Reclaiming Waste Heat From Appliances

October 6, 2011 by Mike Szczys 87 Comments

Here we see [Christopher Suprock] hanging out in his basement laundry area in order to show off his intelligent heat exchanger. The reason for the device is simple, when you use your clothes dryer , hot water heater, other other utilities that generate heat, energy is often wasted in the form of hot exhaust gases. Why not get the most for you clothes drying dollar by sourcing that hot air to warm your house.

The block you see on top of the dryer is a heat exchanger. The exhaust from the dryer passes through a radiator assembly before being vented outside the house. Some control hardware monitors the temperature of the input side and switches on the fan when it detects a higher temperature than the ambient air. Air then flows through the radiator, picking up heat energy from the exhaust gas. See [Christopher’s] explaination, and some thermal readings while the dryer is running, in the video after the break.

This makes us wonder, if the heat exchanger drops the exhaust gas fifty degrees before being vented, will this cause any issues with condensation?

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Sustainability Hacks: Poop Power

October 6, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

Yes. That’s a motorized tricycle with a toilet. Let that sink in for a minute. Oh, that isn’t a concept sketch of something that will never be built. The Toilet Bike Neo is most assuredly a real thing.

Biogas, or methane produced from decaying plant or animal wastes, is a legitimate form of energy. Waste gasses from landfills make up about half a percent of U.S. natural gas consumption. The state of Vermont even has a Cow Power program of renewable energy. That being said, this is a toilet on a trike.

The bike was built for Japanese bathroom fixture manufacturer TOTO’s green initiative. Biogas is produced onboard the trike, so instead of going to the local gas station to fill up, you could just get a newspaper, coffee and bran muffin. There are tanks on the back of the trike containing “fuel”. This arrangement probably makes a rear end collision in the Toilet Bike Neo more terrifying than getting rear-ended in a Ford Pinto.

The Toilet Bike Neo is setting off on a trip across Japan on October 6th (today) to promote biogas. You can follow the updates on the Toilet Bike Neo’s Twitter.

A tip ‘o the hat to [jon] for sending this one in. You may now commence the jokes.

Sustainability Hacks: Auto-feeding Wood-fired Generator

October 5, 2011 by Mike Szczys 48 Comments

Here’s a project that’s hard to categorize. It generates electricity by burning wood. The diamond-plate wrapped column to the right is a magazine that stores the wood, which is gravity fed as pieces below are consumed. The heat is used to drive a power turbine which is responsible for generating the electricity.

This begs the question, is this a sustainability hack? From one perspective it’s burning renewable biomass. Right now that’s wood, but it could be compressed blocks of grasses or wood manufacturing byproducts. So in this sense it is sustainable. Unfortunately it still doesn’t solve the problem of carbon emissions.

The build log for the project is both image and video heavy. You can see the initial prototypes which are not self-feeding, but burn so hot that there’s a nice pink glow to the entire assembly. But by the time they get to the final prototype it’s running much more efficiently, and can put out a peak of over 100 amps!

[Thanks DerAxman]

Sustainability Hacks: Bio-diesel Motorcycle Speed Record

October 3, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

Sometimes you don’t need a lot of horsepower to win a speed record. In a fluke of no one else competing in the alt fuel class, [John]’s biodiesel motorcycle set a new land speed record at the LTA event last summer.

[John]’s bike is a junkyard 1978 Kawasaki KZ400. The stock engine was replaced with a Chinese knock off of a Yanmar air-cooled diesel motor. The fuel is regular old vegetable oil. From the looks of the exhaust, we’re assuming [John]’s garage has a rich french fry smell to it.

Compared to highway speeds, [John]’s runs for a land speed record are a little absurd – a nice bonus when you’re the only driver in your class. The first pass of 42 mph was a little disappointing, so [John] removed the fender, tail light and brakes. After all the unnecessary weight was removed, the top speed – and new record – was 56.5 mph.

Converting a diesel car to run on french fry oil is great and a lot better for the environment than burning liquefied dinosaurs. In any event, a green motorcycle is a lot better than 2000 pounds of automobile moving less than 200 pounds of person. Check out a few of [John]’s land speed runs after the break.

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Sustainability Hacks: Thin Client Server

October 2, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 44 Comments

It’s not environmentally friendly, but most of us run a small home server 24 hours a day. A small server is a useful tool to have that unfortunately wastes a lot of energy. [kekszumquadrat]’s thin client home server is actually a passable LAMP box that doesn’t draw a ton of power.

[kekszumquadrat] started looking at the SheevaPlug when beginning his quest but was a little concerned about the power supply failing. Looking for alternatives, he ran across a lot of cheap thin clients on eBay. The price was right and everything runs Linux, so a few days later he had an HP t5710 thin client on his doorstep.

This little computer came a copy of an embedded version of XP on a flash drive connected to the IDE port. Ditching that “operating system”, [kekszumquadrat] connected a USB hard drive and installed Arch Linux. After a few updates and package installations, he had a useful machine connected to the Internet.

Compared to the 7 Watts the SheevaPlug draws, the 15 W thin client is an energy hog. Compared to our improvised servers, [kekszumquadrat] is doing a remarkable job. Recycling old hardware never hurt anyone, either.

Sustainability Hacks: Automatic Window Control

September 29, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 43 Comments

Sometimes, changing one little bit of a green hack turns it into a build that wastes as much energy as our gaming rig. [Dr. West]’s automatic window controller is one of these builds. The good news is the window controller can be easily modified to cut energy costs in the fall and spring.

[Dr. West] doesn’t have any control over the heat in his apartment and for the entire Canadian winter, his apartment gets really hot. He doesn’t pay for his heat, so he does what any of us would do – crack a window. Inspired by this post, he put a linear actuator in the frame of his kitchen window. [Dr. West] didn’t want to damage the window frame, so he attached the actuator to a piece of square aluminum tubing that mounts to the existing screw holes.

The electronics, [Dr. West] used a Rabbit 2000 dev board, LCD display and keypad, and built an H-bridge circuit on a bit of breadboard. Because of a port conflict and admitted laziness, an Arduino is used to read the thermistor. The display shows the current and desired temperature, and the Rabbit opens and closes the window accordingly. All the source code is posted in the forum post.

While it’s not the most ‘green’ idea to dump heat from a building’s HVAC system out into a frozen tundra, this would be a great build to automatically open and close windows in the more temperate seasons. Open windows during the day, close them at night and you’ll have no more problems coming home to a house that’s either too hot or too cold. Check out a video of the automatic window after the break.

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Sustainability Hacks: Solar Battery/smartphone Charger

September 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys No comments

[Michael] took a battery charger meant to be connected to mains power and converted it to work with a solar panel. This was a traditional 4 cell charger which charges the batteries in pairs. He kept that functionality, but added USB charging with a special over-current feature. That’s because his Android phone has a fast and slow USB charging mode. The slow mode makes sure that it draws 500 mA or less to stay within USB specifications. But the fast mode draws more current when the phone detects that the USB connection is attached to a wall charger. [Michael] added a switch that patches a pull-up resistor to the data line, signaling to the phone that it’s okay to switch to fast charging mode.

As for the power supply itself, you can see that [Michael] snapped off the part of the circuit board that housed the original regulator. He’s added his own 5V switching regulator which offers a wide input voltage range. This is connected to two banana plug sockets which can be connected to the solar panel.