Working with Other Waste Heat Sources

In addition to the Refrigerator Motor, a typical house has many other Electric Motors, all dumping heat: Dishwasher, Fans, Water Pumps, Furnace, Vacuum Cleaner, Refrigerator, Freezer, Exercise Equipment, Power Tools, Hair Dryer, Electric Shaver, etc.

Count the Electric Motors in your own house. I was astounded to get 46! And that’s not counting any in the electronic devices, such as CD and DVD players (I’ll do Electronics separately), or any of the many in our 2 cars.

I don’t have the statistics for Residence and Commercial Energy Usage, but recall for the Industrial Sector, Machine Drive is 18% of energy usage.

With innovation, such as the methods described above, we can capture much of that wasted heat and put it to good use. Autonomous Vehicles allow us to capture and move heat from where it is undesirably generated and move it to where it can be used efficiently. I’ll also talk later about how Autonomous Vehicles enable us to share all sorts of things to get even larger savings.

A typical house has many Electronic Devices, all dumping heat. Count the number of indicator lights and displays you have on all the time: TVs, Computers, Cellphones, Smart Devices, Tablets, Audio Equipment, Video Equipment, Telephones, even Stoves, Microwaves, etc.

I count 40 indicator lights and displays that are on all the time in our home (note, our computer displays aren’t on all the time, so I didn’t count them).

Have you ever noticed that you laptop gets too hot to keep on your lap? Some high-performance gaming computers run so hot that they have to use water-cooling to keep from burning up. My iPad doesn’t get that hot – a good direction for the future.

You may think this is small, but recall that Electronics use 6% of Residential Energy and 8% of Commercial Energy – and most of that energy comes out as heat!

Increasingly electronic devices are doing away with always-on indicator lights and displays, and are using very efficient LCD displays. Instant-on TVs are going away, and we are even seeing surge protector strips that automatically shut off devices completely when they are in a low energy use mode.

With additional innovation, I believe we can reduce the unnecessary energy use by electronics, and either eliminate or capture the remaining heat. Even computers are getting more efficient, and the move to netbooks centralizes the energy-intensive functions so they can be more easily incorporated in our heat capture system.

So if we apply the same techniques we discussed in the previous two Posts, we can incorporate the energy of many processes in our homes and commercial establishments into a mutually beneficial system. For example, here are several sources of waste heat that can be mixed using the Heat Transfer Pipe concept.

Next we’ll consider how Autonomous Vehicles permit sharing of resources to achieve both efficiency, and improved quality of life.