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Romy the Cat wrote:

In the light of my forthcoming move I deal nowadays with much more prosaic problems then NASA's Mars programs. I for instance am trying to strategize what alternative power I might use to power my sump pump and am trying to figure out if it is possible to have a gas to electricity converter if the power is out… As, you see my mind is occupied nowadays with the subjects remote from Sound.

Sure the PP2000 is great but could it be even more kosher? Her is a direction to think – to regenerate the electricity and completely decuple from the grid. Te idea is not new – we were talking about it before but this time it has anew twist.

The house that I trying to close is next to a river (stream) and has venerable to water basement that getting wet during prolong rain. It will be dealt with and the Basement Treatment Company that I brought came up with various proposals how to address it (sump pump + French drain). One of the proposals suggests the use of battery backup sump pump. Well, I have currently 2 friends on my who live in towns next to where I will be moving in and they have no electricity. So, what the Basement Company proposes does make sense. Well, I was looking what the better performing submergible pumps suck out. For instance ½ HP Zoeller M98 sucks 9A and therefore the flimsy buttery that Basement Company proposed would be great to keep pump uninterrupted for an hour but it will be out of game for a day long interruption.  So, I was considering another power source and I got a good idea. The house has infinite supply of natural gas (heating, boiling), so who do not use gas power regenerator? When I begum to look at the park of the automated standby power regenerators then I asked myself a legitimate in context of this thread question – why do not create isolated  audio grid and power it from heavy-duty gas-driven power generator?

The idea sound great and I spoke with a few tech supports. Here is some data.

There are a number of gas generators out there, they all are more or less compatible. The smalls and cheaper of them are do not provide a perfect sine wave but larger of them have electronic stabilization, better frequency stability and they reportedly do good sinusoid with less than 5% harmonic distortions.  Mind you that this sine wave is pure mechanical made with no noise of any kind. All stabilization and regulation circuits might be bypassed and the playback system might be driven right from the generator’s collector. Let look for instance at the Generac Guardian Series 5502, 10.000 Watt, Air- Cooled gas generator. It is a unit that sits outside of house and produce 65dB of noise – compatible with noise of outside air-conditioner.  So, noise is not a problem at all. It is 10kW of new clean power absolutely decoupled from power grid – looks very good to me.   Generic suggest that this unit it has the best stability numbers - harmonic distortions are under 3%.

http://www.amazon.com/Generac-5502-Air-Cooled-Automatic-Generator/dp/B001DZLKGY

http://www.generac.com/PublicPDFs/0168170SBY.pdf

There are a number of alternative regenerators

http://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com/Briggs-&-Stratton-40243A/p1979.html

Now, about the cost. The unit itself is not expensive – it could be bought around $2K that is less expensive then my current PP200 regenerator. So, for $2.5K it might be bout, shipped and installed. As the result the house would have assured infinite uninterruptable power supply. Then there is a cost of regeneration. The 10kW unit loaded 50% (my playback will never do it) need 103 cub feet of natural gas per hour. The cost of natural gas is falling nowadays, that is good.  Let do some math now.

The electric company charges Generation + Delivery, all together is about 40 cents per 1kWh. One 1 kW of electricity is about 3,4 BTU. 1 cubic foot of natural gas = 1 BTU, so to make 1kWh using natural gas I would need 3.4 cubic foot of natural gas.  The cost of Natural Gas is approximately $0.25 per cubic feet, or to make 1kWh via Natural Gas I would need .25x3.4 = 85 cents. From this number we need to subtract the efficiency of the regeneration methods. The PP200 is 90% efficiency and gas generators are I would estimate do no better than 40% efficiency. I was not able to get those numbers from anyone. I think it would be 40% as the large commercial very efficient regenerators do up to 50%-60%. So, the comparative cost of one hour 1kW loaded PP2000 regenerator would be sub $0.45, while the same 1kW regenerated from gas would be around $1.30. (Let discard that playback will not use 5kW). So, with all equal the bill got gas regeneration might be 3 times higher than electricity regeneration). I would ay it is expensive but marginally tolerable. Nowadays my electric bill for my Playback-only is about $100 per month; with gas it would be $300 per month (for Playback Only). Important is that it would be my chose if I power playback from grid, from PP2000 or from naturally-clean gas regenerator. However…

And this is the very biggest however. I have absolutely no idea who the alternators that are used in gas generators sound. It might be anything from a perfect sound to a complete shit – no one I spoke in the subject in the gas generators world knows it. I think if I know that there is one alternator out there that is sonically tested and that sound good then it would be possible to mount it on the axis of the gas generator and it will be the solution of solutions. Does anyone have any experience with alternators and with powering playback from them?

Regardless many unknown this field I find it is very lucrative direction to look. For sure it will take care about my sump pump but could it take my electricity battle to the new level of perfection? How to sonically test alternators?

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