I'm a self-described "closet tree-hugger" who runs stock market websites for a living. This doesn't leave me a lot of spare time right now, but in my spare time I'm a total gearhead, collecting and restoring and just plain hoarding lots of cars and motorcycles.
I'm nearly obsessive about getting maximum fuel efficiency out of what I'm driving and my daughter drives a Honda Civic Hybrid and my wife drives a Toyota Camry Hybrid.
One of my hobbies is instructing at high performance driving schools on road courses all over the midwest and I use a Chevy Duramax 1-ton truck to pull a 48-foot enclosed trailer hauling two track cars and a motorcycle to events. I'd love to get more economy out of the Chevy but so far, no dice. It gets about 7 mpg pulling the same load my old Ford Powerstroke 7.3l would get 11-12 mpg pulling. I've long suspected there's something major wrong with the Chevy, but the dealership claims it's fine and I haven't been able to find a dyno locally for it to prove to them it's way down on power.
The car-trailer is a small AE project in the works. I started out with 8 marine batteries bought at Walmart and an inexpensive 3Kw inverter to run lights and plug-ins in the trailer with now-predictable results. I've ordered Trojan L16H's to replace the Walmart cheapies and am getting ready to order a pair of 100+ watt solar panels to keep the batteries topped off when the truck isn't running, and am still trying to figure out a way to get the full 210 amps from the truck's dual alternators back to the trailer batteries.
Another extremely large project in the works is a lake on my property with great inflow. I'm currently in the process of removing a 20-year accumulation of muck, which'll take at least a year, then will raise the dam enough to give me a 10-acre lake that should be able to flow plenty of water through an 8-inch pipe year-round with head height ranging from 12 to 16 feet, and explore micro-hydro to provide for some of the lighting/heating needs of my 7200 sq foot workshop about 200 feet from the dam.
Before I decided to drain the lake to muck it and raise the dam, there was a 4-inch pipe through the dam that was wide open all the time and despite this, the dam was breeched twice a couple of years ago. So we're going to dramatically increase the volume, freeboard, and draining and put in a spillway that won't get torn out from the overflows as has been happening.
In 2007, I'm tearing out my inground swimming pool and putting in a much larger one, enclosing it, and attaching it to the house via an enclosed walkway. I know humidity will be a problem, but I'm hoping to be able to take advantage of the pool's thermal momentum to help heat the house in the winter. We're also going to keep the pool and its building completely off the grid and use many alternatives for pumping, heating, and lighting.
A few years ago I made a 4x8-foot solar heater for it and also ran the water through an old small wood stove into which I'd put a home-made heat exchanger. I was able to put 2 degrees into 20k gallons per 24 hours. And subsequently had my whole family mad at me because though the pool was usable in May (the season usually starts in July out here), and despite my having quit heating it in June, the calories I'd thrown into it in May resulted in it being too warm during the normal swimming season.
I'm currently shopping around for wind gennies (I've no desire to build my own, though I've looked through a lot of the projects here with fascination), but am having a heckuva dilemna because a 900-watt unit costs nearly 4 times as much as a 400-watt unit, but the 400 won't be enough. And I don't know if I want to go with a pair of the 400's or not. The idea here is that I want to put together a small AE system (I learn best by experimenting and making mistakes on my own) to keep a 25- or maybe even a 400-watt Metal Halide light going 24/7 in my workshop so I'm not tripping over things when grid power goes out, which happens a lot out here. Despite the cost, I'm leaning toward the 900-watt wind genny and a 250-watt light so I can get a lot longer reserve life out of however many batteries I decide to use. I'll probably start with 4 6-volt L16H's and go from there if need be, and shunt any excess to heating the concrete floor. Spitting in the ocean, but if you spit long enough, you can raise sea level my a millimeter, eh. Although I'm also considering using excess to pump water from the lake to a pond near my house which is rarely full.
Anyway, I think this Diary thing is a cool idea and I'll add more to mine later as new info becomes available to add.
Okay, just thought of some more info to add. I'm 47 years old and figure I'll likely retire in about 3-5 years and hope to make my final "career" tinkering with AE and hybrid vehicles.
It seems that most AE folks aren't grid-connected and AE is their only alternative. I actually have very cheap grid power (7.5 cents per KwH and since it's a non-profit co-op, I get a chunk of my electric bill refunded every year), and most AE solutions are extremely cost-inefficient for me, but I'm just really fascinated with it. And I hope that with the micro-hydro and wind power and maybe some solar if the cost per watt ever gets real, I'll eventually at least be able to light my workshop for free.
It'll at least be fun trying.
Though I'm not going home-brew on the wind genny, I'm planning to go completely home-brew on the micro-hydro and am really looking forward to seeing just how much juice I can get out of this plentiful supply of water. I'm currently planning to use an old 5Kw generator whose engine blew up and use a large water wheel and plenty of chains and sprockets to spin it up to 4k rpm with a computer always keeping enough load on it to drag it down to 3600 rpm. Yeah, I know there's no way I'm gonna get 5KwH out of it, but figure I should be able to get hundreds of watts out of it anyway, and keep enough load on it to limit the R's. This way I can send 240 VAC to the workshop and deal with it up there, charging batteries, and shunting more easily.
An alternative I'm considering that isn't terribly expensive but wastes a lot of capacity I'll never be able to get out of the arrangement is to gear up to just 600 rpm and have it drive a PTO-power generator limited to the 540 rpm these things expect, again using computer control of load to control revs. The lower revs would be easier to do with less drive-train loss than gearing up to 4k rpm, but these things usually make multiple 10's of KwH. And the 5KwH generator is something I've already got just sitting around. And though I shouldn't be too concerned with wasting any of the free power of the water, I can't help but want to tweak things to the nth degree.
