I have set up my 6/1 Metex from Sam Crosby with an induction generator to power my house and to use our states net metering law to send electricity into the grid.  I produce electricity in the winter and bank excess for the summer.  This week I finally got my Cogen set up operating and thought some of you might be interested in the results.

The system is set up with two tanks.  The first tank is the standard closed cycle thermosiphon cooling tank.  Water from that tank is pumped into a natural gas 40 gallon hot water tank that has the Listeroid exhaust running up through it.  This system is directly fed into 80 feet of hot water base board in the downstairs of my house.  The water travels through about 60 feet of the baseboard, goes into the boiler and then through another 20 feet of HWBB until it makes it back to the Listeroid.  All of this is pumped with a Taco 008V that is probably pumping about 13gpm.  I maintain about 10psi in the system (no water in oil).

Hot water is supplied at about 130-145F
Return water runs 115-125F
Temperature differential between the two remains at 15-17F
I believe 10F of the heat rise comes from the engine cooling sytem and 5F comes from the exhaust heat recovery
Intial exhaust temp - 525F at engine
Final exhaust temp - 340F
There is about 4' of 2" exhaust pipe before the heat exchanger
Constant generator output of about 3.5kW for 24 hours per day yields 84kWh per day @14cents/kwh yields $11.76/day

So, the big question, does it work?

Yeah, it works great.  The past two nights the outside temp has gotten down to 14F the coolest the house got was 67F with the BOILER OFF.  The system does not provide enough heat to raise the house temp in these conditions, but it keeps the house temperature essentially stable.  When we need to raise the temp we turn the boiler on for one cycle.

I estimate that the baseboard is putting out about 260Btu/Hr/Ft at 130F(extrapolated back from the manufacturers website). 

80Ft x 260Btu/Hr=20,800Btu/Hr or 499,000Btu/day into house.  Displacing over 3 gallons of heating oil per day. @ 2.25/gallon - $6.75 per day

Overall I heat the following:

2 1/2 car insulated but leaky garage - direct from the Listeroid waste heat - 72F stable
Breezeway - 400SF no insulation with insufficient baseboard - 55-60F
House - 1300' of downstairs that we heat with Listeroid, well insulated with 65 ft of baseboard - 67-72 F interior temp that drops to 67 at night when we open up the kids bedroom doors for an additional 500SF of heated area
Outside air temp - 15-32F

I have purchased an hour meter to determine how often my boiler normally runs to heat the house so I can develop a better estimate of the actual heating oil savings.

Most important result:
Wife likes Lister because her house and car are warm and electric bill has gone to essentially $0.

Has anyone tried making a fuel preheater out of the cavity that the fuel filter cover plate mounts to?  I was thinking of drilling 4 mounting holes in a solid piece of steel plate and adding fittings to run the WVO in the bottom corner and out the top opposite corner.  My external cylinder temp runs around 180Deg F so it should be more than a sufficient amount of heat to do the job as long as the oil has enough time in the heat exchanger.  Thoughts?

Anyone consider replacing the reed valve with a PCV valve and hose up to the air intake? 

My lister 6/1 has about 4 hours on it and seems to generate significant fumes inside of its enclosure.  The engine is relatively clean and the exhaust seems tight to the outside.  The next obvious location for fumes to be coming from seems to be the crankcase ventilation reed valve.  I realize that blowby will be reduced significantly after about 10 hours of use but this seems like it might be a good modern improvement.

I have heard of runaway diesels due to overfilled crankase oil being sucked in through the PCV pipe.  Does anyone think this is an issue with a 6/1?

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Scott