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Alternative Technology, Have you created any yourself?

(18 posts) (8 voices)

Started 6 years ago by Oilburner
Latest reply from johnmath

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Oilburner
Member

I see a lot of things here about different products, but I was wondering if anyone has created Home grown Solution's and equipment/ tech to solve problems or improve things?

My latest " project" is with home cooling. I'm trying a couple of things.

First is just pumping water from my Pool through a radiator with fans pulling through the cooler air. The pool is ALWAYS much cooler than ambient and with 70K litres as a heat sink, I think it should take a while to heat up given it can cool itself through various means. Even in summer, a warm pool is not a bad thing.

The other thing I am trying is an improvement/ modification on an existing practice.
There has always been a hole in the corner of the middle room of the house. For years I cover it up in winter and open it up in summer and put an axial fan over the top to draw cool air from under the house. It seems to work far better than I would ever credit given there is only so much air capacity before it pulls hot air from outside but, it has worked well enough to surprise a lot of people, myself included.

Recently I put the fan itself right in the the middle of the house and ran a length of used duct I found back along and up through the gap in the floor. This was mainly because the fan is a bit noisy and I wanted to quiet it. What I have also done is add a garden micro sprayer about 30 CM behind the fan spraying into the duct. I'm taking the water from a 1000L IBC that's connected to the downpipe and using a 12V 40 PSI pump to spray the water controlled by a cycle timer.

I don't want the pump running all the time as it will inject too much water so I want to play with it to try and cool the air through evaporation without flooding the tube needlessly. Obviously it will vary with the relevant humidity but if it works as well as I hope, I'll look for something like an arduino setup where the timing of the pump can be controlled by humidity and temp.

In winter I used the same fan and duct to suck warm air from the top of the roof space and blow it back in the house through the manhole which I made a modified ducted cover for. That worked well too and I think next year I'll look for a solar controller like used for pools to control it automatically based on temp diff between the house and the roof space. When the air in the roof is warmer than the house it kicks in and when it's the same or cooler, it switched off.

Be interested to hear what others have come up with themselves.

Posted Wednesday 14 Oct 2015 @ 3:06:19 pm from IP #
con
Member

Hi oilburner
I have a solar controller being developed now.
It has a winter and summer mode.
In winter mode it reads the temp on roof in my solar air heater and when its greater by 8'C then my room it turns the fan on and turns it off when the solar air heater comes down to within 1'C of whatever my room temperature is at that time.
It has a fresh air mode that opens and closes certain zone motors in the system and brings in fresh air instead of recirculating.
In Summer mode it measures the temp of the room and when the set temperature that is set by the owner it turns the fan on and opens and closes different zone motors to suck the hot air from up near the ceiling and expels it to the outside. this reduction in internal pressure allows fresh air from outside to enter the home from an open window on the cool side of the house.
The controller had a bug in it when tested so it is being reconfigured at present by my Chinese manufacturers. I actually have a video conference with the electronics engineer this coming Monday so hopefully we will knutt out the bug soon and it should be available soon.

Posted Friday 16 Oct 2015 @ 11:15:02 am from IP #
Oilburner
Member

Wow! That is awesome. I was beginning to think people were just off the shelf installers rather than true DIYers but that's right up there with high end stuff.

I like the idea of the Higher temp margin before the fan pulls the air in. I'll see if the pool solar controller have that feature or get something made from an audino that does the same.

I worked at an aquatic facility for a couple of weeks a while back. Was a whole greenwashed initiative by the council that owned it. Had a Co gen setup of a motor running on Natural gas supplying heat for the pools from the coolant and electricity for the rest of the centre.
They also had this computer controlled heating and ventilation system which was complete garbage. It pretty much worked opposite to what it was supposed to.

The lights came on in bright sunlight, went out in the evenings, the vents opened when it was cold and made the joint like an oven when it was warm. I spoke to the manager of the place and the poor guy was tearing his hair out. It had never worked properly and he said 90% of his time and stress was directly related to the system which he had loads of people come out to fix but never had got it sorted. It cost them a bomb for the system which never did what it was supposed to.

In the end he had full manual over ride installed and just used to let selected staff control it and said he got a much better result.
It would seem a couple of bugs in your system is doing well and should be easily fixed.

I'm talking a slightly different approach to yourself RE the ventilation. Instead of drawing outside air in through windows. I want to force air in to pressurise the house.
I live on a main road and the amount of dirt and dust that comes in is bad. I ordered some AC filters and will build a housing with a radiator core which I am going to draw through from my blower under the house to create a positive pressure so only the clean filtered air will come in. Hopefully.

I was told by a friend in the trade that various places do this in order to help keep places cleaner and it sounded like a great idea.
I can run water from the pool though the radiator in summer for cooling and connect up my veg oil powered water heater for warm air in winter.

Posted Saturday 17 Oct 2015 @ 9:30:46 am from IP #
Morbo
Member

sounde like it can easily done by 2 latching relais?
I.e., switch on when difference is more than 8 and off at say 3 deg.
I found a 500W fan, put some 6m duct on it. Does not really help, when its only a few deg cooler outside. The 500W would be better on a small aircon and then just do 1 well insulatet room. Seems like keeping radiation out and well insulate the house, I don't need that much more extra cooling. Just a couple of weeks when it becomes annoying. Then I could sleep on the deck or use a fan.

Posted Sunday 18 Oct 2015 @ 1:32:17 am from IP #
Greg C
Member

I 'built' our solar HWS back in 1990. First make sure the hot water tank supplied with the new house is what you need for the project, get the builders to run copper pipe for the collectors on the roof while the house is under construction. Then scour Trading Post for second hand solar hot water panels. Found a pair and got them for $250. The next thing, and the only real building on my part is the controller. Found a few circuits in books at the local library and built one up on breadboard. It was 740 op amp wired as a comparator with a 555 timer to control the frequency of turn off and turn on. Quite a poor design, a better way would have been feedback around the op amp to give some hysteresis. However it did work fairly well. A Grundfoss pump was purchased and then engage a plumber to connect it all up. Based on the average of the 2 years after install to the 2 years before (we had finished building and moved in 2 years before the solar HWS was commissioned) the solar contributed just under 80% to water heating. I based the design on the 1957 CSIRO study and one of the their recommendations of standing the collectors at latitude plus 4 was big factor in the success I think.

Posted Tuesday 20 Oct 2015 @ 8:13:47 am from IP #
franks
Member

900x600mm growing table hydroponics setup, 2x50watt multi sprectrum growing LEDs, 5 litre min air pump, 5 litre min water pump & monitoring using Raspberry Pi embedded micro
whole lot uses 3kWh per day off grid

Posted Wednesday 4 Nov 2015 @ 11:52:52 pm from IP #
Morbo
Member

just get some 2nd hand timber and build a garden bed? Or do you have a plantajshon you don't want the cops to know about?

Posted Thursday 5 Nov 2015 @ 4:08:19 am from IP #
Johnnojack
Member

Less than 1 square metre of growing space and it uses 3kWh/day!!! Must be some mistake with the figures here? Some peeps use only that much power to run a whole household.

Posted Thursday 5 Nov 2015 @ 10:45:36 am from IP #
franks
Member

If use 400watt high pressure sodium light wont be as good, 2x50w LEDs get 40% more lumens of red & blue spectrun than 400 watt sodium lamp, setup less than 20% of the power.
Even the ISS grows produce in space using the same technology.
as bang for buck, get more yield for same area outdoors process is all free energy over 1 year grow at least 200kgs of veggies, its technology to solve a practical problem feeding the world in less space & resources

Posted Thursday 5 Nov 2015 @ 10:55:59 pm from IP #
Oilburner
Member

Interesting with the LED's
For the first time in years i have planted some tomatoes. Used to be quite the gardener in my younger days but that got put aside with family and life etc. I have a particular thing for tomatoes because store bought ones tick all the boxes of looking good and being the right size and having clear skins and all those other things important to consumers and growers but fall down in the small area of TASTE.

I have put the tomatoes in large pots and reading of the LED's piqued my curiosity. A bit of googling quickly turned up 2 things:

1. the majority of info I found related to what was best for growing pot.
No thanks, stupid enough already, don't want to frig up the 2 brain cells I have left.

2nd, the consensus seems to be that regular LED's are a lot more cost effective even if the colour spectrum is not as good than grow lights.
That was interesting as I have some 120W LED street lights and some LED Hi bay lights sitting round.

Might Locate a light over the tomatoes and see if I can't rev them up a bit.
Put them on a timer so the light is off through the day and on through the night and maybe double their growing speed?
I wonder if having a small Veg oil burner running in a little greenhouse would help as well? I have heard of this as a frost preventative but the Co2 emissions from the LPG burner used was said to help as well.

I might end up with Jack and the beanstalk size tomatoes!

Posted Friday 6 Nov 2015 @ 2:11:04 am from IP #
Morbo
Member

tomatoes like warm nights. So maybe put up a brick wall to soak up some sun and reradiate at night.
No idea, if more CO2 helps, maybe they can only digest a certain amount.
Maybe you can score some coloured LED strip for cheap, just get rid of the green spectrum. Every now and them they are for $20 or so at ALDI, dimmable I believe.

Posted Friday 6 Nov 2015 @ 4:03:12 am from IP #
wlb
Member

Elevated CO2 concentration helps considerably in greenhouses. 20 to 30 years ago we used to inject it into greenhouses to promote growth for both fruit and flower crops, but it's so long ago I can't remember the concentration. Can't find my old technical manuals either.

Posted Friday 6 Nov 2015 @ 5:38:20 am from IP #
johnmath
Member

Johnnojack said:
Less than 1 square metre of growing space and it uses 3kWh/day!!! Must be some mistake with the figures here? Some peeps use only that much power to run a whole household.

Less actually, even with a dishwasher...

Posted Friday 6 Nov 2015 @ 11:20:22 am from IP #
johnmath
Member

wlb said:
Elevated CO2 concentration helps considerably in greenhouses.

Recent research shows that for a lot of plants used as food sources, increasing CO2 levels encourages growth whilst reducing the nutritional values of the produce.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v510/n7503/full/nature13179.html

Posted Friday 6 Nov 2015 @ 11:24:34 am from IP #
johnmath
Member

I think the notion of alternative technology encompasses more than simply burning energy because it is possible. But not everyone will agree. Here's a blast that is zero cost (to the user, not the environment) and it's fun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD0W7jW54iU

Posted Friday 6 Nov 2015 @ 11:38:06 am from IP #
Morbo
Member

as I mentioned earlier, there is more cars than fish and chips shops. And some fish and chips chops change their oil less frequently than cars.
For the nutritional value, even a simple home grown potato tastes better than a bought one, I would never have expected that.

Posted Friday 6 Nov 2015 @ 8:46:42 pm from IP #
Oilburner
Member

johnmath said:
I think the notion of alternative technology encompasses more than simply burning energy because it is possible. But not everyone will agree. Here's a blast that is zero cost (to the user, not the environment) and it's fun!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD0W7jW54iU

I'm not sure why alternative technology has to be sanctioned by the green do goobers?
If it were supposed to be all save the planet friendly it would be calledn green technology. Alternative means different to mainstream. Don't know what it has to serve the greenwashed agenda's at all.

So what is the cost to the environment this time? there is always something the greenwashed aren't happy about.
You do realise the thing was burning used veg oil right or did that escape you? I spose you know that the C02 released in the burning of the oil was the same as what was absorbed when the plant grew. And the oil is renewable and all that right?

Someone does a vid of a some flames for a couple of min and of course the greenwashed environmental Nazis are all crying and carrying on like it's the end of the world.
Again.

Posted Saturday 7 Nov 2015 @ 6:05:19 am from IP #
johnmath
Member

Oilburner said:Someone does a vid of a some flames for a couple of min and of course the greenwashed environmental Nazis are all crying and carrying on like it's the end of the world.
Again.

What 'environmental nazis' where?

Posted Saturday 7 Nov 2015 @ 9:41:53 am from IP #

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