Efficient heaters

[Ewhaz]

Another project I am working on is one based on the heater patents on Peter's website. The one I'm in the process of building is the oil cylinder design.

basically its two sealed cylinders, one inside the other with an 1/8th of an inch separation between the inner cylinder wall and the outer and a means to turn the inner cylinder inside the other.

The unit is filled with oil, enough to fill the space between the two cylinders when the unit is running. The friction generated in the viscous fluid between the two walls generates heat.


How should I go about testing the efficiency claims of this particular design?
Has any one built one already?

[Ewhaz]

I did a small experiment today concerning one of the heaters mentioned on Peter's website.

The basic concept is using magnets to create eddy currents in a plate of aluminum and generating heat.

What I did was cut up a soda can to get a flat peace of aluminum. I then took that and cut a small circle out of that. I taped it to a small section of cardboard to support it and keep it flat. From there I put a small bolt through the center to hold it and give me a shaft to turn it with.

From there I attached it to a air die grinder which can turn up to 22,000 RPM. I had a large 1/2" by 1" by 1/4 neomidium magnet that I taped to a small piece of plastic so that I could hold it next to the spinning disc of aluminum. I turned it on and ran it for a minuet or so and felt the surface of the sheet and it definitely showed moderate heating of the surface. It never got hot but was at least warm to the touch.

So at least in principle it can work, however making it put out a large amount of heat might require larger magnets and plates and figuring out the right configuration to generate enough BTU's to be useful.

[Sephiroth]

i saw this a while ago... looks interesting (especially this time of year! lol)

I was thinking of running one off the kinetic from a bedini motor instead of a fan...

[future pather]

Hey Sephiroth,

I dig your you-tube page


Jessica

[Sephiroth]

[rhozzi]

quartz infrared portable heater???

I asked about this heater on another thread and received no response, either because no one has any knowledge of it or people thought I was trying to sell them. I don't sell them but I did order one and wanted to find out if it really does what the advertisement says, in that it can reduce your heating bills by 50%. It is by EdenPure. It hasn't been shipped yet and I thought I would check out other peoples experience with them.

[Aaron]

edenpure heater

Rhozzi,

Is that the cube shaped one with infrared bulbs inside?

[rhozzi]

EdenPure...good or ????

Yes Aaron. I got on the internet today and did some checking and found a few people that really liked them but since I have an electric furnace it probably won't lower my heating bill so I canceled the order today. There was more negative info. than positive and $397 is a lot to pay for a space heater that won't heat my whole 1100 sq.ft mobil home and lower my electric bill. I did order the paint additive you recommened and it sits in my closet until I can move to a house where it will be wiser to use it. I had a house picked out but alas, it sold to someone else. Any way, yes to your question.

[Sephiroth]

$397 ??!!!

but it sounds so simple to build yourself for less than $50 worth of compnents!

do you know what dimensions the one you saw was?

[rhozzi]

building a quartz infrared heater????

It would be great to build a heater that had the attributes mentioned in the EdenPure flyer. ...a sheet of cured copper which acts as a heat exchanger and releases the heat into the air. The heater is not suppose to cause any fires like some space heaters do, be free of fumes and carbon monoxide, will not arm children or pets and not dry the air in the room. There are other things mentioned but I don't know what is true and what is hype sales talk. The heater weighs about 37 lbs. and the larger one is suppose to heat 1000 ft. and the smaller 300 feet. I don't know the deminsions. You can probably find out on the EdenPure site.

[Ewhaz]

I was thinking about this lately and a few things occured to me.

Most heaters use a heating eliment to put out heat. The problem with that is simply that your using resistance to generate heat.. Basically its designed as a system thats entirely inefficient and all its losses are in the form of heat.

The mechanical systems may yet be a step above that, due to the fact that you can use other things like leverage and the attributes of the materials to your advantage. It also got me thinking, maybe the answer would be inductive heating? They already use this in stoves, but I'm not sure about the efficiency. I feel it would be a step above a heating element but until its tested, the efficiency is unknown.

With the aluminum I did feel a bit of small magnetic resistance once the small disk got up to speed. Aluminum is also Diamagnetic so it initially puts out a small counter magnetic field when it encounters and outside magnetic field. Other materials would also put out their own magnetic fields as soon as the eddy currents showed up, so there would be losses there too. I guess that the trick is to simply find the one that allows for the quickest transfer from energy to heat with the least amount of losses in the exchange.