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.

Smell your tv

Think about watching an advertisement for a new breakfast sandwich and being able to smell it, or listening to a beer being poured into a glass and smelling the aroma of the hops.  You can’t tell me that won’t get you going to the store and picking some up.  Not only could you create powerful advertisements, but think about brining this to movies, it would add an extra dimension to some good movies.  For example, a movie like “Saving Privat Ryan,” it would be cool if you could actually smell the gunpowder during the opening scene when the American troops invade the beaches of Normandy.  It would immerse the viewers in a whole new way, so they could feel like they are involved in the battle.

I see this as a pretty cool tool for movie directors, but I think it’s commercial and advertising applications are much more incredible.  The cooking channel would have a great time with this because their viewers would be able to smell the dishes as they are cooking and then take a whiff of the final product and decide if it is something that they would want to cook themselves.

How would it work?  I’m imagining a cartridge full of chemicals that could make different scents with different combinations of the chemicals.  So on the camera side, when Rachel Ray pulls out the dish of cookies, a “sniffer” could take in the chemicals in the air that make up that scent and send it to the tv with information on how to copy the smell.

The Automatic Clothes Folding Machine

How to fold clothes fast?  Get an automatic clothes folder.  This machine will be folding your clothes within seconds.  All you have to do is put your shirt / pants / socks /etc. on the conveyor belt and it comes out the other end in the clothes basket, all perfectly folded up.  How this thing works is a mystery, however I would imagine it being an idea similar to this.  If you are like me you hate folding clothes and you want this, I know you do.