Begin at red place, point of heat. Cold CO2 takes on heat and expands, so placing pressure upon the liquid below.
This is a home made thing, probably made of pipe from a hardware store, which at first blush seems it would only require the tinkerer to know a little plumbing. A car water pump is used in reverse to act as a turbine, which you say will power an electric generator. There is some ambiguous float valve made with a tennis ball inside of a collar of some kind that no one will be able to make at home. There is probably a check valve above the hot spot but that hasn't been made clear. There are some other small ball valves of some kind at the bottom which aren't made clear either. There is no parts list so it can't be a model you built, and we can't tell for sure what happens when pressure changes in the various chambers. There is no photo or assembly diagram so we can only assume you've never actually built this device. It's just an idea you have and you think it will work, but you can't say for sure. You put it here believing you had invented a new kind of heat engine, although you may not like to call it that because you say the web is "crammed full" of heat engine information. There are no dimensions given, so we can't figure out how much volume the chambers have, and we have no idea about the mass of gas or water. We don't know any pressures or temperatures in the various chambers either. You don't claim to have a cycle, you seem to deny it (although that's not clear), you don't have a PV diagram and you aren't interested in that either. But it won't do anything unless there is a finite area inside the cycle on the diagram. This was explained to you with links to complete your self-taught program of learning. You responded with ridicule. You seem to be talking about two engines at the same time, this one, and another made by a company called Das Energy that runs at 7000 bar. Presumably they have something that works. Your design resembles a Stirling engine crossed with a Rankine engine, using CO[sub]2[/sub] gas as the working fluid and water as a liquid piston. You either are drawing ambient heat or you're not, that's not clear. If you're drawing ambient heat, then you need a cold sink, such as ice or an external refrigerator, to create a temp differential, but you argue this point and claim that the engine will "cool itself". While it's true that hotter-than-ambient heat will radiate from an engine into the ambient, this requires a heat source, hotter than ambient. You haven't been clear about temperature of your hot spot, and it's not clear where or how any heat is drawn out of the engine, because you don't have a cold spot. You tell us the CO[sub]2[/sub] starts out cold, which seems to make it a cold spot, but that's impossible, since energy can be neither created nor destroyed. More likely the CO[sub]2[/sub] starts out at ambient, and you have to put heat to the hot spot (such a flame to a pipe; you don't have a heat exchanger) to force a pressure change. In other words, you will need a heat source hotter than ambient. You also think a falling column of water will substitute for a cold spot. But the water can't actually fall, since it's held up by the pressure you say you've created at the hot spot. And even if it could fall, the vacuum pressure from a falling column of water is very small. Even if you managed to change the gas temp 1 degree in the "expansion chamber", it will be in a vacuum pressure subject to the suction of the falling water column, so it will not flow into the hot spot. Even if a check valve were not present, the weight of the water column would simply draw CO[sub]2[/sub] out of the hot spot, in reverse of the direction you think it would flow. The odd thing is that you seem to think that there is a negative force to expand CO[sub]2[/sub] by suction, and at the same time, that same expansion creates a positive force, a positive pressure that pushes CO[sub]2[/sub] out of the chamber down toward the hot spot. You don't see that there is really just one force, the force you say is causing suction, and it's the sum of the heat pressure force plus the gravitational force, so all the water ends up as close to the bottom of the device as the valves will permit, all the gas will rise as close to the top as the valves permit, and a static condition develops in which heat (such as a flame) may produce some gurgling noises inside, but nothing flows. There is no way to develop pressure across the water pump, since all of the pressure will equalize through the circuit you created when you introduced the center pipe. But even if you had no center pipe, the hot spot and the upper chamber would still equalize. Even if the tennis ball were to function as you think it will, no pressure can develop across the water pump because the gas pressure in the upper chamber will equalize with the pressure at the hot spot.
Does that cover how your home energy converter works, or did I leave something out?