The house I might be buying has an auxillary hot water heater hooked up to the wood stove, so during the winter I get all the free hot water I can use. Compare that to my current living situation that makes the water usage in nuclear subs and Fremen enclaves look positively wasteful.

If they could get this thing to run off the methane generated by a composting toilet they'd really have something.

Co-generation's been used in commercial buildings for years, and it makes sense to scale it down for home use. This is the sort of small scale, incremental improvement I'd like to see you focus on, oj. Forget the big-ticket government boondoggles *cough* powersats *cough*. They're the reason why defense contractors like me drive new pickup trucks.

Joe: You're welcome.

Gov;

Have you seen this? It's a fan that blows hot air from the top of your wood stove into the room, powered by the temperature differential between the top of it and the top of the stove. A very cute idea.

Mr. Shropshire;

Hey, don't you be disrepecting powersats! That's the future. Because of that, there's no need for any government involvement, private industry will do the job as long as the feds don't get in the way too much.

Joe:

Yes, they shouldn't be government projects, we should just use taxes to make fossil fuel consumption so expensive that innovation pays off quicker.

Well, should I buy or not???

We can do this.

I wanted to put a hot water loop on the water heater, but my husband blew it off. Takes a few seconds to get from the basement to the 2nd floor.

It's funny to listen to rightwingers talk like leftwingers.

I get this from the woowoo crowd all the time; distributed generation.

They never talk about distributed maintenance, though.

I've been doing stories about cogeneration at big hotels. Works fine, if you have a graduate engineer on staff.

Sure, Harry, but compared to shutting down the economy in order to hasten the coming ice age, this is mostly harmless.

Harry's right; this is a woowoo product that will go the way of the late 70's wind generators and the multi-fuel furnaces. Cost/benefit analyses in actual usage will be the end of it.

we need more maintenance/service jobs to replace manufacturing.

What may make this inevitable is electrical transmission capacity. We just aren't upgrading the US power grid these days - I suspect because it's now too expensive - and power demand continues to increase. At some point you either have to build more power lines or build generators closer to the users.

It may be more expensive than a new mult-megawatt natural gas plant, but less expensive than a new natural gas plant plus dozens (hundreds?) of miles of new high-voltage lines...

Maybe you're right, Harry, but think before you snark: it's usually easier to scale each single system down than up, and unit costs go down as volume increases. Honda already makes a million and a half small engines a year, and they're pretty reliable: their propane generators go 5 - 10,000 hours between rebuilds. That's only 7 - 14 months continuous operation, but at 4 peak hours a day it's 3 to 7 years, about as much as you get from a hot water heater, and it doesn't take a graduate engineer to rebuild a lawnmower engine. If that breaks even, so much the better; if not, nobody's the poorer but Honda. By the way, what's right versus left got to do with it?

Mostly righties around here.

The cogenerator diesels I've been monitoring go 24K hours between rebuilds, but they are not as simple to manage as a water heater.