We have power Trial no. 1 A Christmas Ale

The board arrived

So I received my board this week and it has been fun. Got the software installed and ran some of the examples and they worked great but then got to thinking about the project. I also showed it to the sustainable engineering lecturer at work and had to make sure he didn't leave my office with it.

Trial

I decided to place the system on my brew pot while I did a batch of beer to see if the energy harvester would continually run as I was worried the peltier plate and heatsink would end up heating up too much and no longer work.

My highly technical attachment set up it wasn't meant to move so duct tape.

The pot is only half full so placed the Unit down the bottom and realised I should really make a cable so I can see the LCD screen and if I have a boil over on a larger batch it won't destroy everything.

Results

The trial was a success with the heatsink while getting into the 30s (room temp was 22) was still a giant gap in heat compared to the 62 mash temp. Only problem was the energy aware profiler did not like me trying to log for that long and promptly crashed when I went to save.

The system during the heating and boiling is not really harvesting wasted energy as the heat element has to work for longer the mash temp was not noticeably affected by the unit being attached with temperature staying fairly stable over the 1 hour without the element on.

Future Plans

• Create a cable to be able to use the gecko away from the harvester.
• It can definitely create power so get some sensors on there and have them run while monitoring how much power they use with the energy aware profiler so I can get an idea of just how much we can run.
• Connect up the system to the fermenting process with sensors and see how low with things like the lesense interrupt system on the gecko I can get the power draw of the stem to figure out a battery or super cap system I might be able to employ. Not to big as to be a waste but somthing that can get through most peoples brews.

A second project

I had an idea that has probably been done to death by people but is not seen in the hardware stores here and that is a monitoring hydro setup for peoples patios in there apartments. This will consist of a 3 tier growing system as well as water reservoir.

The Energy harvesting kit would keep an eye on the system to pump water back up to the top when needed as well as messaging the owner when it needs to be refilled. Also give the owner stats on light amounts on each tier and temperatures. Power from this system would of course come from solar and posibly the temperature difference from having the solar panel near the reservoir to cool the panel which would increase it's effiency.

Well I guess that is all for now the beer that was made today will be at it's best around the end of this challenge so will be used to celebrate that if anyone can make it to Brisbane, Australia.