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vtsteam:
Oh in answer to your other question, I do have two Kill-A-Watts, but they aren't remote sensing meters like yours.

I just got a handheld thermal imager, ostensibly to look at heat gradients in regnerators in my Stirling experiments, but the selling point at home was looking at the heat losses in our house.

And the shop.

vtsteam:
Well speak of the devil.... our power just went out.

Started up the old Indian Lister clone generator. Hand cranked to start. Two 24" flywheels.

Lights back, cooking dinner, router powered up, back online.

Soothing sound, putt, putt at 600 rpm in the distance instead of a 3600 rpm racket maker.

Joules:
Nice choice of the Lister clone Steve, I used to be in contact with Ken Boak many years back. He used to be a UK guru on Lister CHP use. I still have a Petter AVA1 and alternator under a tarp that has to go at some time. It was part of a design project I got roped into 😅 during the "Great Veg Oil Rush" All the new stuff has pretty much made those ideas obsolete now, allowing silent running.

Thanks for the power revelations Steve once my ribs stopped hurting I could see scope for you saving a wee bit of power 🤣

vtsteam:
Ken Boak, that's a familiar name to me. Wasn't he experimenting with Manson type open cycle hot air engines? And maybe transferators? I think he's also in a book I have about hot air engines.

I have been reading and collecting information about hot air engines for 23 years now. I'm sure I'd have had a lot more contacts and friends with similar interests if I lived in GB. I've got Model Engineers collected in stacks and boxes, and I go through them once every few years. I don't know anyone here who has similar interests to mine. Most people I know don't even know what a metal lathe is. If I mention I built one from scratch when people ask what I do these days, they say, that's nice, and move on to the weather. :lol:

Joules:
You certainly fit the mold Steve for eccentric English engineer. Ken was very much into gasification when we last conversed, he was spending quite a bit of time in the States working on gasifiers and digital control systems for them. Lethal bits of kit producing vast quantities of carbon monoxide, the idea was to use the gas they produced to power the engines like they did in Sweden for cars during WWII.

Sad how our engineering skills have declined, there was a time your average schoolboy had a good working knowledge of IED's often curtosy of the local vicar who made his own fireworks. Plumbing pipe and fittings being so cheap back then, as well as the availability of Jetex fuse for the model rocket engines. I guess that explains why we had so many good engineers, the less skilled ones were sorted at an early age :zap:

Oh, I still get the weather comments when asked what I do, that or OMG....

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