Comments on: Your Dryer Could Make Electricity Too

By: Daniel Beckett

Daniel Beckett — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 05:47:44 +0000

This article is the most inaccurate, misleading piece of drivel I have ever had the displeasure of reading. I will go through section by section:

Clothes dryers throw off waste heat that could be a useful form of energy –if it could just be harnessed. Even enough energy to run half of all your household appliances (Rediculous. Even if you could somehow miraculously extract every watt of wasted power from the dryer you would get no way NEAR the required to power half a household. How can the _wasted_ energy of *one household appliance* power *half a household*?)

Co-generation; sometimes called combined heat and power (CHP) is already starting to be used by factories and data centers to save energy by creating both heat and power. (1. how can *creating* heat save power? 2. they save energy by *recapturing* heat in the form of wasted energy.

But Ener-G-Rotors has just developed an innovative new technology that one day might have your clothes dryer supplying half the electricity in your house as well, and cheaply enough to deliver a payback in two years. (What the fuck? Since when do clothes dryers *supply* electricity? They *require* electricity to operate, at no point in time can a dryer ever generate electricity. The payback in two years referenced here is the time it will take to pay for the device installed to the dryer that will _increase its efficiency_. With the money you save by paying a little less for the dryer to operate, over two years, that money will have paid for the device itself.)

I don't have the will to carry on but nearly every sentence in this article is misleading or outright wrong. You don't get energy FROM the damn thing. Remove or amend this article for the good of mankind.

By: Marlene

Marlene — Tue, 11 May 2010 19:27:05 +0000

I'm ready to test one.

By: Corey

Corey — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:43:52 +0000

This is a great idea, as tumble dryers use a tremendous amount of energy.

You can use spin dryers such as at http://www.laundry-alternative.com instead of or to complement conventional tumble dryers, as they are about 100 times as energy efficient.

By: Generating Your Own Electricity

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By: Susan Kraemer

Susan Kraemer — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 01:29:40 +0000

Conversely: in order for you to benefit ‘tomorrow’, this company needs to do some R&D today. That’s not vaporware, its an essential step.

If nobody ever ‘looked’ for anything new, we would not have ‘developed’ the use of fire yet.

By: Spuffler

Spuffler — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:44:40 +0000

Vaporware. The company is still ‘developing’ the product, does not have a product.

It is really nice to have someone ‘looking’ for new technology, but nobody is going to benefit today from the efforts which hope to produce something ‘eventually’.

By: Susan Kraemer

Susan Kraemer — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 16:06:42 +0000

Combined -cycle heat and power is quite common. Many companies make electricity from waste heat, such as (to quote my Massachusets Institute of Technology source).
“And it will face plenty of competition as the market heats up, Taylor warns. A crop of companies, including larger players such as United Technologies, which makes aircraft, aerospace systems, and air conditioning, and smaller companies such as ElectraTherm, are also pursuing low-temperature technologies–and they already have systems installed.”

Here are their links
http://www.utc.com/utc/home.html
This Electratherm website explains it well:
http://www.electratherm.com/

What is new here, is capturing much lower heat. (And the dryer can be run on either gas or electricity: it’s the heat that is important).
You are utilizing the waste heat being thrown off by the dryer.

By: Nate

Nate — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:11:35 +0000

What mandrill said.

By: mandrill

mandrill — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:06:07 +0000

Erm… perpetual motion machine anyone?
How can a clothes dryer, which is consuming alot less than half the electricity you use in your house then be made to supply half of it? You can’t get more out that you put in, basic thermodynamics. It may be that you get half of the power used by the dryer back in which case its simply a more efficient dryer, nothing more. what you’re suggesting this device is capable of sounds to me to be nothing short of magic, involving the suspension of quite a few laws of physics.

I’ll believe it when I see it.