4.4kwh of power going to waste as heat

[cobra1]

Anyone got any good suggestions on how to salvage this energy??

Been looking at peltiers, sterling engine etc all seem a waste of time.

Looking for any ideas that might get some gains.

The heat will be in the form of hot water,

Central heating etc is no good to me i need to convert this heat to electricity somehow.

 

[crutschow]

Hot hot is the water?

There's not much commercially available to convert such waste heat to electricity. Here's an interesting article on some research in this area.

A peltier junction is probably as good as you can do, although the efficiency is low.

A sterling engine driving a generator may be more efficient but doubt you can readily buy such a device, and even if you could, it would be quite expensive.

 

[cobra1]

the water is quite hot, 80-100c. it will be under slight pressure so it might be even hotter. i wont know exact temps until i get an experiment setup.

So far i know that 4.4kwh of power is lost as heat. Textbook figures.

 

[blueroomelectronics]

What is the device you're trying to salvage excess heat from?

 

[crutschow]

In theory you could use the water to vaporize a low boiling point liquid such as pentane (which is used in geothermal power plants), to drive a small turbine and generator. The pentane would need to be in a closed loop, closed system with a evaporative water cooled condenser to recover the pentane. But, of course, that's a rather costly solution, given the small amount of heat available.

 

[Mr RB]

If you run the heat through your hot water system you can pretty much turn it's electricity off, saving you about 1/4 or more of your electricity bill. That's almost the same as generating electricity...

If you really want to convert heat to electricity you need something like an expensive high maintenance stirling engine. Converting heat->electricity cheap, quiet and efficient is one of those holy grails of energy research.