Baxi hydrogen boilers live trials. ..I'm dubious as to its validity.

[Mr Gus]

https://heatingnewsjournal.com/hvp-maga ... or-trials/

Not impressed myself, if we compare the 20% hydrogen mix in amongst 80% natural gas, it's virtue signalling to me.

Allegedly a conversion kit will be available for 100% switch over, ..but that's pr "find The pea" games, no estimated component & engineer costings on current tech, no timeline, nothing.

The 100% hydrogen boiler is on the never never.

Hydrogen yeah, it's that speck, just over the horizon, ...yeah you see it!?, ..Course you do!
PR & nu-fuel *influencer* disclaimer: you have to agree to be pegged out in the hot sun for 4 days without hydration before we "show" you our 2022 plans for hydrogen, ..wow, nice tan you have there!

[AE-NMidlands]

and on the same topic (rather than start a new thread) https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... d-with-gas has

Hydrogen could ‘nearly double’ cost of heating a home compared with gas
Using hydrogen would add about 70% to home energy bills, according to a report by a renewable energy charity
/snip/
Michael Liebreich, chair of Liebreich Associates and founder of the analyst firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance, has hit out at “boiler-slingers” – the UK’s existing network of gas companies, plumbing firms and engineers – who see hydrogen as a route to maintain as much of the status quo as possible, rather than moving to heat pumps and other proven low-carbon technology.

Liebreich tweeted: “Heating with hydrogen from renewable energy is six times less efficient than using the same electricity in a heat pump. I don’t know a single serious energy analyst not affiliated with the gas industry who thinks hydrogen heating will be a thing.”

There are also doubts over the low-carbon nature of some forms of hydrogen, as there are both “green” ways of producing hydrogen from renewable energy, and “blue” methods to produce the gas from fossil fuels. The latter does not represent a saving of greenhouse gas emissions unless the resulting carbon dioxide is captured and stored.

[Oldgreybeard]

Interestingly we always used to run gas fires etc on gas with a fair proportion of hydrogen, years ago. I remember our gas cooker having to be converted some time in the late 1960's when we changed over to natural gas. Before that we'd been on "town gas", a mixture of hydrogen, methane and carbon monoxide (which is why suicide by putting one's head in an oven worked back then). The conversion process to everyone's cooker back then was to replace the jets in the burners and sometimes add a pressure regulator, as the new natural gas often came in at a higher pressure. The new natural gas also smelled differently, as I remember, and had a different calorific value, so the way everyone's gas bill was calculated had to be changed.

So, leaving aside the way that hydrogen is produced (which is really down to whether it has better environmental credentials) there are no issues with burning it in domestic appliances, like we used to decades ago.

[AE-NMidlands]

I think town gas stank naturally. It was also very humid, lots of the gas works processes cleaning it up being by running it through aquaeous reagents.
When natural gas came in it was a lot drier so the leather(?) seals in old cast iron pipes dried out giving an epidemic of leaks.

Natural gas is odourised with a stenching agent, used to be (probably still) mercaptans of some sort.
A

[Mr Gus]

I did cast my eyes over the guardian piece this morning.

How much bigger will the typical blast radius be with 20% hydrogen? ...when there's a gas explosion it's pretty big as is, & how will it affect house insurance costs annually I wonder, ..seriously Lloyds et al don't like losing money.

[Oldgreybeard]

I did cast my eyes over the guardian piece this morning.

How much bigger will the typical blast radius be with 20% hydrogen? ...when there's a gas explosion it's pretty big as is, & how will it affect house insurance costs annually I wonder, ..seriously Lloyds et al don't like losing money.

Can't possibly be any worse that the plethora of gas works that every town and city had for around 100 years or so. Our town gas works was right by the railways station, in the centre of town, presumably so that the coal and coke could be offloaded/loaded easily. The old gas works in the middle of Salisbury is now a supermarket, the gasometer was still there until around 20 years ago, when it got dismantled. every town with gas had one of more large gasometers, filled with town gas that was every bit as explosive as natural gas. As a student at the University of London I had digs way out at Northolt, in a house right next to this big gasometer on a large housing estate not far off the A40 and very close to the underground station:

[AE-NMidlands]

Can't possibly be any worse that the plethora of gas works that every town and city had for around 100 years or so.

apart from the fact that most fuels (neat) are not explosive. It's when there is a leak which mixes with air (oxygen) that it gets dangerous.
And Hydrogen has an unusually wide range of concentraions at which it will explode. Don't know how being in a mixture affects that though.
A

[AE-NMidlands]

More bad news for Hydrogen - but will the politicians listen to "experts," or only to lobbyists?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -concludes

Hydrogen is unsuitable for home heating, review concludes
Too many technical difficulties to overcome to make it a viable low-carbon heating fuel, say researchers
Hydrogen is unsuitable for use in home heating, and likely to remain so, despite the hopes of the UK government and plumbing industry, a comprehensive review of scientific papers has concluded.

Hydrogen lobbyists are out in force at the Labour party conference this week, sponsoring several events in Liverpool, and will be plentiful at the Conservative party conference that begins this weekend.
They are hoping to persuade the UK government to push ahead with a mooted large-scale rollout of hydrogen for home heating, as a replacement for the gas used to heat the vast majority of British homes. Hydrogen proponents say it would avoid households having to replace gas boilers with heat pumps, the other main contender for low-carbon home heating.

But researchers reviewed 32 studies of hydrogen and concluded that it was unlikely to play a major role in home heating, either as a full replacement for fossil fuel gas heating, or as a blend with natural gas.

Jan Rosenow, Europe director at the Regulatory Assistance Project, an energy thinktank, and co-author of the study, said there were too many technical difficulties to overcome to make hydrogen a viable and economic low-carbon heating fuel.
“Using hydrogen for heating may sound attractive at first glance. However, all of the independent research on this topic comes to the same conclusion: heating with hydrogen is a lot less efficient and more expensive than alternatives such as heat pumps, district heating and solar thermal,” he said.

The study, published on Tuesday in the peer-review scientific journal Joule, is the third major blow in the past week to proponents of hydrogen for home heating. Earlier this week, a separate study by the analyst company Cornwall Insight concluded that hydrogen would be close to twice as expensive for home heating as using gas alone. Last week, the Guardian revealed problems with a hydrogen pilot project in Scotland.

Rosenow told the Guardian hydrogen was not the alternative to heat pumps that lobbyists were claiming. “For policymakers, hydrogen for heating appears attractive because it seems easy: just replace fossil gas with hydrogen with no impact on households. The reality is that significant technical alterations are needed including the pipework in homes and that it will cost people a lot of money to keep warm.”

I had missed https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ture-homes

‘World-first’ hydrogen project raises questions about its role in fuelling future homes
Project to power 300 Scottish homes with ‘green hydrogen’ hit by delays, leaving some to question whether it is still worthwhile

[Moxi]

If I recall correctly Mr Gus Hydrogen conflagration products expand 7 times the volume of the hydrogen involved in the conflagration, this expansion coupled with the velocity at which the chemical reaction (explosion?) takes place is what makes Hydrogen such a bad idea for household use. Add in its ability to escape through almost any crack or imperfection and accumulate in pockets in ceiling cavity's etc (lighting rose for example) and it looks like inviting disaster to me
.

Moxi

[Oldgreybeard]

We did burn gas with a high concentration of hydrogen in our homes for well over a century though. It was part of the gas we burned in our cooker at home, and in a couple of gas fires, during all the years I was growing up. We only changed to natural gas in the lat 1960s/early 1970s, not long before I left home.

There's no intrinsic problem in going back to a mix of gasses that is a bit different to the current mix of gasses, in that in contains a bit more hydrogen. The stuff we call natural gas isn't a consistent product, but a mix of methane, carbon dioxide nitrogen, hydrogen sulphide and even a tiny bit of helium. Town gas that we burned before natural gas was a mix of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and a bit of methane.

The issues surrounding the use of a bit of hydrogen in gas used by consumers has absolutely sod all to do with leaks or anything else, we managed just fine for very many decades with the stuff in many city and urban homes, even running all our street lights. The issue with hydrogen is solely where is comes from. Producing it cleanly is very expensive, cracking it from fossil fuels is cheap. It's the latter process that needs to be tackled and stopped, not the fuel itself.