On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 01:41:39 +0000, Larry wrote:



Parrots both talk, INCESSANTLY. I wish they'd never learned....OR HEARD
AN ELECTRONIC TONE! Once learned, any sound is repeated, AD NAUSEUM!
It's only funny the first 3 days. Then it drives me CRAZY!

Luckily, there is an on-off switch! Simply cover the cages and they
sleep, giving you a break in blessed SILENCE! Too quiet at home? Get a
parrot!

Thanks for the best laugh I've had in a while, Larry.
BTW, my wife bought a battery powered "parrot" which
has a sound activated recording and playback system.
Pretty irritating after the novelty wears off.
She sent it to her mother in Poland, where it was the hit of the
village. Don't know if it still lives on.

--Vic

On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 16:20:16 +0700, wrote:


Explain that again in one syllable words for me :-)

As I understand what you are saying you mean to remove the present
water cooled exhaust manifold from the cooling system and replace it
with a heat exchanger device to heat what? Water to make steam or oil
to heat water to make steam? Or did I miss something there?

What Larry's talking about is using a liquid medium near the exhaust
that will transport the heat to the distiller, similar to what nuke
plants do, but I think they still use water for the transfer.
He mentioned trans fluid, and I'm not sure of its specific heat, but
there are "better" or more appropriate heat transfer mechanisms than
water, as seen in freon A/C.
In any case, though I'm far from an expert in this, I did operate
steam plants in the Navy and acquired but never used a Stationary
license, so I speaking with *some* experience.
As I said before, complexity and size are the impediments to what
Larry is after. Science finds nothing magical in capturing and moving
heat.
But every time I've seen it done it involved sound materials selection
and engineering, bulky heat transfer vessels, and huge amounts of
insulation.

The reason I ask is because many years ago I maintained a distillation
plant that used exhaust heat to make steam. If I remember correctly
the primary power was a Perkins 4-108 diesel and it didn't make enough
exhaust heat to boil water at sea level atmospheric pressure. The
distillation vessel was heated as hot as possible using the exhaust
and then an engine driven vacuum pump dropped the pressure in the
still to create steam at temperatures lower then 212F.

Whether this was done to increase thruput or because exhaust heat
alone was not sufficient I do not recollect.

Probably both. Since the purpose was to make water, they used a
combination that made the most water. Engine exhaust is certainly
hot enough to boil water. If the same engine was driving the vacuum
pump, that's good, because a diesel's designed purpose is to create
mechanical power. No doubt you know all this, so I hope my talking
hasn't put you to sleep.

In any event, given the cost of reverse osmosis systems using engine
heat would seem rather attractive.

It would be good to see development and competition bring the initial
cost of RO units down. I'm still interested in Larry's thoughts about
the "bacteria" issues he has seen in RO units. His thoughts on the
cruise boat ailments being related to the watermakers are very
interesting.
In the meantime, his stovetop distillers are working well for him, and
use heat in a time-tested and pretty efficient way, with almost direct
application of flame to water.

--Vic

wrote in news:m4p4e354ggmshgch6l42g4gutlpd5g19u0@
4ax.com:

Explain that again in one syllable words for me :-)

As I understand what you are saying you mean to remove the present
water cooled exhaust manifold from the cooling system and replace it
with a heat exchanger device to heat what? Water to make steam or oil
to heat water to make steam? Or did I miss something there?

To BOIL, not heat, seawater into steam...while still flushing the
manifold with a tiny bit of seawater to carry the salt, biologicals and
pollutants overboard at 212F. I want to turn the exhaust manifold into
an evaporator, just like the big ships USED to have before RO. The water
in the exhaust heat exchanger would have a controlled flow of seawater
into it to A) maintain boiling temperature while B) flushing out the
remnants overboard, self flushing evaporator, which isn't new.

In addition, I want to replace the antifreeze in the water jacket with
transmission fluid, or any free fluid that has a higher boiling point
than water like transmission fluid, that must A) not boil, itself, other
than at the head like the antifreeze does, now...and B) transfer higher
than 300F heat to a secondary heat exchanger, another boiler heated by
the coolant, not exhaust gasses, to boil even more seawater in a
secondary self-flushing boiler. Both these steam outputs would go to
one, or if necessary two, stainless steel condensors that look exactly
like the pipe-in-a-pipe freon condensors on a marine air conditioner,
which is very compact. This condensor would have a seawater jacket
around the central stainless steel steam pipe it cools, dumping the heat
of condensation into the hot water tank heat exchanger before dumping
excess heat overboard. The condensor only need be pulled apart far
enough so that gravity will drain the distilled water out of it at your
worst angle of heel so it doesn't vapor lock...and be mounted above the
engine far enough so only steam can reach it from the gas outlet of the
various boilers below.

A power boat wasting millions of Btu/day would sink from fresh water
flooding if this thing were left tanking it all. Being as the distilled
water output from this contraption were HOT water, not cold as with RO,
you might even be able to just tank it for that hot shower, directly.
The water coming out of my steam condensor will burn you at 200F. To get
a cold drink, you'd have to cool the engine distiller's water before
drinking it....maybe with further seawater cooling, which is plentiful.

There's so much great heat just going up the stacks and running out of
the boat from the seawater indirect cooling systems on these monsters
it's pitiful! Heat is POWER! All it needs is useful conversion. I've
never figured out why a big power boat doesn't have a Stirling genset
running off its waste exhaust heat, alone! God, it's certainly hot
enough with enough Btus.


The reason I ask is because many years ago I maintained a distillation
plant that used exhaust heat to make steam. If I remember correctly
the primary power was a Perkins 4-108 diesel and it didn't make enough
exhaust heat to boil water at sea level atmospheric pressure. The
distillation vessel was heated as hot as possible using the exhaust
and then an engine driven vacuum pump dropped the pressure in the
still to create steam at temperatures lower then 212F.

It's not? That's most interesting. Maybe we should put the fluid
coolant heat exchanger AFTER the exhaust heat exchanger and use the
exhaust heat as a pre-heater if that's so. Anyone who forgot to open
cooling water thruhull valve KNOWS how much heat and steam the water
jacket can make! Hell, we're only using 30-35% of the energy in the fuel
we're paying $3.50/gallon for, now. The rest of it goes overboard as
waste heat.

Pulling a vacuum on the boilers is also an excellent idea that's been
used since the 1800s, or maybe even before to reduce the boiling point.
I was trying to keep this as simple as possible and free running into
current water tankage.

I wonder why that system allowed all that water jacket heat that's so
hard to get rid of to boil even more seawater?


Whether this was done to increase thruput or because exhaust heat
alone was not sufficient I do not recollect.

In any event, given the cost of reverse osmosis systems using engine
heat would seem rather attractive.

And any RO uses more power which equals more fuel expense we can no
longer afford. It's a shame to let so much heat just blow out the stacks
and be poured overboard as hot seawater when there are so many uses for
it....like distillation, heat engines driving gensets, etc.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I love things like this. When I was using my little 1KW Honda EU1000i
genset to power the service van, I noted that its tiny exhaust was
exiting separately from its air cooling exhaust. So, I welded a pipe
nipple to the engine exhaust so I could pipe it where I wanted it. The
exhaust gas and cooling air exhaust come out on the same end through some
plastic louvers.

The truck is cold in winter with only a small engine heater for the
driver. The back was always cold to work in. So, I moved the tiny
genset from its mount outside the rear door to inside the back of the
"cabin" and used some flexible natural gas pipe, stainless steel with
external ribs that would act as a radiator, made into a big loop behind a
cabinet where there was a void open to the cabin air. The exhaust heated
the tubing, the tubing heated the air, what came out was really HOT air
wafting up from behind the cabinet. The cooled exhaust gasses went
through a hole in the deck to be vented to atmosphere below the truck's
floor. Exhaust gas is heavier than air, so it vents away from the cabin
and this also drains the water vapor that condenses in my heat
exchanger...it runs a full stream, suitable to fill my PortaPottie! The
exhaust gas is about 75F coming out...a good exchange of heat. Because
the genset is INSIDE the cabin, all of the waste heat coming out of its
air cooled engine is POURING out onto the deck of the cabin. I'm
recovering around 98% of all waste heat. When it's 30F outside the
poorly-insulated truck box, I can make it 80F inside in an hour!.....and
have up to 1KW of electrical power, 120VAC 60 Hz to power the shop. The
noise was awful...so I built a foam cabinet out of 4" thick foam packing
crate foam I got for free. The cabin air intake to cool the engine goes
through a little foam muffler on the intake end. The exhaust gas heat
exchanger and cooling air outlet goes through yet another foam muffler I
built onto the other end...making it amazingly more quiet.
Voila!...Gasoline heater and genset! You wouldn't want to live with
it...but it sure is nice trying to work on a cold day in January where
it's WARM as Toast!...(c; After all, old cars had exhaust gas heat
exchangers heating the cars back in the early part of the 20th
Century....not hot water heaters which came later. 1 gallon of gas
provides electrical power and cabin heat for all day....(c;

Larry
--
Search youtube for "Depleted Uranium"
The ultimate dirty bomb......

Vic Smith wrote in
:

I'm still interested in Larry's thoughts about
the "bacteria" issues he has seen in RO units. His thoughts on the
cruise boat ailments being related to the watermakers are very
interesting.

Here's some interesting membrane information from one of the RO makers.
http://www.hydrovane-watermakers.com/products.html

Notice how much time they spend talking about "pickling" and "flushing"
and warning not to flush the membrane with chlorinated water, which
destroys it. They also make some vague references to bacterial
contamination but don't delve into scary subjects that trash sales, of
course.

I gave up looking for the old article I was looking for to show you after
the third time IE's latest version was hijacked by some self-installing
spyware bull**** the net is eaten alive with. I hate looking at webpages
any more. Someone should HANG FROM THE YARDARM. Sorry....(c;

Universities are worth searching like:
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/chem-eng/Biotech-
Environ/MISC/biotreat/reverseo.html

http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/h2oqual/watsys/ae1047w.htm

http://extoxnet.orst.edu/factsheets/mk_nl2.asc

These RO guys look interesting:
http://store.bigbrandwater.com/poorsaplcr.html
they should know the answers....



In the meantime, his stovetop distillers are working well for him, and
use heat in a time-tested and pretty efficient way, with almost direct
application of flame to water.

--Vic


I don't own a stovetop distiller. Mine are all electric, 1 commercial
and 2 countertop home units. The last one is a countertop Sears sells
from Waterwise in Florida. I paid $9 for it at a thrift shop, hardly
ever used it looks like.

http://www.waterwise.com/products/products.asp
One of my units is the 8800, but the Sears-branded model. The newest one
looks like the 8800, but is a Sear-only unit that's much cheaper without
the computer/clock controls. It resets by simply resetting the kettle
trip overtemp thermostat with a push button under the handle. Sears
sells them for about $100. Makes not quite a gallon. The 8800 makes
over a gallon in 4 hours. Both units work excellently with no steam
leakage and great convenience.

I buy Deer Park brand 3 litre polycarbonate bottled water from the
grocery store. I'm not interested in the city water they bottle, just
the bottle itself. These make excellent storage bottles for my output.
They have two dimples molded into the strong plastic for non-protruding
handles and a LARGE CAP to make it easier to fill. I just dump the
product down the drain when I finally wear out one of my 6 bottles in
storage. I used to distill into 5 gallon commercial water bottles. I
have 3 real glass ones I can sanitize in the oven, not polycarb plastic.
I also have an Oasis bottled water cooler to put them in, making really
great, REALLY COLD water always available. I paid $25 for the big
cooler, another thrift shop bargain....(c; It plugs in, of course.

Larry
--
Why drink the government's chemical soup when you can drink pure?

Vic Smith wrote in
:

On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 01:41:39 +0000, Larry wrote:



Parrots both talk, INCESSANTLY. I wish they'd never learned....OR
HEARD
AN ELECTRONIC TONE! Once learned, any sound is repeated, AD NAUSEUM!
It's only funny the first 3 days. Then it drives me CRAZY!

Luckily, there is an on-off switch! Simply cover the cages and they
sleep, giving you a break in blessed SILENCE! Too quiet at home? Get
a
parrot!

Thanks for the best laugh I've had in a while, Larry.
BTW, my wife bought a battery powered "parrot" which
has a sound activated recording and playback system.
Pretty irritating after the novelty wears off.
She sent it to her mother in Poland, where it was the hit of the
village. Don't know if it still lives on.

--Vic


Have you sent Poland a "Billy Bass" plaque, yet?! The novelty wears off
them really fast, too. I see 10 a week at the local thrift shop
shelves....(c;

The parrots are very irritating, but so are all pets, sometimes. But,
I'm typing this with my hand-raised Blue and Gold Macaw sitting on my
shoulder....on one foot.....asleep....leaning against my right ear. I
can hear his little two-chambered, simple heart beating away through his
left wing. I don't see how they live 100 years with it beating so hard,
even while asleep! It's just thumping away. His head is under his right
wing, where they store it while sleeping. He snores and that one foot
he's balanced on sure has a strong grip if I move, even while he's
sleeping. It grabs on right through my t-shirt into the skin...ouch!

I used to keep fish, but every time I took them out of the tank to teach
them to talk....they always died, so I switched to parrots.

I've had birds most of my life. My first bird was a common crow that
fell out of a nest in my grandmother's front yard in upstate NY. I hand
fed it from the information in a book I found at Powers' Library in our
little town that was 100 years old. It lived outside in Summer and
inside in winter when it should have flown south. When I was in
elementary school, school let out at 3PM. That crow knew the time! It
would wait for me to exit the building, then swoop down and land on my
head, and only my head, in the sea of children running out of the
building. I think he liked me...(c; When I was in the 8th grade, one
day, it never showed up again and was never seen again, much to my hurt
and dismay. I'm glad I never found him dead. I like to think he found
him a mate...(c;

Well, I think I'll put "Roger-Roger" (he says his name just like some
pilot on the radio) back in his cage and go get some dinner....He'll be
looking for me to put him over a garbage can to "bomb" as soon as I wake
him. He's the best trained bird I ever had...POTTY TRAINED! That took 3
years of patience before he got it right. It's much better than the
skating around on bird skates my Yellow Nape, "Zeke", can do. He will
not poop on you unless he just can't help it. Very hard to teach them.
Oh, the sequence is to put him over the can (with plastic bag, please!),
say "Do your business.", to him. He will then look at the can, probably
something to do with "targeting", sometimes adding "DROP IT!" in a deep,
low voice if he remembers, then "bombing the target"....followed by
yelling, "BOMBS AWAY!!" VERY LOUDLY....to the delight of anyone who sees
it....(c; I've only seen one other bird that duplicates this trick, but
have been told of many others. Teaching them how to skate is really easy
in comparison....(c;

"NO BITING!"....MY favorite trick!

If you, a stranger, approach his cage and peer in at him, he's trained to
say, "Oh-oh...Now what?!"....(c; Great fun, every time.

As I pass his cage in the dark on my way to my bedroom, he says, "'Nite
Bird.", very quietly.....because that's what I used to say to him when he
was a chick. When I got him he was 3 days out of the egg, hand feeding
every hour or so, 24/7. He's about as long as a yardstick, now, when his
tailfeathers are new and in good condition. He can cut a whole Brazil
nut in half, melting that beak through it like a knife through butter.
He can also pick up the thinnest grape without puncturing its thin skin,
put the point of that beak inside through the skin and use his tongue to
rotate his beak around inside that grape to root out the guts of it to
eat...leaving a skin so thin you can see through it on the floor.....so
delicate it's amazing. If he wants to bite you, he could cut off your
wrist. He can also take hold of your ear and stick that leathery tongue
into your ear canal...just to get a taste of you....OR TO FEED YOU WHAT'S
IN HIS CROP IF YOU LOOK LIKE YOU NEED FEEDING!...(C;.....Yecch!!

Larry
--
Parrots are a LIFE sentence....
a two-year-old kid that NEVER grows up!

Larry, somehow the saying "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch"
kept popping into my head as I read your post. It is my
understanding that phase change methods of water purification take
about an order of magnitude more energy than filtration systems to
convert sea water to drinkable water. So, it seems to me that if you
are going to harness the "excess" heat or the excess velocity of the
exhaust gases to convert sea water to potable water you would be much
better off using R/0 in pure heat terms. Doubtlessly I am missing
something obvious but perhaps I am not alone in this as most cruise
ships and municipalities that do seawater conversion use R/O even
though they tend to have lots of heat available from their diesel
generation systems. Sorry to be dense about this. What am I missing?

-- Tom.

On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 21:14:16 +0000, Larry wrote:


Have you sent Poland a "Billy Bass" plaque, yet?! The novelty wears off
them really fast, too. I see 10 a week at the local thrift shop
shelves....(c;

Hell no! First time I saw one I figured whoever designed it was only
half as smart as the dumbest bass. Makes a whoopee cushion look
positively classy.
BTW, my wife told me the talking bird is alive and well, but her
mother now has to lock her doors to keep the villagers from kidnapping
it.

The parrots are very irritating, but so are all pets, sometimes. But,
I'm typing this with my hand-raised Blue and Gold Macaw sitting on my
shoulder....on one foot.....asleep....leaning against my right ear. I
can hear his little two-chambered, simple heart beating away through his
left wing. I don't see how they live 100 years with it beating so hard,
even while asleep! It's just thumping away. His head is under his right
wing, where they store it while sleeping. He snores and that one foot
he's balanced on sure has a strong grip if I move, even while he's
sleeping. It grabs on right through my t-shirt into the skin...ouch!

Wow. You put me right there.

If you, a stranger, approach his cage and peer in at him, he's trained to
say, "Oh-oh...Now what?!"....(c; Great fun, every time.

My youngest daughter was walking at 7 months and amazing the
neighborhood kids. She knew to say "mama" and "dada." Her third
word was "What?!" Didn't mean anything, she just liked it.
A 10-year old friend of my son's came over to the front fence to ask
my wife if he could come out to play. He didn't even see the little
one standing on the other side of the fence at his feet. Just as he
was about to say something to my wife the little shouted up at him
"What?!"
He about had a heart attack, shouting at my wife, "She can talk!
She can talk!"
Thanks for the parrot stories. I'll remember them.

--Vic

On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:48:39 +0000, Larry wrote:

Vic Smith wrote in
:

I'm still interested in Larry's thoughts about
the "bacteria" issues he has seen in RO units. His thoughts on the
cruise boat ailments being related to the watermakers are very
interesting.

I gave up looking for the old article I was looking for to show you after
the third time IE's latest version was hijacked by some self-installing
spyware bull**** the net is eaten alive with. I hate looking at webpages
any more. Someone should HANG FROM THE YARDARM. Sorry....(c;

The free AVG and Zone Alarm have virtually stopped that for me.
I use my C: partition for the OS and program files only, Ghosting it
often.
If I suspect an infection I just restore the image.
Before, when I was manually removing infections, I got a very strong
suspicion that many of the virii are being propagated not by simple
vandals, but by those with financial connections to the various
ant-virus money-making corporations and businesses.
Hanging from the yardarm isn't good enough.
Thanks for the links. I'll look into them.

In the meantime, his stovetop distillers are working well for him, and
use heat in a time-tested and pretty efficient way, with almost direct
application of flame to water.

I don't own a stovetop distiller. Mine are all electric, 1 commercial
and 2 countertop home units. The last one is a countertop Sears sells
from Waterwise in Florida. I paid $9 for it at a thrift shop, hardly
ever used it looks like.

Yeah, I knew that, but forgot. Probably thinking about how I would do
it given natural gas is cheaper than electricity here. But even with
that, your electric units might be more practical here too.

--Vic

On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:45:09 +0000, Larry wrote:

wrote in news:m4p4e354ggmshgch6l42g4gutlpd5g19u0@
4ax.com:

Explain that again in one syllable words for me :-)

As I understand what you are saying you mean to remove the present
water cooled exhaust manifold from the cooling system and replace it
with a heat exchanger device to heat what? Water to make steam or oil
to heat water to make steam? Or did I miss something there?

To BOIL, not heat, seawater into steam...while still flushing the
manifold with a tiny bit of seawater to carry the salt, biologicals and
pollutants overboard at 212F. I want to turn the exhaust manifold into
an evaporator, just like the big ships USED to have before RO. The water
in the exhaust heat exchanger would have a controlled flow of seawater
into it to A) maintain boiling temperature while B) flushing out the
remnants overboard, self flushing evaporator, which isn't new.

In general I agree but practically I'm not sure how much heat you can
pump into the exhaust water jacket considering that we still want the
engine to do its primary job of pushing the boat and exhaust back
pressure effects horsepower output.

Having said that I suspect that there would be some lower limit on the
size of the engine below which the system is not going to produce
enough BTU's of heat to evaporate a usable amount of water.

If you are using a, say, 50 H.P. engine then a very small volume of
water keeps the engine cool while if we are using a 2,000 HP engine
then it requires a substantial amount of water to remove the heat.

In short, the difference between a small fire and a big one.

In addition, I want to replace the antifreeze in the water jacket with
transmission fluid, or any free fluid that has a higher boiling point
than water like transmission fluid, that must A) not boil, itself, other
than at the head like the antifreeze does, now...and B) transfer higher
than 300F heat to a secondary heat exchanger, another boiler heated by
the coolant, not exhaust gasses, to boil even more seawater in a
secondary self-flushing boiler. Both these steam outputs would go to
one, or if necessary two, stainless steel condensors that look exactly
like the pipe-in-a-pipe freon condensors on a marine air conditioner,
which is very compact. This condensor would have a seawater jacket
around the central stainless steel steam pipe it cools, dumping the heat
of condensation into the hot water tank heat exchanger before dumping
excess heat overboard. The condensor only need be pulled apart far
enough so that gravity will drain the distilled water out of it at your
worst angle of heel so it doesn't vapor lock...and be mounted above the
engine far enough so only steam can reach it from the gas outlet of the
various boilers below.

Again, the theory is good but I'm not sure about how it works in
practice.

I say this because every design engineer understands that heat is
energy and if it were practical internal combustion engines would be
running at much higher temperatures then they do now. I suspect that
higher temperature operation would be getting into the realm of exotic
materials, difference in expansions of various engine parts, etc. I
also suspect that lubrication would be a problem. Jet engine oil, for
example operates at much higher temperatures then internal combustion
engine oil but has far less lubricity (as a bunch of USAF folk learned
to their despair when we converted the APU's from internal combustion
power to turbine units).


A power boat wasting millions of Btu/day would sink from fresh water
flooding if this thing were left tanking it all. Being as the distilled
water output from this contraption were HOT water, not cold as with RO,
you might even be able to just tank it for that hot shower, directly.
The water coming out of my steam condensor will burn you at 200F. To get
a cold drink, you'd have to cool the engine distiller's water before
drinking it....maybe with further seawater cooling, which is plentiful.

There's so much great heat just going up the stacks and running out of
the boat from the seawater indirect cooling systems on these monsters
it's pitiful! Heat is POWER! All it needs is useful conversion. I've
never figured out why a big power boat doesn't have a Stirling genset
running off its waste exhaust heat, alone! God, it's certainly hot
enough with enough Btus.


The reason I ask is because many years ago I maintained a distillation
plant that used exhaust heat to make steam. If I remember correctly
the primary power was a Perkins 4-108 diesel and it didn't make enough
exhaust heat to boil water at sea level atmospheric pressure. The
distillation vessel was heated as hot as possible using the exhaust
and then an engine driven vacuum pump dropped the pressure in the
still to create steam at temperatures lower then 212F.

It's not? That's most interesting. Maybe we should put the fluid
coolant heat exchanger AFTER the exhaust heat exchanger and use the
exhaust heat as a pre-heater if that's so. Anyone who forgot to open
cooling water thruhull valve KNOWS how much heat and steam the water
jacket can make! Hell, we're only using 30-35% of the energy in the fuel
we're paying $3.50/gallon for, now. The rest of it goes overboard as
waste heat.

Pulling a vacuum on the boilers is also an excellent idea that's been
used since the 1800s, or maybe even before to reduce the boiling point.
I was trying to keep this as simple as possible and free running into
current water tankage.

I wonder why that system allowed all that water jacket heat that's so
hard to get rid of to boil even more seawater?


Whether this was done to increase thruput or because exhaust heat
alone was not sufficient I do not recollect.

In any event, given the cost of reverse osmosis systems using engine
heat would seem rather attractive.

And any RO uses more power which equals more fuel expense we can no
longer afford. It's a shame to let so much heat just blow out the stacks
and be poured overboard as hot seawater when there are so many uses for
it....like distillation, heat engines driving gensets, etc.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I love things like this. When I was using my little 1KW Honda EU1000i
genset to power the service van, I noted that its tiny exhaust was
exiting separately from its air cooling exhaust. So, I welded a pipe
nipple to the engine exhaust so I could pipe it where I wanted it. The
exhaust gas and cooling air exhaust come out on the same end through some
plastic louvers.

The truck is cold in winter with only a small engine heater for the
driver. The back was always cold to work in. So, I moved the tiny
genset from its mount outside the rear door to inside the back of the
"cabin" and used some flexible natural gas pipe, stainless steel with
external ribs that would act as a radiator, made into a big loop behind a
cabinet where there was a void open to the cabin air. The exhaust heated
the tubing, the tubing heated the air, what came out was really HOT air
wafting up from behind the cabinet. The cooled exhaust gasses went
through a hole in the deck to be vented to atmosphere below the truck's
floor. Exhaust gas is heavier than air, so it vents away from the cabin
and this also drains the water vapor that condenses in my heat
exchanger...it runs a full stream, suitable to fill my PortaPottie! The
exhaust gas is about 75F coming out...a good exchange of heat. Because
the genset is INSIDE the cabin, all of the waste heat coming out of its
air cooled engine is POURING out onto the deck of the cabin. I'm
recovering around 98% of all waste heat. When it's 30F outside the
poorly-insulated truck box, I can make it 80F inside in an hour!.....and
have up to 1KW of electrical power, 120VAC 60 Hz to power the shop. The
noise was awful...so I built a foam cabinet out of 4" thick foam packing
crate foam I got for free. The cabin air intake to cool the engine goes
through a little foam muffler on the intake end. The exhaust gas heat
exchanger and cooling air outlet goes through yet another foam muffler I
built onto the other end...making it amazingly more quiet.
Voila!...Gasoline heater and genset! You wouldn't want to live with
it...but it sure is nice trying to work on a cold day in January where
it's WARM as Toast!...(c; After all, old cars had exhaust gas heat
exchangers heating the cars back in the early part of the 20th
Century....not hot water heaters which came later. 1 gallon of gas
provides electrical power and cabin heat for all day....(c;

Larry

Bruce in Bangkok
(brucepaigeATgmailDOTcom)

On Sat, 08 Sep 2007 10:10:37 -0500, Vic Smith
wrote:

In the meantime, his stovetop distillers are working well for him, and
use heat in a time-tested and pretty efficient way, with almost direct
application of flame to water.

Yes, but can you also use it to make booze? If so you could turn your
boat into a cash machine.