[Stoves] Flamestover TEG device

David Young dyoung at pobox.com
Sat Dec 27 16:42:44 CST 2014


On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 12:44:13AM -0800, Todd Albi wrote:
> Many of the Smart phones chargers are 5 watts, tablets chargers usually are
> 10 watts.  The Flamestower is only 2.5 watts and it states 3.1 hours to
> charge, according to the description.  Sounds a lot like the major
> complaint of the BioLite Camp stove, that it only generates  2 watts of
> power the majority of the time, and only when feeding it continually, which
> results in hours of time required to charge a cell phone with a partial
> charge.  There are lots of cost effective options available to provide low
> power options for charging at a fraction of the price.  Hopefully more
> efficient and powerful designs will be available in the near future.
> Currently it appears intermittent led lighting is all they are really
> capable of performing at a very high cost.

The TEG seems to be the method of choice for electrical generation
on cook fires, and I'm curious how that came to be.  It seems that
the stoves we are talking about typically produce about 5kW, and they
extract less than 1% of that using an exotic and costly component, the
TEG.  Would some other technology, such as a small steam turbine and
generator, derive a lot more electrical energy from the same fire?
I guess that somebody has compared the turbine and TEG, taking into
account the cost and complexity of manufacture, weight, maintenance
cost, et cetera, and found that the TEG comes out ahead?

Thank you for describing the performance of the BioLite Basecamp stove,
I had wondered about it.

Dave

-- 
David Young
dyoung at pobox.com    Urbana, IL    (217) 721-9981




More information about the Stoves mailing list