ThePog

Well well I may have made a bad decision. The old girl is looking a bit worse for wear. Wife is slightly unhappy. I am foaming.

Yea it was a fantastic wee weapon at the point I sold it. It looked pretty rough when I saw it for sale a couple of years ago.

I may or may not be going to have a looksee some time this week, I can neither confirm nor deny. As a completely unrelated aside, do you know of any handy rust repair people in the area perchance?

Water is limited to 100 deg, sand can run up to 600deg which in real terms means it can store more energy. If you want to heat water then a delta T of 500+degrees works in your favour. Plus it will maintain the heat for way way longer.

This might be fun; https://projecthub.arduino.cc/stevetearle/loadmaster-xp-a-smart-pv-mppt-solar-hot-water-controller-5264c7

Keen.

So this works specifically for an resistive element situation rather than a load/battery? But a dirty old mppt solar controller would do it but inefficiently...? Also can you eli5 why not just hook the solar up to the element for ol thicky here?

Yea I am not expecting much, i have other heat input methods that will be better in this case. Its more to test if it is worth hooking up something like this to a serious solar array if/when I install one. There is a certain amount of excess solar power on sunny days that may was well go somewhere useful.

So I want to experiment with sand batteries, ie fill a stainless tank with copper coils and ducting, pack it out with sand and get it nice and hot with various means. Ultimately I would like to see if I can even out the temperature in the lined section of my shed by blowing air through the sand battery automatically when it drops to a certain temp. One of the potential heating methods is an element powered by a solar array. I know I probably need a 12v or 24v element, but the question is do I need a controller or can I just dump straight into the element and it will just get hotter or cooler depending on the input amps...? I know that is a pretty inefficient way of doing it but it would be an interesting experiment. Any advice appreciated.

Best efficiency for that one was a medium drip. I should probably measure it, I have run it for about an hour in total and I reckon no more than a liter. You can have that one if you want to test it out, I'll be going bigger.

I have learnt some things from this build, mostly that pouring oil in does not increase the burn rate, just the soot. This means I need more air/airflow, therefore a bigger unit and chimney is needed. Also the feed pipe would be better being decoupled from the body as there is enough heat transfer to make the oil in the pipe start smoking. So probably all that lower shroud stuff can fuck off. Still it works pretty sweet and gets fucking hot. I dont think it will glow though as the chamber walls are 5mm thick. It holds some heat tho...

This is 100% bang on the money. It is a real pain in the arse to dispose of used oil now, why not utilise it. I made some mods to it during my lunch break and just cranked it again, there are a couple of issues but it started to get proper hot this time before I had to turn it off. The next stage is a heat exchanger for a spa, maybe in a bigger version though.

That fdm has killer tone I hear.... More side projects, this time a wee waste oil heater; First run tonight, started cranking once I put a 2.5m chimney on it. Edit; it seems that wee feed pipe is limiting the crank though, I'll chuck something bigger in there and see if I can get it glowing.

Ye prety much, for now anyway...

USB unplugged, down it went. Have unplugged the cable from the screen, I await the dark magic hour of 4pm tomorrow.

I do have some ferrites lying around somewhere. I might just do away with it as the the USB on the projector does not reliably switch off, I put it into standby mode rather than full shutdown and sometimes it does not switch off that port. Or use the port on the pc that i stopped using cos I thought that was what was causing it. I fully shut that down and the back ones are not always on like the fronts. I have left it unplugged out of the projector so i will see what happens today. Perplexing.

Trigger voltage is 5 to 12v, so realistically 3 or 4v IRL maybe?

Im going to try unplugging the cable first from the usb then from the screen, if it still does unplugged from the usb but does not do it unplugged from the screen I will assume that it is the power cable. I can probably just move the trigger cable to another route if thats the case.

But I cant see any timer based IO stuff on it.

Its in the ball park....

I bought a new projector screen cos the old one was too shit to use with the new ultra short throw projector I have. It has a 5v trigger so I made a cable to suit that plugs into a usb port on the projector or the little pc that runs it. This is good as the screen comes down when the projector cranks up, however weirdly at around 4pm every day the screen decides to descend of it own accord. This has happened both while plugged into the pc and the projector. The only thing I can think of is that the power feed to the house is running under the floor just there and that the trigger cable is lying on the floor above it and in line with it for maybe 2m. Would the ripple control in the power line be enough to induce a 5v signal in the wire? Its the only reasonable explanation apart from a burst of IR light coming from somewhere at 4pm every day....

Thats what the fuel screw is for.

Try the limibashing first, might not need to change the plugs if it goes well.

Half an hour of limibashing will have the same effect

Dunno, changed the plugs and it stopped using oil. Either typical toyota self healing behavior or our lord and saviour hast bestowed a miracle upon his unworthy servant or some shit.