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Messages - Rtqii

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1
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: October 02, 2006, 06:02:18 PM »
One of the best ways I can think of to utilize engine and solar (and woodstove or geo) heat is to have a centrally located, well insulated, tank with three  heat exchanger circuits.   One circuit moves water through the solar panels to the central tank ONLY if the heat in the panels is greater than the heat in the storage tank.  The second  circuit does the same with the Lister coolant tank.  If there's heat in the engine circuit greater than in the storage, the pump starts moving it to the central tank.. The third circuit feeds radiators or other heating devices where the heat is wanted.

The central tank can be plain water with an added biocide and in total darkness.  The water never goes anywhere, it's only a heat sink....add lots of salt to raise the potential for storage.     The circulating circuits can be antifreeze mix so the solar system doesn't have to be drained in the winter.  None of that fluid ever leaves either.

It takes several thermostatically controlled valves, a couple of small circulator pumps, and a control board that controls the circulators and has the overrides to quit adding heat at a certain point and to dump (the unlikely) excess heat to an outside radiator by way of a diverter valve.

If everything is run from 12 or 24VDC the whole system could be run 24/7 off grid.

Great minds...

I can use the heat since it is free... Until I priced a suitable tank, then priced the time and effort involved in building a suitable tank... And this project may have to wait for development. Maybe I can use the free heat, but it's not really free and I don't need it that badly yet (after all it's warm outside :) )

Still... It is one of those "Because it's there" adventures and will eventually have to be worked out. Hotater you describe exactly the correct way to pump, store, and utilize waste or solar generated heat.

I had a water test performed on the well water I will be using until my cachement system is developed... It is extremely high in TDS and exceeds the county standards for dissolved magnesium sulfate... And explains why the local water gives me the runs (active ingrediant in many laxitives)... I also checked out a swamp cooler system a local guy was running with the same water... The mineral content is high enough the entire system has to be cleaned and purged weekly and it still looks like a salt water fish tank gone bad; salt creeping everywhere and all the steel that is not stainless, like the frame mount to the building, is heavily rusted. I plan on using a fountain for evaporative cooling, and salting is going to be a real problem with 50-60+ gallons a day evaporating in the summer.

Next up on my list of needed equipment is a whole house RO unit with sufficient capacity to supply the fountain with demineralized water and this brings me, in a roundabout way... Back to hot water and heat exchangers.

The byproduct of running a reverse osmosis membrane on the local well water is brine. The accepted practice locally is to drain this brine directly to the soil where these units are operated. This practice will eventually result in salt plumes developing sub-soil and it may hurt deeply rooted native desert plants, not to mention salting up the groundwater. Also I hate to see stuff like this go to waste; it's perfect for use in hot tubs, a bidet, pre-wetting in the shower, and for heat storage.

I think with a high enough salt concentration in some circuits of the heat exchanger system, given the local climate... I can get away with running the brine in my hot water solar panels. At the worse the fluid would get slushy on a few cold nights, I don't see the brine hard freezing since 20 degrees F is a rare and short lived phenomina. An interesting side note... The Fahrenheit scale is based on saturated brine... 0 degrees F is the freezing point of saturated brine.

I cannot see running brine thru an engine however... Especially since most of the minerals that came back with high TDS numbers are sulfates which would cause a great deal of corrosion potential... So I will run the engine on a glycol based coolant, and can sink the heat into the tank which is outside of my reach for the moment.

I am thinking that for this to be practical (hot water storage tank w/heat exchanger loops) the tank needs to carry some summer heat over into winter. This means a large tank. Ground temps locally drop to below 60*F when you dig down 9-10 feet or so... I talked to one guy that excavated down to 12 feet and installed air ducting to feed cool air to his off-grid place but there is a _lot_ of radon contamination with this type system (he ignored me when I pointed this out)... So a below ground tank installation is not suitable, the ground will sink too much heat. This means a large above ground tank with a lot of covering insulation... Like a hay stack sealed up with stucco or something of the sort. In order to store enough summer heat to warm a radiant floor in winter I am thinking it's not worth the hassle for anything smaller than 10,000 gallons of extremely well insulated above ground tanking... It's either a huge job, or a very expensive one to farm out.

I have already budgeted for construction of a 10,000 gallon tank for fresh water storage, sunk below ground, and plumbed for a fountain and plans for a gazebo with a ceiling fan for shade and air movement.

2
Is that gear bronze?

That gear is bronze.

I love the custom cover door... Somebody made a friend in a high place!!!!

3
Listeroid Engines / Re: 12-2 Genset Mounting
« on: October 02, 2006, 05:08:46 PM »
I'm now thinking I may just add expansion joints between the slab and the block sides that pass through the slab. Forget cushioning the block or the set with rubber or other resilent material. I don't wont it to move(or as little as possible), period. Reading hotaters accounts have convinced me of that. I'm just considering detaching the block mass from the mass of the slab. Thats all.

Expansion joints that prevent direct bonding of the equipment block to the slab should work... I plan on sealing some carpet scraps in plastic tarping with silicon sealant and placing those around the block at strategic locations... Like between the block and the surrounding floor.

You also mentioned the mounting lugs (threaded bar, bolts, etc).  If the mount lugs are cast solidily into the block all the way up to the engine base, all the torque applied when tightening, and all the force applied by engine motion, will converge on the one or two lowest exposed threads on the mounting lug... The bottom one or two threads where the lug exits the block; this is where the bolt will fail and shear off.

In my research I have seen specs that prevent this localized stress... The top 10-12 inches of the mounting lug are covered with foam, tubing, tape, etc., when the block is poured. This free section of the lug distributes the installation and operational stresses over the 10-12 inches of unbonded metal... So the torque and vibrational stresses are not focused on just one or two threads.

4
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: September 21, 2006, 05:56:09 AM »
Guy....now I know what is wrong with you! You played with those damn british cars...early 60's Morris Minors and a Major...:)....My first car was a basket case 51 MGTD....I had more fun learning how they did things over there...Loved that car had tons o fun...! Now look at what I got into..at least for a yank I know what the hell a Whitworth tread is...Speaking of time invested for maitenance it is a good thing I didn't have to spend as much time getting my Cummins to run smooth or it would be an insurace claim! I think I'll go out to the shop and get a wiff of some "oil tainted air "....

My first car was a candy apple red MGTD 52. I saw my first major gasoline/vapor explosion during the rebuild/restore. Liquid fuel has 9 times the energy per pound than commercial dynamite.

I still have the car... It needs paint and a new top. Engine is cherry, it's about time I push the pedal.

 

5
Generators / Re: Peak output and flywheels
« on: September 19, 2006, 06:42:19 PM »
Of course it all depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Maximum peak power of course!!!  ;D

I tend, based on experience, to think you are very much correct about oversizing the generator set. I know for a fact how hard these circuits are on everything.  No sooner do you beef up the weakest component in the system (because the previously engineered component failed in serivce), then the next weakest component in the system fails... When the step up transformer, tank circuit and gaps are all pretty much bullet proofed, the next place to look for a failure would logically reside in the control cabinet & power supply.

I am hoping to keep the actual design, research, and prototyping power levels in the range between 3-6 kW, and figured on installing an ST15kW generator head for the mains supply. I could do an ST20, I held back at the last second on the genhead purchase because I have no place to store it until the shop/lab building is roofed and that is a few weeks away yet. There is a lead time in importing the engine, so I paid for that and held the check for the ST15 back.

There is the inevitable temptation in this line of research to match a larger engine to a larger generator and anybody familiar with this equipment knows there is an infinity quotient directly associated with Tesla's resonance patent... There is no limit to how large and powerful this equipment can be scaled up to. It can lead to bankruptcy.

I have designed, built, and operated Tesla oscillators and resonators in the 10-15 kW range, and having done this I am of the opinion that this is 2-3x above the power levels needed in order to produce viable prototypes and demonstrations of the new applications I have patented.  Most of the time I think 3 kW of input power should do the trick, and if it doesn't then 6 kW surely will make my points.

I have liquidated, or am in the process of liquidating, practically all my assets to put this project together... I have the money required to do the job right, but the sky is not the limit. With this in mind, I sized the power plant for dual use... It will run the ranch most of the time, and it will power the research for a small fraction of the time. Giving the balancing act required whenever a project like this is designed, engineered, and paid for... I opted to go with a 20 HP prime mover to turn the generator, and a 15kW ST. I would not consider spending a few hundred extra on an ST20 to be extravagant.

The goal here with the Tesla research is to design, engineer, and prototype patent models for commerical development... Not the commerical applications themselves. Admittedly, I could probably do this work on a much smaller scale, and could even use solid state oscillators... But it would not give people the picture of what a commerical type installation and application would look like... In other words, the proofs can be done on apparatus you can probably hold in your hand and plug into a wall outlet... But in my experience people have limited imagination and are not able to see that scaled up equipment operates on exactly the same fundamental physics, only everything is larger.

So in effect what I am doing is developing a research facility as a scaled down mini-plant... Fuel will come in, drive the prime mover, spin the jackshaft with flywheels and turn the generator.... It will have all of the basic components of a stand alone commerical enterprise, just on an R&D scale.

Good capacitance is expensive... I have some good capacitance with low minutes, and it has never been excited at anywhere near its rated voltage and capacity... They were designed to be tough enough to process 20 kW all day, and should have 72 hours of life in them at 40,000 volts AC rapidly pulsed. I should be able to get many, many research hours out of them at much lower voltages and power levels.

If I were to decide to go with a much larger generator, I would end up moving to higher power levels. If I were to do this I would convert the main oscillators over to 3 phase and pick up a used commerical 3-phase generator to drive it. I suppose this is possible eventually, I have thought about it, but it is not in the cards at this point.  I think perhaps what I may do is put some extra floor space in the engine room, leave a blank spot in the floor where a mounting block for this upgrade could be placed in the future... Then, if I see a steal deal on a big 3 phase generator...

But I would not remove the Listeroid and ST genset from service... I still need a primary power supply for the ranch.


6
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: September 19, 2006, 05:56:44 AM »
Some people can't recognize the fact that show engines are not working engines. Show engines get run sure... Most of the time at a lazy idle, as slow as the machine can operate... With no load.

Show engines are not worked for their keep. If they pull loads, they pull for short periods in demonstrations. They have been removed from their mounting blocks and they are transported around for demonstration, not work, purposes.

Go up to any guy with a nice engine at a show and offer them money to belt their engine up to a hearty load and pull it for 2-3 days straight at maximum output. What is he going to tell you to your face?

7
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: September 19, 2006, 04:51:58 AM »
one display was a maytag engine with an axe stuck in the top..sid

I can sympathize... They are either hard for people to start or impossible for people to start sometimes; you have to learn them. The plugs foul, the starting mixture is not the same as the running mixture, and if it doesn't start right up, the plugs foul. The guy that sold me my engine told me if it did not start in three kicks to not bother with it again until the next day unless I cleaned the plug.

But once you learn to reliably start and run one, 2 cycle engines of any other type are a breeze... A dream to operate. I blue printed a McCulloch engine to run on my racing cart frame and after the compression was raised and the timing advanced, it was nearly as bad as the Maytag... But I had already learned  ;)

8
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: September 19, 2006, 04:36:22 AM »
so you havent had or worked a listeroid but you can get on your high horse and say we're wrong and dont know what we're doing even though we are running them all day everyday day after day. yes we have break downs some are worse then others. when you get your engine and you run oh say 2000 hours and you know more real time data people might start listening

This post is really and truly nothing more than a diversionary tactic. Internet smoke and mirrors, "look over there not at the facts and material presented, look what I FOUND!!!" (P.S. I am honest, I voluntarily answered and I am not ashamed of the fact I research projects before I start engineering them).

If I quoted you someone on this exact topic who has run Listers from the time he was a kid (and I can)... You would find yet another tactic to dismiss the same factual information. I am giving you the straight up facts. If you researched this yourself, instead of operating on an _opinion_ you would come to the realization that there really and truly are engineering specs for mounting this equipment... It boils down to there being a right way, and a wrong way.

My never having mounted a Lister type or worked one hard for long periods is not really relevent to the facts, it is only relevent to _your_ opinion of them. There are some people that never change opinions, no matter what, and that's a fact too... I am not like that, I make logical decisions based on the best available data, including historicals, engineering guides, and current engineering practices in this instance.

Never mind the fact that the _only_ reason I bothered with the research and education was because I will be operating the engine as a primary power supply where failure will cause grave inconvenience.

As for people using flex mounts... I have no problem with your doing that, it's your engine, your decision, go for it.  At least you should recognize that by three separate standards (historical, manufacturer, and current practice) this is not the best or proper way to mount stationary reciprocating equipment.

"But it works fine" - That is a comeback I have seen before. Great if you _think_ so... I readily recognize and acknowledge that people are doing this. Great.

Putting pennies in old fuse boxes works fine. I would hope someone would speak up if I started telling people that I was doing it and it was cheaper and less work than driving to the hardware store... It works great.


9
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: September 19, 2006, 04:16:29 AM »
LOL at the Maytag... Indeed you do see them at the shows, a lot of them. The washers are rare apparently and the washer I happened upon was the correct match for my engine.  There were a zillion of them made, but complete restored washers are worth over $500 today easily... I had people standing in line to buy mine. And the two weeks spent getting it together was just a few hours every day after work.

The Maytag go-cart was way under powered for my speed demon tastes, and I was really tempted to hot-rod the engine but I never put brakes on the cart. Eventually I bought a racing cart frame (with real brakes) and blue printed a chain saw engine to feed the speed demon.

We had a big hill in our neighborhood and running flat out down the hill I could get to maybe 20 mph. Not fast enough, but the real exciting part was not having brakes. I caught hell for wearing out a pair of tennis shoes in one weekend, and several times I had as much smoke coming off the soles of my shoes as the Maytag produced. Gawd... I used to tape carpet scraps to the soles of my shoes, and I got brake heat induced blisters and callouses on the soles of my feet with that cart... The frame was made from a shopping cart I found in a nearby creek. It was chromed!!!

It was no different than a soapbox gravity racer really, except the Maytag would chug you _slowly_ back up the hill for another run.


10
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: September 19, 2006, 03:14:37 AM »
as for the maytag engine///

Don't get me started... But I did end up having a good experience with my engine. I sold it for more than I paid for it  ;)

It's not a bad story... I am not going to talk about the engine specifics  :)

I bought the engine from a guy for $10 back when $10 to a kid was real money and you had to work hard to come up with it.  The guy started it to prove it ran. My mother scowled when I showed up at the door excited and told her I needed her to drive me back over to pick it up.

After a couple of weeks I figured out how to start it reliably... It needed work, I ended up tearing it down and did everything. Parts were available and machine work was reasonable on a single cylinder. After awhile I got bored with it, ran it on a go-cart for some years... Got bored with the go-cart.

Years passed, other engines came and went with them.

My great aunt died, and she owned property in Illinois where she grew up. I was one of the people tasked with cleaning it up.  Down in the basement I dug out an old maytag washer without an engine and I got an idea.

It took me two weeks to clean, repair, and repaint the washer. I had junked the go-cart ages ago, but saved the engine... I dropped the engine into the washer and sold it for a mint. Real money... I was amazed.

11
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: September 19, 2006, 02:09:46 AM »
I am going to cheerfully ignore Guy's posts  ;D ;D ;D (And laugh)

12
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: September 19, 2006, 02:04:02 AM »
Quote
i asked what if any listeroid your running and how much.

This is a good question and I want to expound on it. I love engines, have since I was a kid.

I have never in my life had the opportunity to really _work_ a classic type stationary flywheel engine. There are a number of reasons for this, not one of them related to lack of desire. That has not stopped me from purchasing, working on them, running them (not under real load, or in a real working application)... You see these type engines at shows, guys have them skid mounted and set up on trailers to make them transportable.... But that is not a working engine, it's a show engine.

Now... Finally... For the first time in my life I have real reasons to work a classic design flywheel engine. Reasons important enough to justify the time, expense, and effort in doing the job right... The first time.

I looked at my inventory of engines, and I sold them for cash. They were show engines, not large enough to generate sufficent power, and parts, parts, parts... You should not take a collector engine and put it to work as a prime power source if you cannot make or obtain replacement parts at a reasonable cost.

I researched... I like the Lister design, I have seen orginals running. I like the Witte design, I have seen them running... Other brands of flywheel oilfield engines interest me a great deal, I almost bought a Witte configured as a genset... But from a cost and parts availablity standpoint, the Lister clones from India are hands down winners for a real working engine of this class and type.

Next up, after the decison to purchase was made... The engineering requirements to properly _work_ the engine on-site were researched. Now there are two schools of thought about this (as if you don't know having read down this far)... But the people who advocate and employ flexible mounting strategies for these type stationary engines are not supported historically, they are not supported in the factory engineering specs (these are people who buy things and throw away the operators manual apparently), they are not supported by modern engineering guidelines where stationary reciprocating equipment mounts are specified.

The right way to do this job is exceedling clear. I will have a concrete truck come on site and pour my equipment blocks after I have excavated out to specs and placed in the rebar, isolation padding, and formed everything up. It's that simple, even if it is a lot of work and it does mean an additional expense. This is a permanent installation, and I am going to work my engine _hard_

There is nothing at all new, or controversial, about stationary engine technology... It has been done, and done, and done for years and years and years. You can pick up any good engineering manual or search on-line to get exact equipment block specifications: block size, depth in the ground, footprint dimensions, material specs; everything is out there in print from accurate, well researched, and historically proven engineers.

Then... You have the other school.

13
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: September 19, 2006, 01:01:09 AM »
Quote
Rtqii will likely argue that Caterpillar engines are transportation engines.  You don`t need to move fast to be transportation. In this case half-fast is good enough.  ;D

Dead on correct... Caterpillar engines are all designed for transportation applications. Even a crawler or a dozer is a transportation machine. The engine mount points are not designed or engineered for stationary mounting, the flywheels are tiny in relation to the total mass of the moving parts. The entire Caterpillar ethos is slow moving power delivery.

Again... People are using excuses... The engine is big, and somebody installed it in a stationary application, therefore it is a stationary engine... That is fallacious logic.

There are some engine applications that make up a grey area... But Lister stationary engines are not even close to the grey. The engines I am referring to are large marine and locomotive engines. Technically these engines may be classed as transportation engines, however in practice they are designed for, and actually employ stationary type mounting; no flexible mountings are used in these applications. However, the frames they are firmly bolted to are moving about, so the engines are designed without much flywheel mass.


14
Listeroid Engines / Re: 6/1 and generator setup
« on: September 19, 2006, 12:49:37 AM »
Such anger, Rtqii.

Pshaw pa... If I was angry, I would let you know.

You don't know the difference between right and wrong engineering mounts... Now you are an expert on anger too???

LMAO  :D ;D

15
General Discussion / Re: Call me Lazarus...
« on: September 19, 2006, 12:46:43 AM »
... I see that since my departure / absence other have taken up the mantle of defenders of the faith, e.g. plain old hard engineering fact, and for their troubles are being pilloried in exactly the same way I was by those who either think they know better, or are just in it for the argument anyway.

LOL... That's probably me you are talking about  ;D

Quote
... I posted a picture a long time ago of a broken Lister crankshaft, and said here is what vibration does. Vibration kills machinery. That is not an opinion, that is fact, you either have the (engineering) education and experience to understand that or you don't, waste of time arguing with people who don't and who don't therefore have the tools required to learn why they are wrong, let the fuckers rubber mount their engines, they will pay the price eventually.

I try to tell them... I always put in the caveat... People are free to do whatever they want with their own engines on their own soil.  I draw the line when they come here and start posting to convince people how to ruin bearings, break crankshafts, crack walls & foundations etc...

http://listerengine.com/smf/index.php?topic=1033.msg13735#msg13735

So of course I am pilloried!!!

Good to see you Guy, stop in again soon!!!

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