Ingenuity in Simple Energy Harvesting

February 17, 2008 – Vol.12 No. 48

INGENUITY IN SIMPLE ENERGY HARVESTING.

Sure, to save energy or use it more efficiently at home you can buy more insulation and weather stripping, perhaps splurge for new windows or a new heating and air conditioning system, or at minimum buy compact fluorescent or halogen energy saver (HES) light bulbs. But what else can you do?

Take a browse around the aisles of your nearest big box home improvement store, or perhaps even your old fashioned hardware store. What kinds of things might you find that either by themselves or slightly modified could be used to harvest energy or to use energy more efficiently?

You could buy a garden hose to lay out on the grass or driveway on a sunny day to make hot water. It doesn’t take long for a hose full of water to heat up significantly in the sunlight. (What you do with that water is another question.)

You could buy one of those high power halogen work lights that waste a lot of energy making light, but you can use it to heat a space, like a small workshop or studio. (The lights are very hot.) Putting the light and its waste heat to work is using electric energy more efficiently.

When available, you could buy a set a of LED Christmas lights to use for decorational lighting off season, wrap them around a fake tree trunk or something, whatever. Your string of LEDs can provide a little general illumination, but not enough to read by.

Or you can be really clever like inventor Doyle Doss and look for component parts to assemble low tech energy harvesting and energy saving devices.

His Kandle Heeter (tm) (now in a new revised version) uses clay flower pots, a bit of chain, some nuts and bolts and a custom steel base holding a jar candle to use as a small space heater. The continuously burning flame will heat up the flower pots and take the chill off a room.

A little more high tech (it uses electricity) is his GlowWarm (tm) electric candle. Like the Kandle Heeter it uses a flower pot but instead of candle Doss employs an off-the-shelf halogen bulb and porcelain lamp holder. Like Kandle Heeter the flower pot holds and distributes the waste heat from the bulb and puts it to work adding warmth to a room. Incandescent bulbs are known for their gross inefficiency. GlowWarm makes a bulb a little less so.

Have you ever noticed while working on a stepladder in your house how warm rooms get near the ceiling where rising hot air concentrates? Sure, you can buy a ceiling fan, put it in reverse and push that hot air down the walls and back where your cold feet are. But more directly you can use a Doss HEATSTICK (tm) to grab that hot air directly from the ceiling and force it onto your cold feet. He’s got a new version in development – better than the original – and will announce its commercial release at some undetermined date.

And what about tapping solar energy as everyone wants to do nowadays? A Honey Bee (tm) passive solar hot water heater made from black PVC pipes and elbows will make hot water, at least 20 gallons worth, its volumetric capacity. Like the new Heatstick, the Honey Bee is in development.

Looking at these clever inventions it’s clear the anyone who’s handy with tools could buy the parts and make them. (For the GlowWarm, Doss even provides a parts list in the website!) But all things considered - the time to build them, the fuel to get to the store - it might be cheaper to buy them from Doss Products.

In the end harvesting energy and using it more efficiently may require a good dose of ingenuity using simple, low technologies as well as complex high-tech products.

(Caution: These are not Underwriter’s Laboratory (UL) Listed as are most lighting and heating products sold in the US. Use at your own risk.)

Links:

Doss Products
http://www.heatstick.com