12v Water Heating

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astra
Posts: 13
Joined: Fri Jun 15, 2007 9:05 pm
Location: London

12v Water Heating

Postby astra » Fri Jan 16, 2009 8:58 am


microman
Posts: 48
Joined: Sat May 24, 2008 7:58 pm
Location: Durham

Postby microman » Fri Jan 16, 2009 9:31 am

No reason why not, though I would want to add a thermostat and protection for overcharging the battery.

JonSpence
Posts: 74
Joined: Thu Jan 03, 2008 1:05 pm
Location: Rochdale

Re: 12v Water Heating

Postby JonSpence » Fri Jan 16, 2009 11:33 am



It would work, however you don't need the battery. I did read of someone using wild AC from a turbine to provide background heat in his house. Resistive heaters don't care about the frequence and are fairly tolerant about the voltage.

You would have to be careful about the idea of fitting a thermostat though. If you remove the load from a wind turbine it will accelerate. You could have a catostrophic failyer. The thermostat would have to divert the current into a dump load (ie heating the outside world).

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Jeremy
Posts: 472
Joined: Thu Jul 31, 2008 6:35 pm
Location: Salisbury

Postby Jeremy » Fri Jan 16, 2009 4:17 pm

Around 25 years ago a friend of mine gave up his job, dropped out and bought an old derelict chapel. He was off grid and built a superb heating system using wind power.

In the very centre of the big building (which was just one large room originally) he built a very well insulated closed rectangular room, around 10 to 12 feet to each side and about the same height. He filled this room with large rocks, granite boulders picked up from the beach. Each was around a hundredweight or so.

From the local tip he started scrounging old night storage heaters, and stripped out the elements from a few. He laced the elements through the spaces between his large pile of rocks and wired them directly to a home made wind generator. I have a feeling that the generator used a converted lorry alternator. It had blades carved from driftwood that were around 8 to 10 feet long.

The rocks reached pretty high temperatures after a while, but very little heat escaped into the building normally. The rooms were all built around this central storage heater. Whenever he needed heat in any room, he would open a small vent leading from the heat store to the room, then turn on a small battery powered fan to pressurise the sealed heat store room.

AFAIK this system worked very well indeed. I don't think he had any form of regulation on it at all, he just dumped as much power as was available into the heating elements, whether he needed heat or not. I've no idea how long he could go just on stored heat, with no input, but my guess would be a pretty long time.

Jeremy

microman
Posts: 48
Joined: Sat May 24, 2008 7:58 pm
Location: Durham

Postby microman » Fri Jan 16, 2009 4:59 pm

Now that what I call a storage heater!


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