I had a brain wave one day, and it made me stop and think a little more about it.
An electric powered household generator. haha i know it sounds like a catch 22 and kind of stupid but here is what made me think harder about it.
If I could remove the gas engine side of a generator and replace it with an electric motor, my generator could run forever (use that lightly, maintenance etc i know)...powering my house with a consistant month to month power bill.
So here are some numbers right now, I pay about $150 a month for power and $230 for gas in the winter. Thats around $350-$400 a month on utilities. If I could create enough power to run all my household item as well as electric heat, (electric furnace). Then maybe, just a slim maybe it could end up being cheaper.

So here are the parts I know nothing about, how big of a generator I would need (10kw?) How big of an electric motor I would need to turn it? and how much it would cost to run that electric motor all year round?

I know there are other problems like what do you do if the generator or elec motor fail..the electric motor running all year round would get hot...etc.
Some ideas of fixes would be have a bypass to run your house on "retail" power supply. Having a pair of electric motors hooked to a timer with something like your ac clutch to switch between the two. Who knows.

and as i type this i had another idea...you could do it in a series. Have a smaller light duty motor running a gen sized large enough to power the electric motor needed to run the household generator.

Whatcha all think about it?







I need a truck to work on to keep my mind from wandering off too far lol

 

It would be a net loss in efficiency and an increase in your electric bill. Current state of the art motors and generators are not one hundred percent efficient so it would take more electricity to run your setup than to just supply power to your house.
If you want to drop your bill, work on ways to reduce your consumption. I used to unplug anything that didn't need constant power when I went to work.

 

Think of the electric powered generator as a middle man...any time you add a middle man, the cost goes up.

 

Get a diesel generator and make bio and use an old oil burning furnace to heat your house (on bio-fuel) 400gallons of bio (for the furnace) should take anywhere from 5-10 days to make and last a month, plus another 400 for the generator. Good luck.

 

It looks like you are already desperate to lessen your bills.

 

nah was just one of those crazy what if ideas

 

Compact florusent lites make a big differance. Also, turn off your moniter when not online.
FlyCanadianGuy has the correct answer, if it applyies to you.

 

old thread dig up here lol..
so get this anyways, winter 07/08 my furnace died and I used five 1500w (7500w total running constantly) electric heaters to heat my house. Usage was ~1950 KW hours for the coldest month. Now this winter 08/09, I have a new furnace and no electric heaters, everything else EXACT same... and the coldest month I used 1800 KW hours of power. If you grasp the amount of power that five 1500w electric heaters use, then you can understand the disbelief in that bill.

 

It can't happen even through gear reduction. One of the laws of science: Energy can not be created or destroyed only change form. So it could never produce more energy than was used to produce the energy in the first place, to get it to run only it's self you would have to have no gravity, put it in a vacuum, use superconductors to take care of resistance "resistance causes heat and heat is energy" use brush-less and stator-less motors and generators so you would have no friction. I'm sure that NASA could do it but not us Earth bound folks.

If you are looking for free energy go wind or solar, I like the idea of the biodiesel generator.

Thanks for the fun topic
Shaun & Effy

 

Nope. Not even the NASA could do it. There are some inherent inefficiencies that cannot be overcome even with the best and most expensive technology.

People looking for 'free' energy should look at solar panels, or wind turbines. While there are a few more (i.e. radioactive decay) these two are the two most likely sources ordinary people can harness.