Holy cow Tom, you're right. That is a 5000 psi pressure gauge. On a steam engine with plastic piston rings.
For a company that spent more than a million dollars last year on General & Administrative expenses, wouldn't you think they could cough up $20 for a pressure gauge with an appropriate scale? It's not like they've spent all their money on other instrumentation.
There's nothing on that test stand indicating any load is being applied to the engine, other than the pumps being driven by the belt. There are no instruments indicating a load is on the engine, nor are there any controls for applying a load.
The engine isn't even powering the cooling fan, nor the blower on the boiler. Even with considerable steam pressure, the system is running negative net power output.
So efficiency isn't just zero, you'd have to shut the system off to move up to zero efficiency.
Of course, letting the engine spin for more than the minute ever shown in the videos will cause it to shut down all by itself once the engine breaks, thus increasing it's efficiency. That must be the "Schoell Cycle" in action.
