hey guys,
i dunno if you guys share the same concern for the environment, energy conservation and the poor as I do, but an idea just popped into my mind for a business/charity based on those causes.
I thought I'd like to attempt to help people convert waste heat to do something useful around the house like dry clothes.
An initial attempt would be to channel the coolant from a fridge to a larger area that can be maintained and cleaned so that the clothes can be dried on it.
I reckon this idea will not be immediately attractive as the cost savings will be quite little - maybe under $100 a year? and the initial cost of labor and raw materials to set it up may be way above that order of magnitude (some survey will have to go into this).
There are also several technical and aesthetic/design issues to concern oneself with - whether we can come up with designs for each situation that is functional and simple enough to be of casual utility, and that will be the thing which determines if this idea takes off.
In this climate of tightening belts and of people looking for something worthwhile to do, we can take otherwise unemployed people (ourselves) and apply them to helping the poor whom a few dollars in savings would matter to.
It could serve as a springboard/source of experience to implementing ideas that involve higher tech, more complication and more cost e.g. I envision solar powered windows to absorb energy from the sunlight to power air conditioners, or an external system to aid in cooling the computer, which is becoming the central problem with computing these days (incorporating the home server with the home water heating system). It has the scope of utilizing some of our trainings - varun's business skills, chua's design training, and perhaps shamir could help us market the product using videos - getting the message across to the our target audience.
4 comments:
very utopian Gabriel..and as an architecture student who's interested in green issues i applaud it..but i am skeptical of "make the world a better place" schemes..thats my western training talking i guess..well, not to be discouraging, lets try the coolant channeling bit first shall we?
here's a paper that examined the possibility of using heat from the air-conditioner to heat water...
:)
Interesting... not so much as the cost savings but the marketting of such a scheme to take advantage of the global hype surrounding global warming and the imminent doom of our tiny dear little home we sometimes like to call Earth.
If you can set up a small working model of something similiar, there might be ways to convince larger companies to invest in the idea.
Recycling heat is pretty interesting. though things like drying clothes doesn't make sense if people are already using the sun to dry their clothes no? the same amount of CO2 is still being produced by the whatever.
The idea of solar powered windows for air con also makes sense... are there transparent solar panels around? i understand that if the air con was on the window will be closed, but what if the air con is not on and the windows are open? won't they be ugly if its opaque? should have handheld solar panels.. or removable/hidable ones.
there are transparent solar panels..new technology..but thats not the point..my issue is why people want to start marketing green tech now all of a sudden when its been around since the 70s..of course, the technology has developed and we should care about the environment and Gabriel's idea is great but my problem is just that green is now "hip" thats why everybody wants it..but people are just creating another fad and they'll soon tire of it..and if we start anything its just capitalising on a fad thats all..
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