Hello, I'm a newb to the forum but have done a bit of hunting on my woefully slow 3g connection before posting and hope I'm not treading well trodden ground.
I live on a narrowboat in the UK and have a 4kw solid fuel burner that's lit pretty much 24/7 during the darker months when my 130W PV panel's not producing much.
We over at canalworld.net are playing with the idea of using peltier modules to generate electricity from our fires and I'm wondering whether anyone knows a bit more about these modules.
I appreciate that seebeck is viewed as rather inefficient source, however generating any significant current will be useful; a couple of amps over a day saves an hour's engine running while charging the batteries, this would mean a 25% reduction in our electricity generation cost over the winter.
Any significant differences between the modules sold as TEC rather than TEG would be of particular interest, and ideas as to how hot we can get them and the like would also be useful.
I've found an article in make magazine where someone using a 37watt cooler module with a candle managed 400ma, if there's a linear relationship then that would mean roughly 6amps for me which is most of our domestic consumption over 24 hours and would mean a wood powered laptop
Our electricity comes from 12v truck batteries that when new totalled 440Ahr but ours are pretty old now.
To save people doing too much reading, the side of the fire i intend to mount to runs at around 150 degrees C at a minimum; that's quite cool for lot of boats as we've got a 2Kw boiler in there that heats our hot water and 1.75Kw of rads; a lot of boats don't have such boilers.
For a bit of context, the last time someone tried guessing how many residential boats there are in the UK they reckoned at about 15000; the vast majority of which have solid fuel as their primary heat source as diesel's unreliable and expensive while LPG is unwieldy when you need to change bottles every few days.
I live on a narrowboat in the UK and have a 4kw solid fuel burner that's lit pretty much 24/7 during the darker months when my 130W PV panel's not producing much.
We over at canalworld.net are playing with the idea of using peltier modules to generate electricity from our fires and I'm wondering whether anyone knows a bit more about these modules.
I appreciate that seebeck is viewed as rather inefficient source, however generating any significant current will be useful; a couple of amps over a day saves an hour's engine running while charging the batteries, this would mean a 25% reduction in our electricity generation cost over the winter.
Any significant differences between the modules sold as TEC rather than TEG would be of particular interest, and ideas as to how hot we can get them and the like would also be useful.
I've found an article in make magazine where someone using a 37watt cooler module with a candle managed 400ma, if there's a linear relationship then that would mean roughly 6amps for me which is most of our domestic consumption over 24 hours and would mean a wood powered laptop
Our electricity comes from 12v truck batteries that when new totalled 440Ahr but ours are pretty old now.
To save people doing too much reading, the side of the fire i intend to mount to runs at around 150 degrees C at a minimum; that's quite cool for lot of boats as we've got a 2Kw boiler in there that heats our hot water and 1.75Kw of rads; a lot of boats don't have such boilers.
For a bit of context, the last time someone tried guessing how many residential boats there are in the UK they reckoned at about 15000; the vast majority of which have solid fuel as their primary heat source as diesel's unreliable and expensive while LPG is unwieldy when you need to change bottles every few days.