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"I understand what you are saying but I'm trying to picture running a steam turbine in the basement. I do have a little practical exposure from the navy and in commercial power plants. Steam really is dangerous. Even in state of the art engineering, there is a lot of maintenance. Add to that, you would have to have a darn good heat sink somewhere. Also, the noise, generating electricity is loud. Traditional ICE generators make a racket, a steam turbine screams like a jet engine. There is also a lot of toxic chemistry used to make the water less corrosive to the engineering.

And yet you can buy diesel or gasoline powered "whole-house" gensets which have solved all of these problems. The original "Stanley Steamer" was MUCH quieter than ICE's. Like I said, "just engineering". The way it would probably work is that every six months, a tech will drop by, change out the Ni-H cartridge, check the coolant chemistry, add additives if necessary, top the system off and crank it back up again.

It might not be practical for areas where a well-developed central generating system and transmission lines are already in place, but for folks who want to live in the boonies, it would be from "hog heaven".

And I can see a possible intermediate case, where what are now transformer substations would be replaced by actual E- Cat generating plants and linked into the existing transmission infrastructure. Such an approach would add huge redundancy and reliability to the grid.

This is also probably vapor ware but if thermoelectric doesn’t work out then something like this would be interesting. They haven’t made it work as an ICE but it runs well on compressed air.

http://angellabsllc.com/mytengine.html