Emergency Power Generation Unit at Home

Greenwood

When you experience black out in New York, you soon realize the importance of emergency power generation at home. Mr. Greenwood already have windturbine and solar cell hybrid system at home. But is is not big enough to supply power to freezer refrigerator. For such purpose, you can find many options.

1. Increase Battery Capacity

Increasing capacity of deep cycle battery is costly. And in any case, it cannot supply power for long time.

2.Install additional Windturbine

Increasing additional windturbine need more space and could not accommodate another one.

3.Install additional Solar cells

Solar cell is still costly.

4. Buy Portable Engine driven Power Generator and use 100V AC power

Portable power generator driven by 60cc gasoline engine might be most cost competitive way. The cost of the unit is only $700 for 400W. You can have it in the second hand market at reasonable price. Portable machine can also supply power for camping out.

Reasonable cost machine is now available at yen 29,800. It is 63cc, 6,000rpm, 2cycle, 60Hz, 850W mixed oil machine made in China. No DC output is available.

Portable Generator

5.Buy Portable Engine driven Power Generator and charge Battery by 12V DC output

DC output from Japanese made portable machine could be used for recharging existing battery of windturbine and solar cell system at home. In this way you can stop noisy machine in mid night.

6.Build brick made gasifier for Portable Engine driven Power Generator

In the case of stoppage of oil supply from abroad, you can build your wood gasifier.

7. Micro Gasturbine Generator

Mr. Greenwood is dreaming to buy power unit similar to PHT-3 developed by Jetcat. They developed it for model helicopter and selling at $4,000. Fuel is kerosene mixed with 5% lube oil.

PHT-3 Power Unit

Shaft power of PHT-3 might be less than 1kW. but this is big enough for running freezer refrigerator. Thermal efficiency might be less than 10% but for emergency purposes, efficiency is not important. It seems that this jet engine uses mass production type turbo charger for automobile engine. Belt drive reduces 84,000rpm jet engine rotation down to 1,260rpm. This speed is adequate for DC generator which supply power to existing battery inverter system of wind and solar cell system. You can easily get DC alternator from used car at almost free of charge. Therefore, you can have such system at the total budget of $4,000.

Capstone is selling  30kW micro gasturbine at $40,000 but this is too big and too expensive.