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.

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!

Light Detecting Lights

Smart lights are the new green technology to hit a home near you.  Each lamp has a sensor on it that detects how many lumens are in the room.  The idea is to always have a comfortable amount of light in the room while using the smallest amount of electricity possible.  So essentially, these lights are self adjusting lights – but I like the name Smart Lights.

Consider this example:  If the light is turned on when the sun is shining into the house, the light sensor will take a reading and dim the light, automatically adjusting lights to a comfortable level.  Your energy bill will slightly decrease while the size of the glaciers will slightly increase.

If you are trying to decipher the picture, it shows a light bulb connected to a sensor that is connected to th wall outlet.  The sensor reads the amount of light in the room and adjusts the amount of power reaching the light.  The picture on the right shows how this configuration may look.

Rechargeable Shoes

Here at Patent Penders, one of our goals is to try and utilize some of the untapped sources of generating electricity that we come into contact with during our daily activities. In this idea we take advantage of something that each of us do on a daily basis… walking. With the aid of piezoelectric crystals (crystals that gain an electrical charge when strained by compression, and by twisting motions: Example: Quartz), we hope to developing a special piezoelectric shoe where the electricity is generated by our own walking movements and funneled into the heel of the shoe where it is stored. The heel of the shoe would be detachable and could be used to charge, or extend the battery life of a variety of common electrical items:

• IPods
• Cell phones
• Laptops
• Electric razors
• Etc.

The shoe’s heel could be fitted with any number of electrical outputs, based upon desires of the customer. This invention will be beneficial and convenient not only to us as consumers, but to the environment as well .

The Hippie Surfboard - Charge your electronics

We here at Patent Penders welcome all green technology and encourage everything it stands for.  The name of this surfboard was the hippie surfboard because hippies are synonymous with green politics and place a high importance on environmental goals.  If I were to call it the green surfboard, it would sound stupid because you would expect the surfboard to physically be the color green.

With that being said, I introduce the Hippie Surfboard.  This surfboard is taken out to the ocean and the rider uses it as a regular surfboard.  While it is being used, the turbine on the bottom of the board begins to charge the tail end of the surfboard for as long as the surfer uses it.  The end is removable and can be plugged into some sort of electrical device like a radio (pictured) or some sort of extremely efficient, electric hippie car.

Now you may be thinking, won’t this ruin how the surfboard rides the wave?  The answer is no, it doesn’t.