Hydro-electric power is real, of course, and water mills are real too. At the Centre for Alternative Technologies, in mid-Wales, you'll use a water-powered cliff railway. You can see it working, too - but that's fed by a pond further up the hill (which is fed from the surrounding hills) and it just uses the principle of counter-weight. There are uses for water in the creation of power, but a 5,000 watt generator that runs a stove isn't one of them, I don't think.
From my limited reading into the tech, it requires salted ion cathode and anode sources that are consumed in the process and the water provides a transport for the redox reaction. so yes it runs on water, but it also consumes its ion sources in the process which need replacing over time. A lead acid battery car battery could be argued to run on distilled water, but ultimately the metals are consumed.
I would guess (and thats a guess mind!) that its hocum. The only water only powered generators I know of is the water wheel or water turbine and even with that you need a gravity potential or the ability to create one, or flowing water. If you wanted to create gravity potential that would take energy. The only other type would be a temperature gradient one and I did see (many many years ago when I was a child in school) that some hot countries have salt water beds on their roofs to make them work, it wouldn't be all that possible in our climate apart from a few days in the summer in Cornwall maybe.
The best turbines for domestic or rural locations would probably be wind and the other solution would be solar. Everything else would require combustion (internal or external) of some sort.
reperio a solutio
Resident and Co-Ordinator of AREA 2 Area 2 = Hampshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Bucks
