like solar panel MPPT charger controllers try to solve; to much current will drag the voltage down and hurt overall wattage. Youll have to deek around with the output current / volts (take note, hell maybe even put it on a graph). Although you need 14.4v so I guess all you can play with is the current.
Make sure they are all in series for minimal voltage drop.
That setup the guy made was awesome, very well made.
What temp does kingspan melt at?
Looking forward to the next episode.
Ahh. I thought the on / off turned the unit on and off. Can try again next time.
Maybe if you have a small intercooler or radiator laying around you could modify it somehow to attach the Peltiers? Intercoolers have nice fins in them.
Interesting experiment, keep it up.
David
I suggest that you have a look at the biolite camp stove, this works fan and charges phone, I think uses 1 TEG.
My friend nearly bought one. I think we could get 3W with a TEG directly in the flame of the heater. :)
Have you tried the low temp TEG modules. They run at 100c instead of 230c ?
according to the datasheet and the output voltage of the TEG, the temperature difference between hot and cold side is just 20K. More water flow could yield more voltage and thus power. love your videos !
the only thing i can think to suggest is to use the tecs almost directly on the burner, so have a square burn chamber, then directly line the outside of the burn chamber with tecs and have a huge heatsink and fan/ waterblocks cooling them, how hot the tecs will get im not sure, but i think testing would be required, as they cant get too hot, but the burner in the burn chamber can be angled away, these are my thoughts, also as efficiency is key when you only have a small amount of power available possibly the impeller and motor design isnt best, i have a feeling that you can get alot more air movement using less power and a more efficient impeller but again i am not sure
Just got mine yesterday ! The amount of heat is ridiculous !
1) could one use an old Heating radiator with the exhaust to use that wasted heat ?
2) Could I use a mix of diesel and used (filtered) cooking oil ? And if so will it run ok ?
Together with Big Clive and Ralphy you are one of my favourite Scottish RUclipsrs !
1) yes
2) not really. The veg oil doesn't really burn well and leaves a sludge inside
Thank you, I am a fan of Big Clive as well.
do a steam or Stirling engine using the exhaust thermal energy :)
You could try a Nitinol pulley and wire engine to power the fan.
Are the Peltier junctions stacked to increase the voltage? The voltage stack efficiency decreases with heat differential so it can be plottable using the area of the Peltiers, medium of heat transfer, and possibly intermedium of next layer mounting (preferably copper). From memory the loss between stacked junctions loss in voltage gain between each layer relative to the heat dissipation. There is a potential each Peltier junction has a sweet spot before the inevitable losses occur. It is all about the coolest side C efficiency and if it can give the stacked cooling needed. In my case for a CPU that runs very hot, I was not in the range needed. But this seems interesting! I found that if my benchtop source was running at let's say 100C my temperature differential needed was 0 C to maintain 50C. This was 2012 tech so... let's experiment!
Cheers
Try a egr cooler on the exhaust and run water through that and that will be 100plus c°
How many amps does the heater require on a continuous basis? I know the startup is probably a quite heavy load for the glow plug...but after that?
40-50 watts so about 4-5 amps.
I think you really need max power point tracking or, simpler, setting. You could possibly do it with a boost converter but take the feedback from the input rather than the output and back to front it so that as the input voltage falls below the. Set point it turns the mosfet off allowing the inductor to pump more voltage to the output.
Tecs work of heat differential, given one side is 90c I doubt that passive cooler is going to get any heat away quickly causing your hot and cold side to both be quite hot. I think that's your problem. A simple way to test this cheaply is to connect a CPU cooler to your tec to try and cool down the cold side (Yes, you need to power the CPU fan, but it's just a proof of concept. You could use the inlet air to pull cool airflow over the CPU cooler)
For a £/W comparison, you should only just replace the three expensive TECs with the cheap ones in that fancy heat exchanger. That way you cut out all other variables except what you are testing for. If the results are the same, or better, then time and money can be expanded on heat exchager design. If not worse, then you have saved that time and money.
Fantastic idea!
@@DavidMcLuckie are you using tec or teg ?
Are the TEG in series connection ?
hey! call it a green / clean energy generator and you might qualify for a huge government subsidy
Can you use that as a battery trickle
DAH!!
Maybe the exhaust gas is not even hot enough ever. Maybe it will never get hot enough. They usually build the heaters to to be efficent... and not have wasted heat going out the exhaust pipe.
HIT Thumbs up all you people. This is awesome! =)
OH MOMMA! That rig is sexeh!
Can OLD diesel fuel be boosted, using gasoline. If so, what ratio?
I'd put in 10% gasoline to start with and see if that improves performance.
What we need is to replace the cheap Chinese heater with a plutonium core as a heat source. I will look and see if I have a spare in my shed or a model gas turbine with a steam generator......nurse my medication please!
If you feel like trying a totally different approach, I bet scavenging the exhaust heat to boil water and spin a turbine would do the trick. :)
Man, you spent a lot of money to find out that physics works. I like that. But I wouldn't do it this way.
As I said in a previous message, the exhaust gas has a low density and a high temperature, so, it contains a small amount of energy. You could measure that energy by passing the exhaust pipe through water and find out how much energy remains in the water. And then multiply by 15%, which is the efficiency of a TEG (as far as I remember).
Cheers!
You'll enjoy the latest video in that series then. :)
@@DavidMcLuckie I've seen all of the series but not in the correct order.
yay
Gona throw a curve ball here… what a about a using the exhaust to heat a boiler and a small steam engine or…. Use a sterling engine and a Dynamo…!
try running them in parallel with diodes
Why not use a whole lot of thermocouples. both in series and parallel. You just only need one set in hot stream. No cold sides to deal with.
I immediately thought of something like this when I found out about these heaters. but Ive had no luck with thermoelectric heaters. they are fragile, use a tun of power bairly do any cooling. and in my attempts to get them to actually make electricity.. terrible. shame this never worked.
What area would these heaters heat ?
that depends on your insulation
there is 2 kinds peltier. one to cool (TEC) and one to heat (TEH), i am guessing you are using those to cool TEC in this experiment. are you running the element in series/parallel.
TEC thermo-electric cooler
TEH thermo-electric heater.
No. There are two kinds. TEC thermo electric coolers & TEG thermo electric generators. TEC just heat or cool either side depending on which way you connect them to the power supply.
This is exactly the stuff I get up to in my spare time. Turn the exhaust heat exchanger into a mini boiler and add a steam turbine to generate power.
Alternatively give up as this seems a busted concept and fit a solar panel 😂
Try the exhaust driving a 12v turbine
Interesting.Sodium iron battery s soon coming ,from salt.
Why not just convert diesel heater to a jet turbine with a power driven turbine disk in exhaust stream. Then you hook PT disk to a DC motor and now you have a good power generator. And a good heat source. Oh this looks like a model airplane turbine with a PTO.
Oh no how disappointing 😭😂
The way I see it is that the TEGs are 5% efficient so to get the 50w output from the TEGs we need to redesign the diesel heater with the TEGs inside,so then a 8kw heater can use 1kw of heat to create the 50w needed to run the heater and we still have 7kw of heat coming from the heater,
I imagine that if we have a temperature of 600 degrees on one side of the TEGs and 0 degrees one the other side of the TEGs the TEGs should be around 300 degrees which should give the maximum output of 25w per TEG.
I need to learn how to cast a new designed aluminium head for the heater with flat surfaces for the TEGs and send it to you 🤔
Yep thinking the same here. I would have guessed the best chance at making this work, would be to have the TEG molded in the internal heat exchanger body of the heater. IF the 5kw heater has to transfert 5kw from the heating flame to the circulated air, I think we could hope this heat transfert, going trough TEGs in the heat exchanger could possibly yield 50W (1%) of usable electricity ? There could be the problem that TEGs are much less good at transfering heat than the actual aluminium cast radiator, thus a lot more heat would be wasted trought much higher exaust gas temperature😖. IF this would be the case, much more combustion chamber/radiator surface area would be needed, and an appropriate number of TEGs added to cover that surface.
I was just thinking, he could grind all the fins off the back half of the heater itself, and make it flat, and then put the TEGs on that. Also could use the existing fan to cool a heatsink on the cold side of the TEGs if you could make a larger shroud around them.
Make A DC turbine with the exhaust to get your voltage.
If they are 7 pound each they will be tec modules will still produce power but even less then the true teg units
This is my suspicion, but I'm willing to give them a test.
Was it a TEC or a CET ?
TEG, the generator ones that don't melt until 250ºC. :)
Enough to charge a phone.
You'd be better of letting that water boil and spinning a turbine with it to generate the electricity...
Let me see if I can translate from US to Scottish. These things are fuck awful in- efficient. Like 5% electrical comes out of the heat what goes in. Sooooo, lots of heat going in, you have to get lots of heat out from the other side. Soooo, it's all (95%) abooout the cooling side. And you have to have an electrical load on the TEC units from the get go, to get things going. Fans or cooling water to get the fucking hot heat away.. From the hot side.. On the cooler side. Good luck.
Just a thought but have you tried the heating end of the heater instead of the exhaust.
not to be a smart arse but, if you're getting 6v couldn't you just get a 6v to 14v transformer?
DC itself doesn't work through a transformer, only AC. That DC to DC box does the magic that can turn low voltage to a higher one and vice versa. Had I only known the on/off button is actually the output on/off button.
That was a laugh and a half...300 quid and dog knows how many hours in building stuff for 1.4W...you'd get more power with a solar panel inside the shed!
Yes but nothing would compare with the beauty of that fabrication. I want one just as a table ornament. Way to go Dave!👍
Hey we don’t know the results until we build and try lol.
@@daveparf I think it would work with more thermal input but if it didn’t it is still a thing of considerable beauty. You have skills sir!
@@robinwells8879 thank you, I try my best 😊
@@daveparf Well done David, you did a great job on the heat grab chamber 👍
You're overthinking the whole thing use the exhaust gas to power a hydroelectric generator all it is doing is rotating the same way water would or if you were to blow into one of them drill powerd water pump 🤔 like a "turbo"
yeah there are ones made specifically for power generation. are these those? idk why people are on the steam turbine idea. do they know how much steam youd need to make to get 50w out of it. or how much water youd blast through youd be better off trying to heat exchange the exsaust from a jet engine and use its starter as a generator.. but forget about it being quiet. if these Peltier devices cant do it then there is no hope. for this heater design being self powered.
Impressive! Lots of work and ingenuity, but wouldn't copper have been a better conductor? You need to move a lot of heat rapidly and copper or bronze seems to be a better choice to do just that.
You could have spent £50 on a solar panel and got more power even in a Scottish rain storm or summer as you call it.
Someone else said I'd have got more power from a solar panel inside the workshop. :)
just run a diesel engine for CHP:-) spend the time making a quiet box for it (a challenge) and run it on waste engine oil (a challenge)
Yeah those heat for electric exchangers are at their best crap. Anytime I imagine building something like this it's always minimum 20 plus of these but when looking at free heat source but even at 7.00 each I figured I'll never get my money back in savings.
DAH...
CONDUCT A TEST FIRST!! Dah!! Take a $10 common plumbing propane torch... Attach the magic white square volt generator cube to a blank aluminum plate. Carefully/gradually heat the back of plate as high temp as possible. Hook up volt meter to magic white volt generator. DAH!!... what is highest volt possible. Will the magic generator cubes EVEN produce desired volt you ar seeking.
We know that TEGs work, I don't need to test they work. What we need to ascertain is- is there enough waste?; if so how best to harness it.
Thermoelectric power is simply a bridge too far to generate much of any usable power. Back in the 60s and 70s long before decent solar panels were available, certain remote sensing stations opted for propane powered thermoelectric power supplies. I acquired one surplus, and they were quite pitiful, using a 10,000 btu burner to produce 50 watts with a proprietary (at the time) TH module, DC-DC switching boost power converter, and 75 pound copper finned heat sink. It cost $10,000 when new. Efficiency of new modules like yours have not improved, even though costs have dropped greatly. The entire output of your 8k heater would not be enough to generate sufficient power to overcome their low TH efficiency and operate your project, even if it did have adequate thermal coupling .... nice try though!
PS: That same amount of propane could instead power a 1 KW inverter generator.
What the hell somebody -tube... was unsubscribed from the channel and the bell was unclicked today from yesterday
Maybe use a solar panel to keep the 12v battery charged
They don't work so well at night.
Three exhaust tubes, that's a lot of heat loss and they are so long. My cube idea with 5 tigs would work, just saying. 👍
Stop making the box out of aluminium' use steel it may take longer to start generating but it will keep generating longer when it stops . It will also get hotter. Fins Inside should still be aluminium. The fact the pipes are so hot you can't touch them shows the heat is there.
That's what I was thinking, most of the heat is lost through the manifold pipes. It would have been interesting to see them insulated. It probably would not come close to the power needed but would still show the potential.
I run my heater at around 1 kW so getting 12 Watts at 12.4 volts from it would be enough. I feel it could be like a dog chasing it's tale though.
@@pa_maj.MARTINI-van-MAN great point - the max heat will be in the manifold - so therefore the biggest losses.