Category Archives: Electricity

Off-Grid Electricity

Living off the grid brings a dangerous reality.










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Shipping Container Homes

You don’t need more space, you need less stuff.


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Is This The End of the Internal Combustion Engine?




Diesel exhausts are killing us all, allegedly.















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Jack Says Yes

Saying; ‘Yes’ often leads to interesting opportunities.













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why not have red wine delivered?

Clinton on Coal

















draxthese opinions are mine and mine alone


Tesla and Baked Alaska


Electric automobiles have been around since the 19th century, Englishman Thomas Parker built the first production electric car in 1884.  The land speed record was held by en electric car until 1900.   Not much has changed since The Electric Construction Corporation’s car to today’s Tesla.  (Nikola Tesla was a Serbian physicist.)

ALL electric cars have 5 main systems;

  1. electric carThe Vehicle.  Since the early days this has standardised around 4 wheels, a chassis, and something to keep the rain off.  The modern Tesla is maybe better looking and a hell of a lot more sophisticated than a 19th century dog-cart.
  2. The Electric Motors.  These convert electrical energy into mechanical energy, (and nowadays they also convert mechanical energy back into electrical energy via braking regeneration).  Again these are far, far better and more sophisticated than they were in Victorian England, but the basic principle hasn’t changed at all.  Electric motors as used in cars have one huge advantage over the internal combustion engine ~ massive torque at low rpm, so no separate gearbox is needed.
  3. The Control System.  Modern methods of controlling the amount of electricity that gets to and from the electric motor / dynamo are light years ahead of how it used to be done, which was basically a variable resistor.  The Tesla has computerised Intelligent Motor controllers.
  4. teslafireThe Batteries.  This is the Achilles Heel of electric cars.  Batteries are bulky, heavy, expensive, can burst into flame, and have a limited life.  Early electric cars had a lot of damn heavy lead-acid batteries, of exactly the same type as a normal car has at the heart of it’s electrical systems.  The Tesla uses a hell of a lot of lithium-ion batteries, of exactly the same type that powers your mobile phone and laptop / tablet…
  5. The Power Source.  Electricity doesn’t appear for free out of thin air, it has to be generated from a primary energy source.  For pure electric cars, like the Tesla Model S, this means plugging them into mains electricity to charge the onboard batteries.  Hybrid cars also have an onboard internal combustion electricity generator. (Which makes one wonder why all the batteries and other complicated stuff?  Why not just connect the petrol engine directly to the wheels?  Oh, we’ve done that, it’s called a normal car.)

The Weak Point of any electric car is battery life.  This comes in 2 flavours;

  • Range.  How far can one drive on one battery charge?  The Tesla Model S is supposed to do either 230 miles, or 320 miles, on one charge.  (Depending on how big a battery you’ve bought.)  That’s assuming a constant 55mph, (and that you’re not killing the A/C).  Also, charging a battery at a normal plug in socket will take 30 hours.  In normal, everyday, long-distance motoring, that’s as much use a cell phone in a lifeboat, in the middle of the Atlantic ~ no damn use at all.
  • Total Battery Life.  How long will the vastly expensive lithium-ion battery pack last before it’s only so much junk?  All batteries have a finite life, so how long will the battery in a Tesla last?  If you drive it every day, then my guess is performance will start to fall off, (a lot), after 4 or 5 years.  Total usable life?  I have no real idea.  Hey, I know the theory of making baked Alaska, but any real attempt by me would be just embarrassing.  (If you want to be an expert start with Arrhenius’ Law.)

poppies-lupineTesla make great looking, technologically advanced cars, with one huge flaw ~ all batteries eventually die, even sophisticated rechargable batteries die eventually.  One day the battery pack in your Tesla will reach the end of its usable life.  But the Tesla is a fashionable throw-away product, made for fashionable throwaway people.  (It’s also very unethical and environmentally damaging.  Recycling lithium-ion batteries is damn difficult.  You get toxic waste, not wildflowers.)

I would drive an electric car, if I had to.  I would not choose any electric car for a cool road trip.  The Tesla is very sexy looking, but it’s got no soul.  For the price of a Tesla, I could buy a really cool car instead.





Free Power ~ Combustion Engines

For the Backwoods / Backstreet Engineer interested in becoming ‘greener’ self sufficient and possibly going off grid, there are some serious problems with the two common types of combustion engine.

  1. Steam Enginessteam-boilerIt is perfectly possible to build, operate and maintain your own steam engine, and you can power it using wood, (or practically any other combustible material come to that).  However, you will soon come up against the problem of the high-pressure boiler, (leave aside how many psi constitute high pressure).  Very hard to make, requiring official inspection, and a big bomb waiting to go off.
  2. Internal Combustion Engines4-strokeBasically your car / truck / tractor engine.  Doesn’t matter what shape you choose the problem you have is making clean fuel.  You can make your fuel from just about any type of vegetable matter, including wood, and you can make either a gas or a liquid.  But making methanol from wood is fraught with issues.  Gasification of wood is a bit easier, and you can even buy a small-scale gasifier in kit form.

The Stirling Engine solves many of the issues raised by the two more common combustion engines.  And, here we get into the realm of the impossible.  To a lesser engineer a Stirling Engine looks like a perpetual motion machine because it operates on a closed cycle.  For an engineer who properly understands heat a Stirling Engine makes perfect sense.  Heat = Energy = Work

The good part is that we probably get to explore our pyromania and build a fire.

At this point I could direct towards the study of Thermodynamics and Carnot’s theorem, but honestly my bible these days is D. A. Low’s Pocket Book for Mechanical Engineers, (1953 edition).

The Stirling Engine works because a gas takes up more room when it’s hot than it does when it’s cold.  If there isn’t any more room ~ as in a container ~ then the pressure increases.  Cool the gas and it will take up less room ~ the pressure drops.

Therefore a the operation of a Stirling engine is exactly like the essence of a woman, she will blow hot and cold, and it’s a man’s job to harness and control her.

To make a Stirling Engine 5 elements are needed:

  1. A temperature difference.StirlingEngine  This is the essence of a good heat engine.  It’s not raw heat that’s needed, it’s a temperature differential.  If you have a source of cold ~ (OK physicists can shut up) ~ you can make a Stirling engine run on sunshine.
  2. A working fluid.  A gas is best, you can use everyday air.  For the sake of argument our working fluid is any gas, (NOT Gas as in Petrol).
  3. An expansion cylinder.  This is where the hotter part of the gas gives up work.
  4. A compression cylinder.  This is where the colder part of the gas gives up work.
  5. The mechanical linkages turning lateral motion into rotary motion.

There are two basic models for the Stirling Engine:

  • Alpha ~ two cylinder engine
  • Beta   ~ one cylinder engine

For me, the two cylinder engine is far, far less complicated to build and operate than the one cylinder engine.  That is counter-intuitive, but I told you the Stirling Engine is like a woman, the logic is a little twisted, but it’s there all the same.

The benefits of a Stirling Engine are:

  • Low noise.
  • Very energy efficient
  • Simple in operation
  • Very low maintenance
  • Very scalable ~ you can make a little one or a huge one
  • Multifuel
  • Can use any combustable crap as a fuel
  • Can utilise coldness as a fuel

I could design, draw, fabricate, build, operate and maintain an Alpha type, 2 cylinder Stirling Engine using basic tools and techniques.  I probably wouldn’t need a machine shop, but access to one would simplify things.

Do some more internet research and you will find some resources to get you started.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThere are also some complete installations on the market, try here to begin with

But I would caution you NOT to use a pellet system unless you are allergic to hard work.  Pellet systems tie you to going on buying your fuel from the outside.  The thing about a Stirling Engine is that it should run on any old wood.  To get your free power, you need to get away from the bad idea of buying fuel.

A small Stirling Engine is an ideal power generator for anyone going anywhere near the green / self-sufficiency / off grid lifestyle.  And, you probably get to use up a hell of a lot of that wood you just happen to have lying around.


P1010853jack collier



Green Energy Kills The Elderly

As an Arctic blast sweeps across Britain, Age UK have warned that almost a million elderly people are at risk from the bitter cold as they cannot afford to heat their homes.  Older people need longer to warm up.  Their blood thickens and that increases blood pressure.  Breathing cold air can increase the risk of chest infections.  Cold can kill the elderly in a myriad of ways.old personMedical advice says that the ideal temperature is 64F (18C) in the bedroom, and 70F (21C) in the living room.  Not everyone can afford to keep their thermostat that high.  In an average winter, one old person dies every 7 minutes in Britain from the cold.  That is 24,000 elderly people dying from cold every winter.  This scandal is the direct result of the ‘political elite’s’ obsession with carbon reduction / renewable energy.

The most cost effective way to provide electricity to British homes and industries is to burn coal in large power stations, such as Drax.  The math is complicated and subject to manipulation by statisticians, but any calculation you want to make into the comparative cost of electricity shows that coal-fired power stations are the least expensive way to make electrical power.  Every other method of electricity generation costs at least twice as much as burning coal.


Our supine politicians, in thrall to the Green Lobby and the European Union, have squandered Great Britain’s natural advantages in these key resources.  As it goes, Great Britain’s offshore resources are not limited to fish.  Offshore coal reserves are estimated to be some 23 trillion tonnes.  Given that the UK currently burns about 65 million tonnes of coal a year, (world coal statistics), we have 3,500 years worth of coal reserves at the current rate of consumption.

Wind_turbinesHowever, instead of exploiting these vast on-shore and off-shore coal reserves, our halfwit officialdom insists on installing useless, expensive, on-shore and off-shore wind farms.  This method of power generation is only possible / profitable in Great Britain because of compulsion and bribery, (subsidies).

British electricity suppliers are required by law to provide a proportion of their sales from renewable resources such as wind power.  Subsidies paid to wind-farm developers currently run at some £1.2 billion a year in the UK.  This is in addition to the grants paid to the manufacturers and developers of wind-powered electricity generation systems.  All of these grants and subsidies come from the pockets of hard-pressed taxpayers and consumers.

HuhneElectricity supplied to Great Britain’s elderly costs more than double what it should, as a direct result of meddling by successive Energy Ministers, (Principal Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change).  The current incumbent is the hapless Ed Davey, who replaced the criminal, lying, adulterer Chris Huhne.

Despite everything that global warming alarmists say to the contrary, there is no evidence that the Earth is warming up.  There is also no hard evidence to support the existence of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change.

It seems that the elderly can be damned to die from the cold, as long as successive useless politicians and their vampiric staff can continue to travel to the world’s beautiful places to attend United Nations conferences on climate change.  Residents of the USA shouldn’t think themselves lucky.  Your president is at least as loopy about climate change as is our very own Ed Miliband.

Not all politicians are lying, adulterous criminals.

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