apex fuel saver

[sam7]

hi - I'm new here so please excuse any accidental breaches of protocol!

The Apex fuel saver device sounds too good to be true, but having spoken to the inventor, it seems he's completely above board. The posts regarding this have gone quiet since end of July - has anyone got to the bottom of whether it really works or not?

Thanks

[wyleu]

some discussion took place http://navitron.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=207.0 here

[sam7]

thanks wylue - been there done that!

In the meantime have also discovered the sunstream energy tanks or 'power tanks' that are brought in by Firstlight - they were mentioned in Ivan's bit about interseasonal thermal storage. NOW THEY DO LOOK INTERESTING...

Any views on them yet?

Cheers

Simon

[Ivan]

The sunstream tanks got me really excited.....for the first five minutes..

They have an incredible heat capacity when changing state ie from solid to liquid and back again, so you can store a lot of heat energy (kWh, J etc) with only a very small increase in temperature (dT). The problem is that this only occurs for a very limted temperature range (which can be virtually anything you want, by selecting the appropriate wax - which is readily available from chemical suppliers). Once the wax is liquid, it has a lower heat capacity than water - so the total amount of heat stored by raising the temperature from say 25C to 85C is not very much more than for heating the same quantity of water through the same heat range. The thing to remember is that water is a LOT cheaper - and does not require specialist containers, and you do not have to pay anyone's profit margin when using water as the heat store.

If you really want these heatstore tanks, simply buy the appropriate grade of wax and fill a standard hot water tank with it!


Ivan