Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

They allready have the solution but they have a one big problem with using it.
Solar bank on the roof making hydrogen from water. How do we tax that

Cool, maybe in a few years we will be discussing low cost DYI hydrogen generators.

I'd like to keep that as a question and not ever find an answer

Same as how do they tax homemade biofuel

I only use salt when recovering a failed batch. If not enough heat or to much water or not enough methanol in the conversion you will get an emultion of oil & water. To break that mayonaise looking stuff into BD I use salt and the byproduct of making BD. The problem with the salt and zeolite method is that you must use 30% petroleom diesel in the process. So cost runs $4.50 dived by 3 = $1.50 plus the cost of the pellets and salt. straight BD is cheaper and more certain.

Thanks spiritrancho, my friend told me he thought he had to dispose of a failed batch which he called gelled Glop. Good to know it is recoverable. I’m not sure how his price on Methanol compares to yours. He is getting his methanol from another fellow who works with us and has his own machine shop and builds racing engines which I think he uses straight Methanol and he purchases fairly large quantities for racing and Dyno testing his engines.

http://www.biodieselmagazine.com/issue.jsp
for those interested, haven't read it myself.

Cheers

On the hydrogen front, have they looked at using the hydrogen stored in Urea (46%) might be another way for them to store the stuff so it is safer.

Even though I only have about 3 ½ months where a wind turbine us useful I am fastenated by them and want one or two or more of them. More research on the net has brought me to many home brew as well as larger scale how to sites, and what I found is that most all of the items I have can be well suited as wind turbines and the car alternator (which I initially thought would be the easiest) would require the most changes but because of the scale would be fairly inexpensive. I found that the 3000 watt alternator can easily be used. I would not get the full 3k watts but should be able to get close to 1k watts. Because it is an alternator the distance to the house from the alternator should be kept in the higher voltage to save on wire cost then use bridge rectifiers in parallel to change to DC then run thru an inverter for the grid tie. I am thinking of getting a phone pole driven for this if I go with it. I have a Tread mill that the card went out on (prolly died from lack of use)
that has a 90 volt 3600 rpm permanent magnet motor in. I am probably going to build my first proto type out of it from my understanding it would be the easiest and inexpensive to build. I would have to add diodes to work as a check valve to keep the generator from running as a motor when the wind isn’t blowing. This is a quote from this website: http://www.alton-moore.net/wind_turbines.html
A 90V DC motor rated at 3600 RPM and 6 amps, then the rules of thumb will be that the voltage will be proportional to the RPMs you turn it at, and that you can never exceed the amperage rating. This last point is the most important, and usually determines how much sense it will make to use a particular motor. I'm still trying to get my mind around prop sizing based on my wind speeds, and motor rpm requirements.

Was thinking of looking into wind power. I have a pole in the back yard allready.

May be a stupid question, but why do you have a pole (that big) in your backyard.

Maybee his neighbour 2 doors down sunbakes topless and he wants to peek

Doesn't everyone
Was used as a HF antena, had 20mt wire comming off it with frequencies along it. Then we had a 1000w HPS up there to work on trucks next door. Was like daylight in the back yard, even give you a suntan. Now its just a big ol sun dial. Or a weather station. you see clouds behind the pole, theres a chance of rain.

Was going to say all my neighbour were ugly but I tell a lot of people about this site so that could come back to bite me.

Dufflight, it appears there is a wind turbine a little further in the background, you have have the hard work done with that pole. Get you a wind survey map of your area and size you a wind turbine. I haven't been looking in the large comercial wind turbine sites because of the cost, but have found some nice links for DIY.http://www.windbluepower.com/category_s/1.htm
http://www.btinternet.com/~andrew.h.loh ... dMill.html
http://www.alton-moore.net/wind_turbines.html
http://www.forcefieldmagnets.com/catalo ... Path=22_30
http://www.scoraigwind.com/
and there is lots more out there. I put a drill to my permant magnet drill motor from the tread mill and found it needs to be going at least 600 rpm to get 12 volts so for me it is another dead end. I think I am going to make a spread sheet to try to figure what would be best for me based on my low wind speeds. The two I have found that were even functional was the low 150 rpm cutin windblue alternator (only 25 watts at that speed) and Hugh Piggott's DIY axial flux alternator and a low rpm Ametek permanent magnet motor. I am going to order Hugh's book because of his designs for low wind speeds. But you shouldn't have those problems I understand there are better sustained winds in Australia.