I know that it is quite early to start telling the world what I want for Christmas. Even worse, to let out my New Year’s resolution where my major goal for the coming year is to proceed with development of a valid way to remove the requirement to burn fossil fuels as much a possible. I make no effort to hide the fact that I am a lousy handyman so one of the main tasks for the blog is to open up to a process dedicated to start finding existing products that might help. There is lots of hobbyist grade stuff out there, and some of it can (or could) be adapted to our purpose, but dedicated low or no added energy consumption items of a scale for house independence are few and far between.

I doubt this will be the last article on this topic before the end of the year, I am sure new and interesting items will require revising and adding to the list as time elapses before Christmas. It may be pretty obvious, I have not written this blog for a long time as of yet, and the web constantly offers new possibilities to review and decide a product should be in my possession for evaluation, testing and modification.

For the past few weeks I have been reading the biographies of Nikola Tesla, there are a couple of classic ones, I purchased them from Amazon.ca along with a couple of the classic videos on his life.

Book – Prodigal Genius – The life of Nikola Tesla – John J. O’Neill

Book – Tesla – Man out of time – Margaret Cheney

E-Book – Tsesla Coil – George Trinkaus

E-Book – Son of Tesla Coil – George Trinkaus

E-Book – Tesla – The Lost Inventions – George Trinkaus

Video – Nikola Tesla – The Genius who lit the world -

Video – The Secret of Nikola Tesla – The Movie

So it is a simple jump to ask Santa for a Tesla Coil for Christmas. It is his best known invention (besides the polyphase alternating current motor) and it is often described as an energy reduction device – especially for lighting.

A search for “Tesla Coil” on Google got me a site that has all types of electrical kits for the hobbyist and the inventor. The plans are cheap, but in my present case a waste of time until I am well grounded in the concepts and familiar enough to understand what to do with that information. I could ask for a kit to put together. I am not about to go all out and find one that is dealing with seriously dangerous voltages, but rather I only want the medium Tesla Coil found at:

http://www.amazing1.com/tesla.htm

The unit I want (BTC30 – already built and tested) can be purchased in plan form, as a kit or already constructed and tested. I have no illusions that the one I want is the pre-built and tested unit BTC30 with the optional T08 Toroidal Terminal – 74.95). For the extra hundred over the plans and parts kit, I will save myself hours of aggravation and the humiliation from not properly assembling it well enough to get it working and, thus, wasting the entire (fiat) currency outlay.

http://www.amazing1.com/cgi-bin/hitslog.pl?/Graphics/btc30-b.wmv

Some video of other working coils is on the web at You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi4kXgDBFhw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY-AS13fl30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueUl0×9_Hj4

That was just a few, but interesting stuff.

I want the working apparatus to see what can be done with the reduction of power needed to light a room. The same website has other (smaller) units MTC30 – 49.99 built and tested) that are supposed to light a fluorescent tube wirelessly. The medium unit should be able to do that as well as generate lots of the sparks that the Tesla Units have as their trademark. I am interested in the claim that entire rooms can be lit wirelessly for 100 Watts per hour, making the bulbs highly efficient and saving lots of energy from being wasted – no matter how many bulbs are used.

The concept that it makes no difference how many are being lit by the Coil, there is no added power drain and that fluorescent tubes will last for very extended periods make this avenue a great one to explore. If other wireless applications can also be run in the home from the same coil – such as possibly a heater or motor as well – still only drawing the exact same utility power from the wall no matter the load, the effort will not be wasted.

I am beginning to look at this as a way toward massive energy conservation for my energy independent house goal. Consider the possibilities if a single Kilowatt per hour Tesla Coil is all that is needed to run a house that originally needed over 10 KW per hour during some peak times. I am probably naïve to believe it would be simple, Tesla worked on this all his life, but then again all his laboratories were lit wirelessly by coils, so the possibility exists. Think of what that will do to the requirements for energy independence and to the nuclear and coal lobbyists trying to make the government allocate massive public investments for their ultimate profit at our expense and the world’s future grief – especially the nuclear lobby. If we can just find a safe alternative to using nuclear, I would rest a lot easier,

- it is better to go green than glow -

The medium Tesla Coil BTC30 – pre-built and tested costs 499.00 US plus, of course, the added extras of shipping and in my case duty and taxes. At least the Canadian Dollar has finally overtaken the US fiat currency and will be less of a hit on the credit card – think of it as my contribution to overcoming the trade deficit the US has with cheap products from China. Who knows, I may even help keep the country out of a recession with my Christmas list.

The second item on my wish list is a Stirling Engine application for wood burning stoves. It is a unit designed to use a Stirling engine to turn a fan and create better heating efficiency by moving the hot air around the room. The power comes from using the generated (and wasted – radiated) heat on the wood stove as it burns the fuel to heat. The fan just turns without electricity or other fuel and spreads the heat wealth to all areas. This is not a passive convection unit, but a true machine to make heat dissipation more efficient.

The big question people who know my home will ask: Why do you want this, you don’t have a wood burning stove to give heat. No argument there, but I want to see just how strong this fan mechanism really is. If I could remove the actual fan blades (or even just leave then there), and the unit is strong enough to rotate a small generator (we are talking hobbyist size, no large voltage just yet) it could offer avenues of research and design in whole new areas. I plan on using a Stirling Engine to run some form of home generator in my final plan, but finding one pre-built and properly sized is very difficult.

The only alternative open to me is to proceed with a study of Stirling engine manufacture. I do have books on the subject on their way, but it is always an incentive to me to see a running unit to help me visualize what I want to accomplish. The Stirling Engine Application that I have in mind is rather cheap, at 189.00 US or its cooler brother for 199.99 plus shipping and handling. It seems worth it to me to get one (or both), if only to add to my sometimes neglected collection of hobby steam engines. I already have a very small Stirling engine, but finding a way to use it is pretty difficult at the present time.

If you want to explore this practical application further, go to:

http://www.thermalengines.com/index.html

What I like best about this particular item is that they have authorized dealers listed to purchase the unit, and some of them are actually in Canada! Even if I don’t get one of these from Santa, I will definitely be getting one sometime in the new year to see how it works afterwards.

I figure since the unit is built to take the heat from a burning wood stove, it will also run on the heat thrown off by a regular stove burner. Our stove has a solid glass top over the burners, so I don’t really have to sit it right on top of a burner to get it working, but hopefully it will run on conducted heat beside the burner while we are cooking. It may not make a real difference in spreading heat from the burners to the rest of the kitchen, but it will be a lesson to see it run and experiment with possibilities for other applications.

Finally, my last wish presently on the short list, is to get my hands on the Solar House model kit offered for sale at:

http://www.electronickits.com/kit/complete/solar/solarhouse.htm

The 124.99 price sounds like a steal if it does all the things that it integrates. The picture shows a wind turbine, solar panels and lots of other information in the extensive literature accompanying the kit. It looks like just the thing to get a young student interested in the ways power can be generated in the modern household and how they can work together in a house that becomes self sustaining. OR, even possibly teach this old dog lots of new ways to do what he is trying to do!

I want to acknowledge the tireless efforts of the Google Alerts system for scouring the web every night while I sleep and providing me notifications of all the articles and blogs that use a given set of key words. I did the search manually for the Tesla Coil, but the Stirling Engine Fan and the Solar House kit are as a result of the output from these searches that come to me on a daily basis.

It never fails to astound me that there are so many other people who are also trying to push farther the boundaries of alternative energy production and reducing our critical and desperate reliance on oil to keep our civilization continuing. Isn’t it really about time we stopped exploiting less well developed countries and resources for fleeting needs. It is time to turn toward reliable, renewable uninterrupted power sources that can co-exist with the rest of nature without damaging the planet or its flora and fauna