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- Fresh

Using wasted heat to keep use less energy when heating water

I’m talking about the pipes that run through your house and bring water to your sink… not that pipe.  This new pipe would be ideal for situations such as the shower where you usually require hot water but once the hot water has been used, it then exits through the drain.  In order to get this water hot, you need a water heater which can take up quite a bit of energy to get all that water to the temperature you want.

The idea behind this invention is to use that heat from the water exiting the drain to heat up the water that is entering the sower.  This way the water heater won’t need to heat up it’s tank quite as high because the wasted water will meet it half way and heat it up to the desired temperature.  The way this works is by inserting the pipe containing the warm drain water inside the pipe containing the unheated water entering the water heater.  The inner pipe should be made of aluminum or a metal that can dissipate heat well.

The pictures shows what the piping would look like if it were cut in half.  The warm waste water is moving to the right while the surrounding cooler water is moving to the left and receiving heat by conductive heat transfer.

iPhone with a USB port

How about Apple introduce the new iPhone (which will be in June) with a built in male USB port so we can just plug the thing in to any computer and use it like a portable hard drive.  I don’t want iTunes or anything to pop up, just a little window that you can drag data to.  It would be convenient and solve some of those problems where you think to yourself, “Damn, I wish I had my USB drive.”

We apologize for all those that despise the iPhone, but we love it.  What phone is better than the iPhone?  So far, we haven’t found any that come close.  So until that day, we will be coming out with ways to make the iPhone better… although these things won’t ever happen because Apple is not wasting their time with listening to us.

Use your gym equipment to power your house

What does everyone keep track of when hopping on that stationary bike at the gym?  Calories.  Everyone wants to burn calories, but have you ever thought about how many calories you can generate from riding that bike?  Probably not much, but you could watch how many Joules (note, 1 Calorie = 4.184 Joules) you are generating for your house and also how much money you are saving from your electric bill!  What motivates people more than money?

Now, move all this equipment to the gym and suddenly you have a power plant of people on elliptical and stationary bikes.  It could be the first gym that pays you.  Imagine this example:

You sign up for Go Green Gym (GGG) and you are charged a small initial fee to join, just like every other gym out there.  But this gym is different, because when you hop on one of the stationary bikes or ellipticals, you slide your membership card and it keeps track of how many joules you produced.  At the end of the year, you are given a cut of the money that you saved the gym from electric bills!

Maybe this is what we need to bring down the average weight in America, a little money motivation.

Use wasted energy from your chimney and send it back to your house

Why do you build a fire? Probably to warm the house, and because it looks pretty cool. But what about all that wasted energy that exits the chimney as heat and burned up biomass. How about harnessing that energy and storing it? Yep, I want to turn your chimney into a personal power plant that can help keep your electricity bill down.  Or even better, you might be able to make some extra power and sell it back to the grid and make some side cash.  Think Stirling Heat engines.

Let’s first examine how much energy is stored in wood.  The Sustainable Energy Development Office (SEDO) states that wood has about 4.5 kWh per kilogram.

So how much electricity to run a house?  Obviously this depends on the homeowner, but a good estimate is about 50 kWh per day.

So if we were to burn 10 kilograms of wood in the fire place, you could almost live a whole day on that!  Now as an engineer, I realize that 100% efficiency is impossible, especially for the conditions your fireplace is in.  But, we could take some of that energy and suck it back to the power grid.  Your going to burn that wood anyway, might as well go a little green with it.

Solar Powered Cooler

The solar powered cooler invention would be a big hit at those pregame tailgating parties.  However, this thing packs a refrigeration system that is completely run by the power of our good ‘ol sun so it could probably graduate to the name of portable, solar powered refrigerator.  Either way, you are going to use it at the next tailgate.

I don’t think there is too much explanation on how this thing works.  Put it out in the sun, watch your beers get colder.  And if it is a cloudy day, then you better bring some ice because you have a regular cooler now!

The iPhone app for VoIP - Voice over Internet Protocol

Do you live in one of those dreaded dead zones?  Do you want to know how to get better service on your phone?  more specifically your iPhone? Are you sick of me asking you all these questions?

If any of those answers are yes, well I got an app that will get those iPhone developers typing away some computer code.  Dropped phone calls should be able to be prevented by using an app that allows the phone to be connected via cell phone tower or wireless internet and seamless switch between the two depending on which is giving a better signal, while in the middle of a phone call.

If this isn’t possible, then how about AT&T give us an affordable, one time fee network extender.  I mean seriously, why should I pay every month for something the cell phone company should do themselves.

And to the iPhone developer that decides to make this million-dollar-app, sell it for $0.99 and give me a free copy, please.

Add the cell phone to the cloud computing network

This pretty much exists but it isn’t used quite as well as I would like it too. First of all, read my first post on the Computing Cloud to better understand my depiction of how cloud computing should work.

So phones are already connected in a giant network, and now they are all basically computers with more power than our home computers from  a few years ago.  So everything is ready, but we just aren’t actually using everything to its full capability and using our cellphones is how we optimize our technology.

Our cell phones can be connected with our cars, and our cars should already be connected to the giant computing cloud.  With these paired, we can use it as our car key or even have our phones store information about how we like our seat positioned while we are driving, or our favorite radio presets.  The possibilites are endless.

Most of the cell phones include GPS as well.  I dont want to give too much away about the next part of my cloud computing segment, but how nice would it be if you house knew when you were coming home?

The new detection system for forest fires - smoke alarm or thermometers?

In California alone, hundreds of thousands of acres are burned each year in devastating forest fire events.  These fires are due to lightning strikes, cigarettes, camp fires, and even some people that think its fun to just start a fire in a field of dead greass.  My point is, you can’t prevent it, just like smoking marijuana in America, it is going to happen no matter how much money you throw at it.  So the next step from prevention is reduction, how to reduce these forest fires?  How about some smoke detectors? … or thermometers?

Putting some smoke detectors around the forest that are hooked up to small photovoltaic cells for power could be the first step.  There are a few different types of smoke detectors, but I feel ionization detectors should do the trick.  These simply detect the amount of americium-241 in the air.  Using this system, a message can be relayed to the nearest fire department, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or whoever is in charge of keeping an eye out for these forest fires.

Of course you may be thinking of the obvious flaw: What about campers just making a camp fire.  Well, there will have to be some metrics that will determine if a cry for help should or should not be sent out.  It is in open air, so maybe if a certain amount of americium-241 is detected, then an alarm should be activated.

If that doesn’t please you, then the thermometer idea may float your boat.  The thermometer plan is pretty simple: if a thermometer reaches x degrees, then a possible fire is happening – call help.  You can even put these thermomters like 10 feet in the trees so no camp fire can reach it.

Nothing can hide with a night vision windshield

No we can’t get rid of our car headlights because we need other drivers to be able to see our car, but we could add some night vision to our windshield.  But not only would it be night vision, I want to throw in a little infared in the mix as well so we could see anything that gives off a heat signature like incoming deer or those people that seem to think running at midnight is a good idea.  So it does add a little more safety to your car, but it gives you some style points as well.  Sure, Shaq might have a TV on every seat in his car with DirecTV and a PS3… but he doesn’t have a windshield with infared and night vision.