So now Israel is attacking events here as well? What is their goal here. To be more hated than Russia?

Probably, but its cheaper than solid wood

Even softwood seems so expensive. Plywood is probably the extent of my budget for a lot of things. Not sure how well it lasts outside or how treatable it is though so just haven’t really made much.

I generally prefer fermented fruits and honey. Although I suppose rhubarb is a vegetable, and one of the things I grow with hand tools.

Yeah, expectation of them doing HP style bullshit makes me want to refuse the entire thing.

Plus as long as hand tools do a good enough job there is something rather satisfying about using them. So much quieter too, I can hear the local cats if one of them turns up and wants a head scratch. Or if I have gloves on, a tummy rub.

Petrol generator is probably cheaper. But still expensive.

I really hate proprietary batteries on powertools, so corded is tempting. But I can’t get power 250m away across a road and several other peoples gardens.

Jackery/similar are a far higher capacity than I would realistically need to run a few tools for a fairly brief duration but you need the big ones to have a high enough current limit to reliably run any kind of garden power tools I may need.

I found another solution though. Return to tradition! Got a hand scythe. Also working to remove most grass areas. Not 100% sure what to do with the space over winter when veg isn’t growing. More rhubarb? At least weeds don’t grow as much over winter either.

Ahh that makes a bit more sense.

If that is the case you certainly don’t get thermoelectric generators

My thinking was steam engines are 100s of years old technology.

Only places I have seen TEGs really used in a useful sense is stove fans. They blow air around the stove to move warm air around the room.

If you want primitive, steam engine? Orders of magnitude efficient than thermoelectric generators.

Lol, what a loser.

I don’t think we have those here

Depends a lot on what you want from it. Trees, hedges, shrubs, plants?

My garden is mainly shrubs because its quite small. If I had more space I would add fruit trees.

No fires here, how much traffic pollution do they remove and how much goes through?

Have wondered about making one, not sure where I would get HEPA sheets like that though, or a fan like that tbh. Don’t seem to be that common in the UK.

What is the realistic output? Seem some thermoelectric camping stoves and they can barely manage to charge a phone.

Also sounds like a lot of fuel would be required which solar panels don’t need. As some kind of backup power maybe it could have a use, but no chance at being a good primary power source. And isn’t a steam turbine much more efficient than thermoelectric?

CAN be very expensive. If you are doing it with a car radiator and a hose pipe it costs very little and there isn’t even a heat pump involved.

You can take it up a step by using a heat pump of course. Which you can also do fairly cheaply if you are willing to modify a portable AC unit or tbh anything else with a heat pump in it. All you need to do is water cool the hot side of the heat pump and send that water through your ground loop.

Depends how much you want out of it. Are you heating and cooling the entire house year round along with providing hot water. Or are you just taking a few degrees off the peak summer temperature in a room or two?

IIRC the latent heat of fusion of water is about 333kJ/kg. So 666kJ for 2L. With ice that averages out to about 23w over a nights sleep. Heat capacity of water is 4.2kJ/kg/k, so even if its 0c as a liquid, to warm up to body temperature is under 300kJ.

TLDR: Water going from a ~0c solid to ~0c liquid takes more than twice as much energy as ~0c liquid water warning up to body temperature.

The ice also only melts to 0c, so you get that benefit as well.

Wouldn’t cold water get warm very quickly? I have thought of ice though. If you wrapped it up enough so that it takes up heat fairly slowly.

That is kinda like earth tubes isn’t it? Which you could retrofit. More powerful cooling can be achieved by using the tubes as part of a geothermal heat pump. Bonus there is that its also even more efficient than a regular heat pump in winter too.