Aye. Legislation changed in April. It's as if the government could see it coming.
- Thread starter Lewis_RX8
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Wherever it went, I didn't get a penny if it.
DAPPH
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When the cold war was getting started in the mid 1950's as part of the civil defence & nuclear emergency planning some of the big telephone exchanges had massive auto start up back up genny's. That not only kept the exchanges running but also the battery back up in the battery hall. IIRC Meadows Alternators with RR engines made under subcontract by Perkins engines and nearly as big a void close by for the long-term running fuel.
An acquaintance who had a turkey rearing business picked one up for about £2.000 at auction when a big trunk telephone exchange near him was modernised , digitized & made fibre optic enabled to be just the size of half a dozen or so red telephone boxes stood side by aside. Seem to recall him saying it cost him nearly £6 K to get it out and transported to his place.
The last really big set up I saw had two massive automatic switch overs without disruptions was in an Inland Revenue & Customs computer centre that would survive all but a very close or direct nuke strike.
Apparently, they were able to run for a couple of months on the stored fuel.
You can get Lister-Petter T Series air-cooled engines (max output about 17kva on the triple) with a large base tank extended lube oil tank.
These engines are massively over-engineered anyway (short of putting sand or marbles in em, they are hard to kill - I've seen examples with over 30k-hours with little more than the occasional oil and filter change) with a 2000+ hour service interval. Really good on fuel as well.
Used on stuff like remote mast sites where they are THE primary power supply.
Abserloute groundshakers when they kick in. I thaught the building was coming down once in Redcar ate. Happened to be it was just a powercut outside.
DAPPH
as dyslexik as I'm daft
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Still, if the business is registered, the fuel cost can be set against tax demands and if registered for VAT that too is reclaimable in monthly or weekly (?) claims.
Runing a business you have to pass on such costs almost on a daily basis if you want to survive . All this I'm trying to protect my customers, rings a bit hollow to me most of the time.
Though in some areas of business I recognize that it could also be a death knell if the customers decide to not continue having what you are producing /selling.
On this, once pubs, restaurants, cafe's, clothing shops, in fact almost anything with an outlet on the high street lose their customer base due to customers not wanting to pay higher prices, their days are numbered unless big rethinks on how & what they trade in are made.
addjunkie
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It used to be run one for a week then swap, but you end up with all your kit needing major overhall or dead at roughly the same time. 3 gennies was the common too as two are often needed for big loads like bow thrusters. Now the tendancy is to bang the hours up on one, then switch to the other. With the increase in shaft gennies, medium speed diesel electric and waste heat recovery things are different. Serviceing is on both hours and oil analysis results.
Offshore we used to need all 4 flat out to run everything, for maintenance you had to reduce some of the large loads like water injection pump or a gas compressor. So maintenance was pushed well out using oil analysis and vibration monitoring.
Modern stuff with very easy to-use Synchronising Controllers, you can have a bank of several gensets all capable of synching together for peak loads - and with 2 "spare" ones that can be brought-on-line manually or automatically, while you rotate out others for service (or if one shutdown/failed).
They can be programmed to switch around which sets are brought on/kept on, and which are switched off when loads are lower, to share running hours, flag up faults or impending service need etc etc.
They can be programmed to switch around which sets are brought on/kept on, and which are switched off when loads are lower, to share running hours, flag up faults or impending service need etc etc.
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We used to do that with the compressors at Rover, we had 5 compressors, 2 on "duty", one on "top up", one standby and one being serviced then every X hours one of the duty ones would be pulled for service and the rest would move up a place, I do remember you couldn't go into the compressor house without hearing protection it was that noisy.
Morrisman
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Got an electric van on order.... That i'll be charging up from a diesel generator...
that's the thing with these electric cars... they never show footage of one being charged up outside a power plant
out of sight out of mind. it's a big con really..
And here, started off just milking time, then for cooling the bulk tank, now all the farm, all day.
Can't see it being sustainable long term due to the cost of replacing generators when they die, but we'll see?
A guy from our MTB club was an early adopter of the turbo milk float - he ran a Tesla for 3-years.
Saw him the other day, driving a sporty ICE Beemer saloon - asked him why the switch.
He replied that he'd got fed up with the unimpressive reliability and dodgy build quality, while planning longer journeys around charge points, range anxiety, diverting off-route to find a charge point etc had got annoying (& he'd relatively recently had a change which meant a lot more long journeys instead of previously mostly local runs).
He said that now with prices of electric, any running cost benefit had also vanished.
Given the economy and the premium cost of EV's as well - will we see sales of EV's take a bigger hit than ICE's for a while?
Saw him the other day, driving a sporty ICE Beemer saloon - asked him why the switch.
He replied that he'd got fed up with the unimpressive reliability and dodgy build quality, while planning longer journeys around charge points, range anxiety, diverting off-route to find a charge point etc had got annoying (& he'd relatively recently had a change which meant a lot more long journeys instead of previously mostly local runs).
He said that now with prices of electric, any running cost benefit had also vanished.
Given the economy and the premium cost of EV's as well - will we see sales of EV's take a bigger hit than ICE's for a while?
The compaire Broomwade ones we had running in the dairy had three running staged. They were mounted too close together, with accoustic enclosures, we had to manually replace the motors or air ends when they failed - we were young and stupid - should have got the management to put some lifting equipment in - and holes in the top to get them out.
Morrisman
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I've worked on ships where the main engines run literally for a year or more, they're never shut down until we go to bi-annual dry docks. Oil is cleaned with continual centrifugal separators, and topped up or exchanged gradually. Some more modern diesels actually feed the dirty engine oil into the fuel supply to dispose of it, while adding more to the sump.
addjunkie
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Were these diesel electric running thrusters or diesel with CPP? Were you on those ranform boats?
Diesel electric is popular now on hitec ships and cruise liners etc, you just start and stop generators to supply the required capacity, allows stopping for maintenance too. The first FPSO I was on was like that 8 gas fired dual fuel generators. The later one was 4 RR RB211s
Centrifuging lube oil is adding a bit much complexity for a shop or farm set up. Purifiers can be a pain in the aris if they are not looked after properly.
I see plenty of gensets with auto-oil top-up systems.
Bigger engines always use at least a bit of oil, its normal (I'm no engine design expert but I believe its due to the larger tolerances big engines need, and what is acceptable usage is stated in the Mfr blurb).
E.g. Main Hospitals require (or used to anyway) installations with fuel and capability for 200-hours continuous operation.
When building the Chunnel, I was told by guys at the F.G. Wilson Factory that they supplied 3 of 600kva sets for the site (would have been Perkins 2500 Series 6-cyl most likely), which they said did around 60,000 hours apiece, and ran pretty much continuously.
Most of the wear in an engine is when they are started/stopped and heated and cooled - just keep one running and in its comfortable operating load, and extremely impressive life and reliability are possible.
(A few weeks back I saw a small Perkins - base load rated at just 55kva, converted to run on gas produced by burning pellets - its a CHP plant on a farm in Pembs. It was a horrible abused-looking oily mutt of a thing - but was still running pretty much 24/7 (it was starting to struggle & break-down more n more) - but it had done 69,000 hours when I saw it.
Bigger engines always use at least a bit of oil, its normal (I'm no engine design expert but I believe its due to the larger tolerances big engines need, and what is acceptable usage is stated in the Mfr blurb).
E.g. Main Hospitals require (or used to anyway) installations with fuel and capability for 200-hours continuous operation.
When building the Chunnel, I was told by guys at the F.G. Wilson Factory that they supplied 3 of 600kva sets for the site (would have been Perkins 2500 Series 6-cyl most likely), which they said did around 60,000 hours apiece, and ran pretty much continuously.
Most of the wear in an engine is when they are started/stopped and heated and cooled - just keep one running and in its comfortable operating load, and extremely impressive life and reliability are possible.
(A few weeks back I saw a small Perkins - base load rated at just 55kva, converted to run on gas produced by burning pellets - its a CHP plant on a farm in Pembs. It was a horrible abused-looking oily mutt of a thing - but was still running pretty much 24/7 (it was starting to struggle & break-down more n more) - but it had done 69,000 hours when I saw it.
James1979
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Scanias run a centrifugal lube oil separator on their truck engines so I wonder if a big generator set engine might also?
mtt.tr
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A number of engines do.
We have a 250kva with a V8 scania engine at a local farm. Noisy old lump I prefer a straight 6.
