I’ve noticed when people are using generators to power a tool or appliance, they always directly plug into the generator. Then the generator is burning fuel reguardless of consumption.

How can that waste be reduced? A simple approach would be to plug your tool into a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) which is then plugged into the generator. This would help capture some of the excess energy when you are not pulling the trigger on a drill. Correct?

Possible flaw in this thinking: lead-acid batteries can only be trickle charged. So putting a battery in series only captures a small slice of the energy waste. Better than nothing, right?

I’m asking because I may need to install a generator for a whole house, and it’s not just for incidents. It will run daily in an off-grid house. So I’m trying to work out how to keep the fuel burn at a minimum and also how to fully exploit the available energy when fuel is being burnt (which should generally be during low sunlight times).

(edit) The UPS idea could backfire. IIRC, some UPSs are designed to always draw power from the battery while charging it at the same time. This is a superior design because it ensures that your appliance gets clean power that closely resembles a sine wave. UPSs that directly power the appliance from the mains and only tap the battery when mains go down have the disadvantage of sending potentially quite dirty wall power with surges and brownouts to the appliance. I think the always-use-battery design becomes self-defeating if using the UPS just to avoid generator waste. Correct? Though I’m confused because I don’t quite grasp how a lead-acid battery can charge as fast as it dissapates energy… I would think the charging would be slower than the consumption and power to eventually be lost.

  • Alexander@sopuli.xyz
    3·
    5 days ago

    Was thinking about this very topic, although I plan to catch wind.

    So far the best ideas I’ve got are:

    1. Scavenge old Toyota hybrid Ni batteries - those are surprisingly reliable long after they are not giving enough power for a car, and have quite good charge-discharge capacity
    2. Build Fe-Ni base batteries - messy but cheap
    3. Switch part of equipment to compressed air, run compressor for storage, spin generator with air on demand, possibly bubble air through some kind of bioreactor (kelp, mushrooms, etc.). Maybe same thing with vacuum line.
    4. Electrochemical synthesis on spare power (pretty much open battery loop; just a little bit - by making materials to be used in non-rechargeable batteries - or completely - make something useful elsewhere like metal coatings; I could extract stuff from local minerals, or barrety broth, or some kind of local goblinite). Anyway, something that wouldn’t care about random schedule, as opposed to, for example, greenhouse lighting or heating.

    Home power storage is very hard to design. Ballpark-wise, I found that energy storage could be as profitable as renting space for living, normalized by square meter; thus it’s bound to be at least about as expensive to run. If possible, you should consider making smart grid with neighbours.

    • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      4 days ago

      You could also use the excess power to heat up water in your house or for AC. In well insulated systems, you could keep constant temperatures for a while.

      • Alexander@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        3 days ago

        Well, in Finland, this kind of setup is deeply default. It becomes the main power consumer in November though.