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

[cs1234]

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.

It's time might be coming with the increasing droughts and such. The powers that be just need to be able to limit / control your production. If they can't sell you gas, they will sell you the water to make the gas.

 

[SolarScott]

Remember, that the hindenburg was coated in thermite, so... and also, similar craft burst into flames with helium in them when the coating was the same...

The Hindenburg was destroyed by jealous Americans.....who did not like Deutschlanders....

 

[jetjaguar]

It's time might be coming with the increasing droughts and such. The powers that be just need to be able to limit / control your production. If they can't sell you gas, they will sell you the water to make the gas.

I'm one step ahead of them! I have my own well! But then the "well tax" will come....

 

[OffGridForGood]

yeah the way things are going in some jurisdictions, they will try to tax you on the natural gas "you arn't using"

 

[Warpspeed]

I well remember a student project at my favorite university many years ago.

They hooked up a bunch of solar panels through a solar controller (that I built) to power an electrolysis tank that produced hydrogen and oxygen. Running flat out it produced an impressive stream of bubbles, enough to power a really small flickering candle sized flame.
As there was 2.5Kw of bulk electrical power going into this contraption, and not a huge amount of final gas output, it was considered non practical.

The biggest problem with hydrogen is long term storage of the stuff. It leaks fairly readily out of just about anything. The only practical way is storage at low pressure in a large floating metal chamber, the classic gasometer. Not the kind of thing that fits very readily into a small suburban back yard.
Its not a new idea, and its been tried thousands of times by enthusiasts, but its always a complete non starter from a practical point of view.

Vastly more efficient to just store your 2.5Kw into a battery.

 

[Zwy]

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?

You would be better served using the electricity to power a heat pump. Easier conversion, easier storage.

Add more battery capacity if needed.

Biggest problem with hydrogen is hydrogen embrittlement and storage. There are tanks that don't have this problem, better get your BIG checkbook out. Like the tank in this truck.

There most likely at some point will be a point where green hydrogen will be refined into hydrocarbons. It is run thru a catalyst at high temp to create a hydrocarbon chain.

If you are really serious, check out this guy.

 

[Supervstech]

 

[Shimmy]

If you just want to burn it there are processes that can create syngas (methane) from hydrogen and CO2. From the efficiency standpoint, you have 45% for the electrolysis, ~30% for the compression, and ~70% for the combustion for ~10% overall efficiency.

So, if you are getting 1/100 the going rate for electricity dumped to the grid it might make sense if the equipment had long life and low capital cost. There are likely better ways to do it though.

 

[timselectric]

I researched this a while ago.
This is the best information I have found.

 

[Warpspeed]

Certainly an interesting project. There are a few problems about this that he never mentioned.


He says his "hydrolizer" uses pure water to generate hydrogen and oxygen.
That does not in fact work. Distilled water is very nearly a perfect insulator. No current flow, no gas created.
Something must be added to the water to make it electrically conductive. Salt works, but Caustic soda works better.

There is another problem though. Your now conductive caustic/water brew still has a fairly high resistivity, and when you pass a large amount of electrical current through it, it generates heat like any resistor. It will rapidly boil unless you provide a pretty potent cooling system.
I assume the noise his hydrolyser makes is the circulating pump and fan used for cooling.

The unit we built (in post #25) required around 24v and ten amps, and the heat generated would not be far off 240 watts, and that is ALL an unrecoverable heat energy loss. He never mentioned that. It certainly generates gas, but its not a lot of gas for the amount of dc electrical power going into the thing. This is not armchair speculation, its what we discovered as a student project building and testing an actual unit.

The second point that I have a lot trouble with, is the storage pressure of the gas in his vehicle. To get sufficient mass of gas into a cylinder small enough to fit into a vehicle, and have a decent range requires a significantly high storage pressure. While its possible to liquefy a gas, and allow it to boil off (as in propane) that is then not quite such a problem. Compressed gas, that he appears to be using, is an entirely different matter.

For instance, compressed natural gas when used as a vehicle fuel, is usually compressed to roughly about 2,500 psi. That sort of pressure is also used in scuba diving tanks and compressed commercial gasses such as oxygen, nitrogen, and argon also run at similar stored pressures. His system appears to run at a much lower stored gas pressure.

Now compressed natural gas is an excellent fuel for a vehicle, the actual gas itself is unbelievably cheap. But to compress it up to a suitably high cylinder pressure of perhaps 2,500 psi requires a lot of horsepower, and its a long slow process. You might need to run for example a ten horsepower compressor for eight hours to fill one vehicle tank overnight. If you work out the Kwh to do that, compressed natural gas is only just competitive with diesel, and only if you can get your power at a very low night time tariff. Solar would be the solution, but its still a lot of Kwh for not a large final stored mass of gas.

I might suggest that compressing and storing sufficient oxygen and hydrogen to a high enough pressure to go the three hundred miles he claims might take an awful lot of extra electrical power above what is required to just generate the two gasses originally.

I am a bit skeptical about the whole thing. If it was as easy as he says it would be well known and would have been commercialized a very long time ago.

 

[timselectric]

He has several videos on his channel.
Maybe your questions are answered in one of the others.

 

[Warpspeed]

Try it yourself.
Get a glass of water, two bare wires, and a 30v dc power supply.
Nothing much happens.

Add a big heap of salt to make very strong brine so its almost syrupy.
You will then get some reasonable current flow, and some bubbles, and the whole thing will start to heat up (power = volts x amps).
It will boil pretty quickly, as most of the electrical power is converted to heat.

Electrolysis certainly works, but its not the super efficient process people expect.

 

[OffGridForGood]

I can say, I saw the Hydrogen House vids (a few years ago) and played with making hydrogen gas from water.
As @Warpspeed correctly pointed out, 'pure' water H2O doesn't conduct electricity - I added sodium hydroxide (dangerous stuff) to the water to increase the conductivity. Because of the impurities in the water, you don't actually get 'pure' hydrogen or oxygen, there are other elements that come along for the ride.
First attempt I just used a couple copper pennies for the anode/cathode these quickly build a layer (electoplate) and efficiency dropped. My wife wouldn't part with her gold wedding band (even for the sake of science experiments) so I had to use silver instead for attempt #2, not ideal but worked long enough to fill some garbage bags with gas.

The water certainly warmed up considerably as the process ran. I didn't set up cooling, I just changed the fluid as it got hot, and put the hot fluid into another container to cool. Slowed things down.
I had this idea of compressing the hydrogen with an old 1960's fridge compressor, into propane bottles, but this clearly wasn't going to work.

In the end, I burt up some bags, had some fun, and ended up filling a bag with both hydrogen and oxygen together - don't do this - lucky thing I had the sense to use a spark plug tester on some long wires for the ignition system, so I was quite far away from the sonic boom, but my hearing did return a while later, when my spouse came home none the wiser. She asked me a few days later if I had heard some explosion? since the people down the road had asked her about it, I honestly said: "nope, I didn't hear anything all afternoon dear".
That was the end to my hydrogen experiments, was not impressed with production vs power required, lots of issues to have a system that would run long term, and storage/safety was certainly going to be an issue.
Moved on to LiFePO4, and been here ever since!

 

[SparkyJJO]

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.

Except that darn electric car is tens of thousands of $$$$$
That takes a long time to break even on, especially if your current car is already paid for, or you'd never pay that much for a car anyway, or an electric is next to useless for what you need (all 3 fit me - one car is paid off, the other one can't be replaced by electric because they don't make electric minivans and I couldn't afford one even if they DID make one).

 

[timselectric]

When I was researching the hydrogen options.
I decided that it was too complicated and wouldn't be cost-effective enough for me.
But I did find the subject interesting.

 

[Warpspeed]

I can say, I saw the Hydrogen House vids (a few years ago) and played with making hydrogen gas from water.
I added sodium hydroxide (dangerous stuff) to the water to increase the conductivity. Because of the impurities in the water, you don't actually get 'pure' hydrogen or oxygen, there are other elements that come along for the ride.

That was the end to my hydrogen experiments, was not impressed with production vs power required, lots of issues to have a system that would run long term, and storage/safety was certainly going to be an issue.
Moved on to LiFePO4, and been here ever since!

The stuff to use is sodium hydroxide NaOH, some other common names for this are lye and caustic soda.
Best and cheapest electrodes to use are a good grade of stainless steel.

Biggest problem is heating, and its pretty easy to boil your reaction chamber dry, especially at high power.
The sodium hydroxide then goes as solid as concrete and its then a real bugger to chip out with a hammer and sharp screwdriver.
Its all pretty easy to do, and jolly good fun, and quite instructive. And all totally impractical.......

Agree with you 100%, LifFePO4 is the way forward.
Not exactly a low cost solution, but definitely very efficient and effective.

 

[OffGridForGood]

Biggest problem is heating, and its pretty easy to boil your reaction chamber dry, especially at high power.

It seemed a cruel reality that the timing for great solar available and the timing for needing heating are opposite parts of the year!

If all that excess heat could have been used to warm up the house while making the hydrogen would have been a great option!
Best I could think of - didn't try - would be a heat exchanger to heat the HWT in the house.

 

[CoolWill]

The problem with stainless steel electrodes in electrolysis is the potential to make hexavalent chromium. You don't want anything to do with that.

Just build a wood gasifier instead.

 

[Doggydogworld]

Hydrogen HouseBoy tells a lot of whoppers:
- His Mirai can power 60 homes (2 kW per home for less than an hour, lol)
- He gets 200+ miles (~70 kWh of electricity) from that sub-1kg tank on his Polaris
- His steel tanks last forever because "hydrogen is inert" (he cured H2 embrittlement, apparently by magic)
- Japan ships H2 from solar "around the world" via pipeline
- Thanksgiving EV charging lines are 200 miles long while H2 refills instantly (starts H2 refill then walk away for 20 minutes....)

I only skipped through the video, so I 'm sure I missed a bunch more. He's not a 100% fraud, like H2 hype king Trevor Milton of Nikola. I'm sure he actually makes and uses hydrogen. But H2 has both pluses and minuses. People who so easily play fast and loose with facts always try to hide the truth from you.

Except that darn electric car is tens of thousands of $$$$$

You're looking into hydrogen, so I just naturally assumed you're drowning in cash

Used Leafs are 5k and a few other low range models, like the cute/fun but tiny Fiat 500, aren't much more. Low mileage Kia Souls and BMW i3s start around 10k. They make great second cars for commuting and errands. Many people can trade their existing 2nd car straight across with no cash or payments and immediately save on gas, oil changes, etc. On top of all that, some qualify for a 4k tax credit (I'm not a fan, but if it's there you have to consider it). EVs aren't a perfect solution for every single person, but tens of millions of families could come out way ahead. Even more so if their schedule allows charging with excess solar.

they don't make electric minivans

Yeah, the only van option is the Chrysler Pacifica PHEV. It's rated at 33 miles on battery before the V6 kicks on. In reality it kicks on in lots of situations. Still, people who drive 35-40 miles a day report annual gas savings of ~500 gallons. That's about 2k/year. Five year old Pacifica PHEVs start around 18k. Not sure if they qualify for the 4k credit.

 

[Spunky]

Hydrogen HouseBoy tells a lot of whoppers:
- His Mirai can power 60 homes (2 kW per home for less than an hour, lol)
- He gets 200+ miles (~70 kWh of electricity) from that sub-1kg tank on his Polaris
- His steel tanks last forever because "hydrogen is inert" (he cured H2 embrittlement, apparently by magic)
- Japan ships H2 from solar "around the world" via pipeline
- Thanksgiving EV charging lines are 200 miles long while H2 refills instantly (starts H2 refill then walk away for 20 minutes....)

And, does he have a FuelCell or is the car the key to the whole system?

Adding to your list, 28kw probably won't carry 5 houses.

There was a guy here in Michigan that was using PV to get Hydrogen from H²O and storing it in propane tanks. He claimed to be able to keep enough in a Toyota Celica (iirc), that his gf drove on the road and around town.
He made some kind of catalyst for the inside of the tank that absorbed the hydrogen more densely when electrically charged and like a solid state cooler can also heat, which in this case would give up the gas when the polarity was reversed.
I'm sure he patented it and someone bought and mothballed the working plan ?