Mike’s BTU Calculator For Fuel/BTU Price Comparison

This is a excel spreadsheet I started some years ago and have added many types of fuel/BTU’s over the years. Since I am in the process of digging up old tools I created over the years to share with you folks,  and I thought this one was a bit more important now-a-days !

Most BTU  Data from US DOE. Compare Nat Gas to Coal or Propane (LP) to Gasoline/Petro to Bio-Butanal or Methanol. Extra stuff related to the BTU content of Solar Energy included.

You will need One Of The Following to be able to work with this spreadsheet.

Microsoft Excel Viewer (free from Microsoft)

OpenOffice (free open source office package at openoffice.org)

Microsoft Excel (big bucks)

and The Will To Do It (free but requires effort) & click the link below.

Mike’s NRG Conversion Worksheet (BTU/Cost).XLS

It is not perfect but a great tool ! Enjoy !

Enter your prices for fuel in your area and your consumption of your fuel type and see what it would cost you in other fuels to heat with etc…

September 22nd, 2010 | Tags: , , , | Category: BTU Calculator | Comments are closed

DIY Solar Lawn Mower #2

In 2005 we created our solar mower #1 that is merely a 24 volt battery operated cordless Ryobi push mower. We were not taking photos or video at that time but we wanted to. So recently, we were at a monthly local public auction (great place to get project parts) and came up with a Black and Decker 12 volt model and since our 5 year old 24v Ryobi was in need of repair at this point. So it’s a great time to share this little mod to basically charge a battery operated mower with a solar panel.
This is only a concept guide to what we did and you will no doubt be using other equipment or have problems other that we incurred here so please be safe with your re-engineering. If you are not sure what you are doing ask someone and/or check the web/wikipedia.

One thing we forgot to mention in the section of adding a diode to block current in the case we accidentally connect the power up incorrectly, you should add a fuse ( 3 amp in our case) to the power line in which you use the blocking diode so that it will blow before the blocking diode is destroyed (please use a polarized power connector).

Please feel free to comment or ask a question but do allow some time for a reply as I am a busy guy !
We hope to have the website updated to full functionality sometime soon.

June 18th, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: Solar Lawn Mower | Comments are closed