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by gwbas1c 2360 days ago
How much power are you trying to make? You can already buy "off the shelf" USB power supplies for camp fires
1 comments

As much as possible. I would probably cover the entire top of the stove in TECs (so maybe something like 0.5m^2). If I wanted to I could play with adding some to the sides, onto the chimney, etc.

Essentially, it's just to supplement the solar which as I said isn't so crash hot in the Yukon in winter. It's a hobby, and I'd like to see what I can get out of it.

Again, because it's 24x7 for ~6 months I think it might be a fun side project to play with and watch what I can get out of it.

> How much power are you trying to make?

> As much as possible.

That is not a useful response. Would it be worth doing if "possible" turned out to be 0.1 mW? 1 mW? 10 mW? 100 mW? 1 W? 10 W? 100 W? 1 kW? 10 kW? Presumably somewhere in that sequence your answer goes from "no" to yes" and that point determines what tradeoffs you're going to be willing to accept in order to increase your power capacity.

People have suggested steam engines. Those would definitely produce more power than TECs, at least twice as much and potentially six times as much. But they are far more likely to kill you. Is that tradeoff worth it to you?

TECs are pretty expensive per watt. Are you really willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars if it will increase your energy output a little? How about hundreds of thousands?

There are tradeoffs in any engineering design. It's obvious that more power is better, but without some idea of the shape of your utility curve, it's impossible to evaluate those tradeoffs in a useful way.