DO-IT-YOURSELF GREEN ELECTRICITY

04 May 2010

Man makes renewable power station in back garden

Man makes renewable power station in back garden

Tony Bohana is no ordinary DIY man though! He has built a generator in his back garden that runs on waste vegetable oil and produces renewable electricity for his home and green electricity supplier Green Energy UK. The generator, which has been Ofgem accredited, also provides the family home in Westbury, Wiltshire with heat and hot water. Tony visits local pubs, cafes, restaurants and takeaways to collect the waste vegetable oil for his unique domestic power station.

Tony, who by day runs his own IT company, says: “I was running a car on waste vegetable oil and it occurred to me at the pub that if I could get hold of a cheap engine I could begin making my own electricity. Modern engines could do the job, but because of their high revs you can’t have them on all the time or they’d soon start breaking. So my search for a low-rev engine led me to a 1950’s Lister. It’s a reliable engine usually found on boats working the rivers of old colonial countries, and because they’re still making them in India, cheap spare parts are easy to come by in the UK.

Tony continues: “The Lister produces a lot of heat and needs water to cool it down. I realised that instead of losing this heat energy, which is essentially a waste product from making the electricity, I could use it. I worked out a way to divert the hot water and heat produced by the exhaust to a thermal store, and this keeps our radiators warm and gives us hot water throughout the house.”

The project has cost Tony £10,000, but he says this is because it was a learning process with mistakes, and having learnt from these the price now would be around £3000. His generator produces 3.5 kWh per hour, enough electricity to power four additional homes, and he sells the surplus to Green Energy UK customers via the National Grid.

Green Energy UK chief executive, Doug Stewart, says: “Tony’s engineering is incredibly clever. Lister engines are started manually by winding them up, but Tony has modified it so that all he needs to do is turn a key to get his going. He has painstakingly built from scratch a clean power station that helps Green Energy UK in its mission to green up the National Grid.”