Veggie powered Generator to power home.... Feed power to the grid??

[dkjones96]

Crazy idea, but who needs to change the oil anyways? Why not run the WVO through the crankcase before burning it? Like having constantly new and fresh oil all the time. I'm pretty sure it lubes plenty well.

And while you couldn't sell the power back to the electric company, you could split your mains so you have the generator powering your house OR the electrical grid powering your house. Unless you went fancy with it you are looking at a manual switch system but it still isn't a huge deal really.

If you did decide to go fancy with it an old 486 even has plenty of processing power to run a UPS type system. If the generator needs brought down for maintenance just push a button on the computer and it'll switch to the grid, if the generator fails the computer can kick on a battery powered back-up system and verify the grid is alright and switch to that.

I built a system in high school that was similar but in reverse. I ran the grid all the time and the generator ran behind the UPS. A computer monitored voltage on the UPS battery and if voltage began to fall from a dying battery the computer started the generator and connected it to the 24v battery side(externally regulated car alternator). I just let the UPS do all of the 24vdc to 120vac conversion and used an old 386 to tend the dc end. If I had the know how that I do now I would have P&G the generator by quick charging the batteries and cutting the engine after they were topped up. As it was though, it just detected a dead battery and kicked on until the grid was back up. The two car batteries had a good couple of hours run time(the generator only worked in my bedroom).

You may laugh about the 386 but it ran for 3 years without ever requiring a reset. The only reason it even went down was because the power was out after a hurricane and my mom forgot to put gas in the generator.