Thanks for the replies and taking the time guys
Craig: An interesting one - but some pictures would help visualise things! What is your actual Oz. location ? Budget ? Time frame ?
Aside from PICAXE issues, perhaps first clarify (especially for for snow bound northern readers), just why this particular WVO slant. For those unaware NSW= Australian state New South Wales, & given your abundant solar resource, WVO seems a tad tedious ! Associated gene noise & maintenance also arises, as do numerous hassles, the least of which is a reliable ongoing WVO supply. Guess you've factored in time, effort & energy needed to collect,store &
purify it too ? Unless refined, free fatty acids in WVO can have a detrimental effect on metals, & diesel injectors only need to get zonked for $$$($) repair bills to arise. There's a great account of
Thai experiences here- their CVO (= crook vege oil) powered genes gave only 300-500 running hours before failure.
I've a relative in rural California who flagged WVO away after finding he was spending more time & money on his "free" setup than it was saving. He concluded WVO best suits a community setup where a uniform & refined product can be utilised. FWIW-with 2009's global down turn causing a flagging in PV demand, quality solar PVs can be picked up now for ~US$5 a Watt. Double that for storage batteries & I'd say an Aust$10k capital outlay would set you up for the next 10-20 years Stan.
Stan, Yep i have been on the whole WVO thing now for about 2 years and have a good and stable setup for collecting, filtering, storing and using WVO. I currently run my car on WVO and have done so for the last 18 months.
My system is refined to the point where it takes no more than 30 minutes each week to process around 200 litres of oil. I currently have a stockpile of WVO of just under 4000 litres and can with the supply stream i have now easily collect 500 litres per month.
One of the beauties of using a stationary engine is that it can provide a lot of possiblities for Combined heat and power production - in my case i intend to use some of the waste exhaust heat to help process solidified fats. In Australia most people who use Vegoil tend to stay away from the solidified fats (lard and other variations) because of the complexities this introduces into the design of a vehicle system.
Recently on one of the forums that i am regularly on someone at Coffs harbour (about 5 hours drive) made available 3000 litres of solid Fat (FRYTOL), i intend to make a few trips over the next 6 months to collect this - as i plan on running my engine for 15+ hours per day, i will have a lot of excess heat that can be used to liquify and ultimately process this oil/fat. The engine will use approximately 250ml of oil per kw hour of electricity produced -so at its sweet spot of 4KW around 1 litre of oil per hour. based on a projected runtime of 100 hours per week - i am therefore up for 100 litres of oil per week.
The engine i will be using is a clone of an old english design and is known as a Listeroid, these are slow turning (in my case 800rpm) workhorses that reliably run for months at a time - the maintenance and running issues with these workhorses are well known - a complete engine landed in Australia from India is in the region of $1500 - the raft of spares i have purchased with it are another $500. An injection pump costs all of $55 AUD and an Injector $9 AUD !!.
I am well underway to constructing the shed for this unit which due to the location of my block will lend itself very well to allowing this unit to run without annoying neighbours (search on YOUTUBE for Listeroid) and you will get some idea of the level of noise these units make (they are not the 3600 RPM screamers you typically think of)
Whilst i know what i want and need to achieve with the system i am building and can nominate the parts at a high level i do not have the construction skills (or time) to learn how to do this from scratch.
I have done this type of outsourced collabarative design arrangement with a US based person previously for a home heating and control project and that worked very well to achieve what i wanted in terms of finalised boards delivered to me - which i was then able to program etc.
Due to the different electricity standards etc in Australia i though it would be easier this time around to get someone OZ based (preferably) or NZ or UK.
Both my wife and i run business's from home that revolve around the provision of computing services to customers - as such we have a number of machines that have a continuous current draw of about 1.5KW - this equates to a base load in our house of some 36KW hours per day - our total house draw based on our last bill is in the region of 60KW hours per day - it is not feasible or economical to provision this from solar and batteries.
The type of setup i am purchasing for solar now provides approximately 2KW of solar panels and grid tie inverter for approximately $6K after Govt rebates for Solar RECS are applied. To get enough solar to run the house (based on an optimistic 6 hours of sun per day on average) would set us back about $40K - before buying any batteries and all the associated maintenance hassles with those.
Our latest electricity bill ran us to $1200 (this is with a 5% overhead for purchasing so called green power), recent news articles have highlighted that legislation is going through in NSW that will see electricity price rises in the order of 60% over the next 3 years.
The biggest consumable with my setup will be the electrical generator itself - these are Chinese ST gen heads that cost approximately $1000 AUD - once they are bedded in and settled down they will require a rebuild twice a year for the projected hours of runtime i am looking at.
Based on our usage patterns and moving some of the more flexible loads around (things like dishwasher, hot water heater, clothes washing etc) i am projecting that i will achieve a 90% reduction in our costs of usage from the grid by running the generator for 15 hours per day - if these pan out during the first year of operation we will then asses whether we buy a 2nd system (smaller) for overnight usage or look to slowly investing in a large battery bank that can feed UPS's/Inverters to run the off peak loads.
In terms of your other questions
We are based in Castle Cove in Sydney (north shore near chatswood)
Timeframe for the finished design would realistically be the end of March.
Budget - i have allowed $1000 for this side of the project - the outcome of which will be a total of two "systems" - one for live production and one for testing/ongoing development
In terms of the electronics side i see that i have the following needs
1) A method to monitor the load being placed on the system in terms of electrical current - from previous questions asked and research it appears that the easiest/safest/most accurate way is with a hall effect sensor that can monitor the single phase output of the generator and interface to a picaxe through an ADC port this single phase output will come to a sub board from my main switch board, this sub board will be electronically isolated from the main board through electrical interlocks whilst the generator is operational.
2) The ability to activate relays to have various loads come on or off based on the data gathered above - i am comfortable with doing this as i have had a few years experience doing this with Picaxe with my home hydronic heating system - the ultimate system design will decide whether this is better done on a single board (should be doable with a 40x) or if we go to a discrete 2nd board with some form of interboard comms in the form of i2c or HSI or some such
3) One of loads to be activated would be a "dump" load of rectified DC power that could be fed to the inputs of the MPPT Inverter - this is the part where i am a little lost - i think i understand the whole rectified DC thing from AC but do not know how to control the current flow so that i can feed a varying amount of 280v DC to the inverter - based on the load i want to shed and the maximum input the inverter can accept - this also leads to the need for me to monitor the other DC input (from the solar panels) for voltage and current to make sure i am not feeding the inverter more than it can handle.
4) The board as designed would also need the usual peripherals such as Serial in/out to a PC, LCD output, DS1307 for RTC and some form of local storage through i2c memory modules - again all of this i have done with my previous boards and have ongoing experience with.
regards
Craig