It'a real bonus, Bruce

The hillside up above my flat bit is dotted with springs and the previous owners developed the best of them

They got a digger in and dug a hole you could dump my Camry into, let it run for a while until it was clean and then just made a drain out of perforated "Novaflo" drainage pipe out of the middle of it and filled the whole thin up with pumice rocks then fenced it off to keep stock out. 

Water flows into a tank that runs three households and a plant nursery, then it overflows into a smaller tank that feeds stock troughs on two properties

Maybe it flows a litre or two a second?  Although it doesn't sound like much it flows 24/7, so maybe it would fill one of your US 55 gallon drums every few minutes

Every time I go there and turn on the tap I appreciate it.

Next time I'm up I'll take a photo of the hillbilly direct-on-line solar shower lol

Cheers

"over-design/overbuild" is my middle name. Starfire

But you gotta keep your eye on the objectives . . .

Hot water is not the aim.  Free hot water is just a handy by-product of a process that keeps my shed warm and cooks the dinner.  As someone who has had/modified almost 40 years' worth of "coal ranges" I know that the modern ones - the Don Harry/Otago Castings version of the "shacklock" - produce too much hot water as they are designed to cook, heat house and produce hot water for a couple of Otago farming families snowed in for a fortnight in winter

I was always telling one of my kids "go and have a shower" to get rid of some hot water.  In the last place I put a radiator in the bathroom to heat towels and radiate some warmth and just trickled water "to waste" back into the storage tank outside just to get rid of it

This one I have sized the wetback to about 40% of one of those.  In about five hours of burning it'll heat 180L of water to "bloody hot" and that's about right

My water comes from a spring up the hill at about 2 bar and I have a big open vent at about 4 metres with the pressure-reducing valve at 3.7 metres I think.  Should be OK

Apart from breaking my ass carrying the bits in to assemble, there's no downside to the heavy construction - I figure it is "heat sink"

The wetback fittings transition from 40mm Galv BSP to 32mm copper with the use of "Starkie" compression fittings made in England.  I had to order them in and they were $100 each - but the ones on the shelf in the plumbers' merchants were a lightweight Chinese imitation - even the counter bloke looked a bit embarrassed about them

Time will tell

Don't know if this is kosher or not . . .

But I would guess we have a bunch of off-grid folks here

My last three houses have had increasingly-modified woodstoves.  The sort with ovens & wetbacks . . .

But for the "cabin" I am pottering along with, which is my "retirement" project, I decided the way to get the features I want is to build it myself.  So you can get things like the heating-rate of the wetback just right, and the size of the firebox just as you want it . . .

As you can see, it's still in the "build" stages, but last weekend I ran it for an evening after connecting up the wetback (a bit rough as yet) and the heating rate for hot water seems almost perfect

Will pictures show here?  I'll press "post" and we'll see

lol

"   Queen does your thermostat have a small 3/16" hole in it? The small hole will help with the gulping and eliminates the hot cold opening closing of the thermostat. The hole serves the same purpose as your flow control valve. The thermostat will open fully if needed. The valve could bite you. If the thermostat is full open but can only flow the restricted  valve setting it could get hot eventuality  "

+1 on what XYZer says.  I have seen these machines in operation here in NZ many times just working off what we would call a "44-gallon drum" elevated cooling tank thermosiphon system.  Many have been hard-working machines running sheep-shearing plants that work hard and run for 12 or 14 hours a day for a month or two solid at shearing time.

Although the conventional wisdom is that a diesel likes and needs to run "hot" and to work "hard" to look after the bore etc, none of these machines have thermostats and they don't really seem to care much, over the years, about varying cooling temperatures

IMHO a serious overheat is more likely to stop your machine than a bit of a slow warm-up will ever do . . .

I wouldn't be putting any restrictions in the cooling system myself

Just my $0.02

Hey Can

+1 on this comment :

Hi Cam

Look at this in the 'Wall of Knowledge' and all will be revealed!

http://listerengine.com/smf/index.php?topic=7374.0

I actually printed it out and followed it slavishly.

Cheers Stef

It was THE way to go for someone like me who had never seen the inside of one of these before . . .

Cheers

Hi there guys.  I know there are lots of you guys who are very savvy about generators and related (Starfire, you're a candidate for starters)

I recently bought a little generator unit.  It is a four-cylinder flathead Waukesha petrol engine with a four a-section belt drive to a (nominally) 28V generator head which also has a starter winding.  I would guess it was made early in the 1950s, or if it is built later, is of an old design that was kept in production.

I just bought it to use the generator head as it is an open-drive design - I can picture it hanging of one of the  CSs doing a sterling job charging a 24V battery bank

The little Waukesha looks to be maybe 600 or 800cc?  I sold it to someone who likes to play with things like that.

These little units were widely used in aviation, I am told, and this one was on a NZ air base keeping helicopter starter batteries topped up, so the son of the original owner told me.  If I was going to guess I would think the little motor might have worked at around 1500 RPM - maybe a bit more?

The generator drive is geared about 1:2 or maybe 1:1.8, so maybe the generator head is designed to spin around 3000 RPM?

The generator is a solid unit, it'd be 30 Kgs, probably.

I don't know what is the relationship between RPM and output for a generator (as opposed to an alternator) and I'd be interested in any thoughts on what the common wisdom is on this, and on how fast or slow a generator of such an old design should be run

I'd appreciate any thoughts

Cheers, Mike

Humour, Glort.  ("Humor") for our friends Stateside