Engineering

My engineering projects fall more properly into the category of tinkering. I live in a cabin that is not hooked up to the electrical grid, so I have a personal interest in energy efficiency. My wife and I generate our own power with solar panels and use a generator as backup, storing the energy in a large DC battery bank, and inverting it into AC for most uses. My current projects relate to heating and refrigeration.

The heating system I am building is fueled by wood, but stores heat energy in water tanks, and generates the electricity needed for pumps through waste heat. Click here to learn more.

The refrigeration system I am building uses the great outdoors as a heat sink most of the year and a DC compressor during summer when plenty of solar power is available. So far I have successfully cobbled together the compressor parts with an insulated box. The next step (hopefully this spring) is building a new box into an exterior wall, cobbling together a thermostatically controlled pump to move warm glycol from the box to an outdoor radiator, with a second thermostat to turn on the compressor when the outdoor temperature is above freezer temperature.