Hi guys
I'd be interested in tapping into someone's experience here, as I know several of you folks use the heat from the Lister cooling water for things like heating houses, or for domestic hot water . . .
I have just poured a concrete pad and bolted down a base for my CS and genset. It will see the base of the CS bolted down on top of the steel base about 400mm (16 inches?) above the top of the concrete pad. The plan is to then pour the floor at a level about 100mm (4 inches) above this pad, so that the feet and lower section of the steel base are encased in the floor of the shed as a vibration-damping device.
Local Councils here don't care about a shed if it's less than 10 square metres; so I guess this one will end up being maybe 3.3 metres on a side (say ten feet-ish)
The other things that need to go into the shed (diesel tank, cooling water tank, battery bank etc etc ) will determine whether the CS sits central, off to one side, or sort of up against a wall. I favour "central" for ease of access at this stage of planning; but we'll see
Now, every house I have ever built or modified has had a woodstove with a wetback, so I'm comfortable with thermosiphon processes . . .
I have been thinking of using a 135-litre (30-gallon-ish) copper hot water cylinder as a cooling tank for the CS; and using the "in" and "out" plumbing and the internal riser on the "in" of the hot water cylinder as they would be laid out for use with any other thermosiphon system, so that I can have a low-pressure feed of water to the hot water cylinder at about half or maybe two-thirds of a bar (think, say, seven metres or twenty feet of head)
That would mean I need to mount the cylinder so that the base of it is a little above the "top hose" point of the Lister's cooling system, so that the hot water feed pipe is level or slightly rising between the head of the CS and the base of the cylinder, but actually terminates about 800mm (two and a half feet-ish) above that, at the open top of the riser inside the cylinder.
I'm just kicking this around as where the cylinder sits has some bearing on the shed layout, see . . . .
Basically, I'd like to be able to have a "hot tap" pipe coming off the top of the hot water cylinder once the CS has put some heat into it
If there's half a bar or so of pressure in the cylinder (no different to a radiator with, say, a ten-pound pressure cap) do you think the thermosiphon will still work OK? It works fine under identical circumstances when the heat source is a wetback . . .
Or maybe that bit of pressure is asking for trouble with the CS's water jacket?
I'd be interested in any thoughts or experience
Thanks, Mike