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Generate hydrogen (electrolysis) and use hydrogen boiler to heat home

jetjaguar

jetjaguar

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It's late and I might be a bit stoned but I'm thinking about electricity and water and gas.

Let's say there are days where your batteries are charged to 100% by 12:00pm. What to do with the extra electric power you have and aren't going to sell for 1/100 the price to the power company? Electrolysis.

You use that extra energy to split water into its constituent parts, store the H, breathe the O, and use the H in a boiler to heat the house.

Reading the internet makes me think Hydrogen boilers are experimental at this point, but some adoption in the UK? The most tricky part for the whole thing seems to be transport. Flooding highly flammable gas into the existing natural gas system seems like a problem. But at home it would be an on-premise solution without any transport.

I can't be the first person to think of this. Anyone doing this? Interesting threads?
 
Lavo, an Australian company has been working on a hydrogen fuel cell (not a boiler) for a while.. I haven't seen anything come from it yet though. Maybe some of our Australian friends on here know more about it.

 
It’s possible but the return on investment is very long term if ever. Compressing and storage in the amount necessary will be huge. If bringing hydrogen to a liquid storage is next level and requires cryogenics. Doesn’t tolerate mistakes well.
 
I played with it one time, there are many issues with making and storage of H2,
a tiny bit of air in a cylinder full of H2 is a bomb just waiting for a static electric charge.
Propane is far more stable, and doesn't need the super high pressures that hydrogen needs.
You can see a guy in US on YT that built a whole system using hydrogen and low pressure tanks, but it doesn't store much total energy for the size of the system he built.
 
Here is a German product that is supposed to save the summer electricity overcapacity and provide it in winter via H2 storage. The idea is to make a house energy independent. But it comes with an expensive price tag: 85k :D
Their site is in German but here is the Google translate link:
www-homepowersolutions-de.translate.goog

Wasserstoff Energie immer und überall zur Verfügung dank Stromspeicher

Ihr HPS Ganzjahresspeicher mit unabhängiger Stromerzeugung. Sauberer Strom, für jeden Tag und jede Nacht, im Sommer und im Winter, ein Leben lang.
www-homepowersolutions-de.translate.goog www-homepowersolutions-de.translate.goog

I have no affiliation with them nor have I heared any user stories. But I like keep track of what technologies emerge.
 
In the UK before North Sea gas we had Town gas which was extracted from coal, you got gas and coke as the end products.

Coal gas - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

It was made up of 10 to 50% hydrogen and had a lot of carbon monoxide which made it very poisonous. So the gas network in the UK is partially H2 ready.

So 100% hydrogen would be less poisonous but as previously stated its still dangerous. As the smallest atom its prone to leakage, explosive with some oxygen. Also known as Green Hydrogen it takes too much electricity to do the conversion from water to make it economic.

As the North Sea gas was rolled out then every gas burning device had to be converted by changing nozzles and adjusting pressures. It would be easy to go back the other way.
 
Researched the idea, the tech just isn't mature enough, and pretty much financially in the realm of "when ever I win the lottery".

Converted my home to full electric, heatpumps for heat...

Financially more sound and way more affordable.
 
jetjaguar said:
I don't want to convert the hydrogen to electricity. I want to burn it for heat.
Click to expand...
Electrolysis --> burn is less efficient than battery --> resistance heat and much less efficient than battery --> heat pump. Adding more LFP battery is probably also cheaper and certainly safer than H2 storage.

Some dump excess solar into their water heater. That's probably the cheapest approach. People also play around with thermal batteries -- big tanks of water or sand. You blow air through at night to warm it up.

If your car is home during the morning or afternoon swap it for an EV. Every 6-8 kWh saves $4 of gas. Hard to beat those economics.
 
cs1234 said:
How much hydrogen can you store safely at your place?
Click to expand...
I don't know how to answer that question, unfortunately. In reading more, I'm learning that H is very difficult to store. It will literally pass through metal because it is so small. Or, it may get interspersed with the metal and make the metal brittle. Even tank manufacturers will specify a % of leakage that will occur because of this situation.
 
Doggydogworld said:
Electrolysis --> burn is less efficient than battery --> resistance heat and much less efficient than battery --> heat pump. Adding more LFP battery is probably also cheaper and certainly safer than H2 storage.

Some dump excess solar into their water heater. That's probably the cheapest approach. People also play around with thermal batteries -- big tanks of water or sand. You blow air through at night to warm it up.

If your car is home during the morning or afternoon swap it for an EV. Every 6-8 kWh saves $4 of gas. Hard to beat those economics.
Click to expand...

This is helpful information. My thoughts were about achieving complete independence from external sources. As in I don't even want to have to call in a refill of natural gas/propane.

Adding batteries is simple and scalable. I'll not be into an EV for a while, it makes no sense to have one where I am located. I'm not sold on the tech there to make the leap, either. Maybe in 10 years.
 
jetjaguar said:
I don't know how to answer that question, unfortunately. In reading more, I'm learning that H is very difficult to store. It will literally pass through metal because it is so small. Or, it may get interspersed with the metal and make the metal brittle. Even tank manufacturers will specify a % of leakage that will occur because of this situation.
Click to expand...
It's got it's potential uses. Short term storage as a fuel cell in place of / in addition to batteries for excess solar/wind storage, need tanks though, stored in a well ventilated area or at least not in your building.

Possible use as a fuel (either combustion or fuel cell) in place of gasoline/diesel for vehicle types that batteries aren't necessarily the best exclusive (meaning only batteries in the vehicle) solution for due to weight / refueling time concerns. Hydrogen is dangerous compared to petroleum based fuels, but, it can be manufactured from excess solar/wind and water, which petroleum based fuels can't, at least not directly without converting it to some sort of biological form first.. that I'm aware of.

It's seems very pipe dreamish though, which is why nothing is really coming from it. Look at all the putzing around Toyota (and a few others) has been doing with it.. wasting the huge head start advantage they had with the Prius.. losing so much of the electric market to Tesla. There was no reason a company like Tesla should have been able to come to dominate the EV market like it has so far, the other companies all made better cars initially, but literally twiddled their thumbs instead of releasing some EV's.
 
cs1234 said:
It's got it's potential uses. Short term storage as a fuel cell in place of / in addition to batteries for excess solar/wind storage, need tanks though, stored in a well ventilated area or at least not in your building.

Possible use as a fuel (either combustion or fuel cell) in place of gasoline/diesel for vehicle types that batteries aren't necessarily the best exclusive (meaning only batteries in the vehicle) solution for due to weight / refueling time concerns. Hydrogen is dangerous compared to petroleum based fuels, but, it can be manufactured from excess solar/wind and water, which petroleum based fuels can't, at least not directly without converting it to some sort of biological form first.. that I'm aware of.

It's seems very pipe dreamish though, which is why nothing is really coming from it. Look at all the putzing around Toyota (and a few others) has been doing with it.. wasting the huge head start advantage they had with the Prius.. losing so much of the electric market to Tesla. There was no reason a company like Tesla should have been able to come to dominate the EV market like it has so far, the other companies all made better cars initially, but literally twiddled their thumbs instead of releasing some EV's.
Click to expand...
I don't disagree at all Re: Toyota. The "OMG DANGEROUS" argument against Hydrogen doesn't resonate well with me for the following reason: When humans started distilling petroleum to obtain highly refined fuels, that was dangerous as hell. We figured it out. And while it's not totally safe (gasoline still goes boom sometimes) it's common now and we accept the risks and know how to mitigate them. The same can be done for other fuel sources like Hydrogen.

Technological problems have solutions. That said, it seems like well-funded and well-educated companies in the energy space haven't figured it out yet. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if that's all just because we can't have Joe Public going around getting low-cost energy.
 
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