Future in Heating and Electricity??

I find myself often looking online for new ways to heat my greenhouses. We have in the past used Natural gas Electric and Wood. We are using wood now and it is much cheeper. It is a lot more work and I have to get up at 2 and 4 in the morning to feed the flames. This new device looks very promising in offering lots of people a new way to heat greenhouses and possibly do so much more.



Link to video

http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/10.08/friction.html

Sounds like a good idea, I'm looking into making a system.

Has anybody tried solar?

The problem with solar is that using any kind of a heater uses vast amounts of electricity, and usually you have to have an inverter (plus the usual solar panels, controller, and deep-draft batteries), so it can get terribly expensive. In my little 6x8 greenhouse, new this winter, I have some old solar panels hooked up to 6 old batteries (still working), and have a 12Vdc automobile-type electric blanket plugged into it. On nights when it is expected to be 20 or less, I put my geraniums on top of the lettuce beds & cover them all with the blanket. So far so good, the geraniums are blooming and the lettuce is 4 inches high. We have not had a very severe winter here so far (zone 6) but it is snowing now (finally) and will be cold & cloudy for the coming week, so we shall see. For 12Vdc heat sources I also have tried 12dc hair dryers, coffee warmers, etc. but the blanket seems to work the best. It does not get very hot, just adds enough warmth to keep things from freezing. In my barn I have AC electricity so am using standard heating cable from the HW store wrapped around the pipes out there. They use only a teeny tiny bit of electricity, so I have been wondering if they could be used in a greenhouse? I don't know how they compare with commercial heating mats in watts used or if it would work. Has anybody tried it?

Ha! --call me as soon as the inventor has reached the point where his method produces enough power to run the electric motor he uses to produce the power.

The link says it's "not perpetual motion", and that's both right and wrong. It's right in this respect --you cannot possibly get more energy out of a system than you put in. However, it's wrong in the sense that the inventor is trying to do exactly that --the amount of energy used to run the motor that creates the friction will ALWAYS be substantially more than the amount of heat energy produced by that friction. There might be some heat energy released through combustion (burning of the wood) --but you can always just burn the wood to produce that, WITHOUT expending one bit of energy to run a motor.

Rubbing two sticks together to make a fire is a method of turning enough (a small percentage, though) of the energy expended in the rubbing into enough heat (yes, from friction) to trigger combustion, which then releases energy from the wood. If the inventor's system was to use a motor to do the rubbing --but only until the fire started, then turn it off-- he would have a much more sensible system. But it still would not be as good as using a match.

He had a website that stated that the machine ran the electric in his house as well as the electric for the motor on the machine. He said that it ran for 3 days on the two 4x4 pieces of wood non stop and that it also has to have water added to create the steam.
It is said to be using the wood more effectively than burning it?
I am not sure how true these statements are but I found it very interesting sense steam is a great way to heat a greenhouse. Maybe some more info will be put out to tell if this is really a good alternative to what is already out their.

Sorry, that just cannot be true. No question he can plug in a motor (using electirc power) to turn a wheel that rubs against something rough (which wouldn't have to be wood, though, right?) and gets hot enough to make steam. But it simply CANNOT be true that the steam would be sufficient to to generate enough electricity to keep the motor running --otherwise he would be getting more energy OUT than he was putting IN. And that would be a perpetual motion machine, which is impossible under the laws of physics.

As I said, if the friction is used to initiate combustion of the wood, he can generate all the steam he wants, but the energy source in that instance is the burning of the wood.

Burning wood is a way to release energy originally sent to Earth in the form of solar radiation that has been stored in plant material through the energy transformation process known as photosynthesis.

The motor physically cannot put out more energy than it uses, period, end of story.

This message was edited Feb 8, 2009 9:14 PM

I had figured the same. But here is the article I read on the website? As you can see it says it produces enough electricity to run the machine and his house. The only way I can see this is possible is if he is getting more out of the wood and water than what is usually released? I know steam can be powerful force. I would like to see it for myself personally but for the moment all I can do is take in the info that is given. Hopefully their will be more on this to prove it is correct or wrong. It sounds to good to be true which usually means it is. At the end it says the wood and water are used up but it seems a lot of energy is created from that small amount of wood.

http://www.blfdesigns.com/frictionheater/


Here is the same info copied and pasted


One New Jersey Innovator has come up with a clean way to generate electricity that's a new twist on an old idea.

Creating electricity means turning the turbines of a generator, usually with steam pressure. All you need to do is create heat to boil water. And THAT'S where all the burning of coal or oil and the associated pollution and expense and eco-unfriendliness comes in.

Lloyed Tanner, on the other hand, has built a device in his garage that can boil water and create steam pressure using the heat of FRICTION... you know, the same thing that lights matches, and overheats our automobile brakes. His prototype presses pieces of oak 4 by 4s onto a metal wheel being spun by an electric motor. The wheel soon becomes a spinning "hot plate" that can heat water in a boiler to create steam pressure that can run a generator to supply electricity to run not only the motor turning the wheel, but everything in his house as well.

We're not talking perpetual motion here, (the water and wood get used up) but it's an idea for a clean source of energy that could be refined through R&D to provide every home with an efficient on-site power station.

Newspaper and TV reporters often don't understand physics --or much else, other than how to write about a-m-a-a-a-z-i-n-g things that don't seem possible.

And often even if they do, they stoop to using fuzzy language as cleverly as the infomercial makers.

Note that when they write that the hotplate can "create steam pressure that can run a generator to supply electricity to run not only the motor turning the wheel, but everything in his house as well" --they are NOT saying the steam would in fact generate SUFFICIENT electricty to do all that. They've styled the words very carefully to be true, but very misleading. They're really just saying the generator supplies SOME electricty, and it's electricity that runs the motor and other things in the house.

Note also, that "using up" the wood could mean there's combustion involved. (In which case, why not just light and burn the wood to make the steam, as people have done for many hundreds of generations already?)

And the water is not "used up" in this process --the water is simply a medium which moves the heat energy from one place to another. After heat enters the water and it evaporates as steam, it gives back that heat somewhere else, condenses and returns as exactly the same amount of water.

Don't trust me --ask a physics teacher.

Okay, JPlunket - I follow you. But do you have any ideas of how to heat the greenhouses inexpensively?

Please!

I second that, PaganCat
Last year I heated a 6x8 ' with 2 small elect heaters.
This year with 16 more feet ? ? ? profane cost lots...maybe curtains to divide it into smaller sections ??

"... profane cost lots......"

That couldn't be a Freudian slip, could it? 'Cause when I think about paying for propane, profanity soon follows!!! Too cute.