Self-Sufficiency - Many Suggestions

10/4/2015 SelfSufficiency Many Suggestions
SelfSufficiency Many Suggestions

Regarding Many of the Needs of Modern Life!
Of course, these are all GREEN as well!
SelfSufficiency is a wonderful goal. However, extremely few people (yet) seem to approach it Text Font
appropriately! Some have a hobbyist attitude, of buying or making small devices which will never possibly Face
pay for themselves or otherwise provide any actual value. Others spend spectacular amounts of money for SansSerif
the most recently promoted solar or wind products, probably because the salesperson was a persuasive Serif
talker! Eventually, it is important to develop a more focused approach, and this presentation and assorted
linked webpages hope to be helpful regarding accomplishing that. Script
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Most companies that try to market alternative energy products tend to focus on ultrahightech devices
ComicSans
and concepts. I guess they see that as the most profitable for their companies (since PROFIT is the ONLY
think they ever pursue these days!) Impressive demos are done to allegedly prove the worth of their .
(expensive) products, but few such concepts are yet decently proven as effective and efficient in reallife Text Size
use, and they are also so hightech as to tend to need a lot of repairs which generally require incredibly 14px
expensive technicians to fix extremely exotic equipment! We tend to see value in the other direction! Larger
KISS! (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) The majority of the devices and systems described here are extremely Smaller
effective but are as LOWtech as is realistically possible, while still providing the level of results which
are expected by modern American and European people. .
Background
We consider the Poster Child for such an energy source to be the grass clippings and leaves of Color
your yard which gradually decompose and disappear over a few months. You and the other seven Blue
billion people on Earth have all known that such materials disappear, and you might even associate that Green
with it naturally decomposing. We simply also note the Law of Conservation of Energy, where energy
Parchment
cannot 'disappear' and that sunlight had provided around 9,000 Btus of energy in creating each pound of
organic material. In your (large) one acre yard, you have around NINE TONS (or 18,000 pounds) of grass, .
leaves, weeds, trees and bushes which grow each year. Every one of those pounds of organic material White
absorbed that 9,000 Btu that sunlight provided. Multiply to see that YOU therefore have around (for printing)
170,000,000 Btus of (indirectly solar) heat energy available ON YOUR PROPERTY! (every year!) (as
all that organic material decomposes after dying).
The HeatGreen devices we describe can use some of that enormous available heat to ENTIRELY
HEAT YOUR HOUSE AND HOT WATER! Sort of amusing, isn't it? Does this involve you buying really
expensive equipment to capture that heat? No. Maybe $200 total to build either an HG 3a or an HG 3ab
unit! Every year, all those growing plants WILL provide you with another 170,000,000 Btus of this heat
available to you, but like everyone else, you can certainly IGNORE IT and it will all naturally decompose
and disappear! In any case, among the other SelfSufficiency projects mentioned here, I REALLY
recommend that you at least look at the HeatGreen 3a webpages, which includes the page which has the
construction instructions.
That Poster Child device can do even more for you! In the process of enabling bacteria to decompose that
organic (undesired) material, there are three things it creates: water vapor, carbon dioxide, and warmth.
During the 1990s, thousands of Research scientists discovered some amazing things! They found that
nearly every species of food (and every other) crop will produce about FIVE TIMES the food if they
are grown in high humidity, nice warmth and three times the amount of natural carbon dioxide!
Get it? The HG devices create all three of those NATURALLY! You could have a small greenhouse
which produces amazing amounts (and quality) of tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes, etc!
Oh, by the way, ALL fossil fuel furnaces also create the exact same things that an HG unit creates, the
water vapor, carbon dioxide, and warmth. So it actually turns out that anyone could use an unGREEN
approach in having a furnace burner or one from a gas clothes dryer to supply such a supergreenhouse.
But we feel that GREEN is always better!
Also, YOU are not the only one with a yard in America! There are also around 75,000,000 other families
who have yards, each of which also have that 170,000,000 Btus of solargenerated heat available every
year. Plus golf courses, Forest Preserves and farmers' fields! Without even considering any other
Alternative Energy source, this 'organic debris' could provide All of us with more energy than we now use
from all Fossil Fuels! But we ARE mighty lazy, aren't we?
Many of the devices and systems described and discussed here (and in linked pages) are entirely
presented including construction instructions so that you could build your own. And still better, many of
them only involve a few hundred dollars of purchases from a local store (and some construction work on
your part!)
MOST of the needs of human survival and of some level of happiness can be provided by the following
various systems. Given that the economy figures to become even more dreadful than now (early 2009),
these systems may turn out to become extremely important in coming years. Beginning about 2004, I have
strongly felt that by 2012, the American and most European economies will be in desperate shape, where
http://mbsoft.com/public3/selfsuff.html#refrig 1/28
the Great Depression of the 1930s might be seen as not really having been too bad! (Added note early in
2013: It looks like my 2004 prediction is a little early, but I had not known that the government would be
willing to print up unlimited amounts of new money to keep the economy afloat! Some authorities now
[2013] are saying that the two 'bubbles' we experienced [tech in 2000 and housing in 2007] will be minor
when compared to what they think might or will happen when the 'money bubble' bursts.
Most of these device concepts are also applicable to Third World remote locations, so a jungle
village in equatorial Africa could use these systems to have reliable food refrigeration and freezing, reliable
safe water supplies, comfortable building cooling, heating if necessary (such as for bathing water), and
several sources of substantial supplies of electricity for a wide variety of uses, and even medical
sterilization regarding health issues. Even aspects of enabling a small greenhouse to produce five times
the normal amount of food, at extremely high quality, is in the realm (using the HG 3a).
It seems to me that Robinson Crusoe should have had Central Air Conditioning; Hot and Cold running water that was absolutely
pure; as much electricity as he could have dreamed of; sterilization capabilities to be able to medically fix anything that might
happen to Friday; Food Refrigeration and Freezing; and constant central heat if his island ever got cold, and for his Hot Tub;
and more! Seems to me that the literary Robinson Crusoe had to suffer when he could have provided himself all these creature
comforts, IF he had known about this webpage!
Additional personal opinions: Whether the news of the day has to do with air or water pollution or global warming or dwindling
fossil fuel energy supplies, it seems that every week, some company shows up with some idea where they expect to be given
billions of dollars of profits. We had seen solar and wind be heavily promoted in the early 1980s and then quickly fade when they
did not perform up to the claims. Electric vehicles did the same in the 1990s. More recently, everyone was agog over Ethanol,
where the US gave up 1/3 of its entire cropland to grow corn to be processed into Ethanol. No one seemed to be aware that the
MOST that crazy (and VERY expensive to the government) effort accomplished was to replace around 5% of the gasoline we
use each year! In other words, a pitiful effort at best which experts should have recommending avoiding from the start. And we
hear that Hydrogen is going to be the ultimate solution for energy. But no one seems to recognize that Hydrogen does NOT
contain any natural energy on its own it must be GIVEN that energy from processes such as electrolysis of water, which is a
VERY energy intensive process. At best, Hydrogen is actually no better than batteries, which also must be recharged regularly.
It IS true that people come up with wonderfully innovative ideas regarding a thousand aspects of the
energy situation. Some are dumb ideas, but many are brilliant. IF there were only a few thousand of us Public
humans around, then those ideas would be able to provide excellent solutions to all of our problems!
Unfortunately, there are a LOT of us! Service
Categories
The biggest aspect of all this is the SCALE of our usage of fossil fuels.
SelfSufficiency
Many Suggestions
An anecdote seems to show this well. Sir Richard Branson made many press conferences where he
promised to remove all the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that we (including his Virgin Airlines)
put into the atmosphere. And he and others have shown very smallscale demos of a few of over two Environmental
hundred different chemical processes we already know about to extract carbon dioxide. And everyone Subjects
celebrates when an ounce or ten pounds of carbon dioxide gets removed in a demo. Fine. But at
Scientific Subjects
some point, the SCALE of the problem must be faced! Say that someone actually sets up such an
operation (the Solvay Process appears to be the best chance, and it is well proven over the past 150
years). No one mentions that if you do the math, you quickly find that you would have to chemically Advanced Physics
process NOT the ten pounds of carbon dioxide in a demo for Reporters, but 200,000,000,000
Social Subjects
pounds of carbon dioxide EVERY DAY, and convert it all into either compressed CO2 gas or liquid
or some other chemicals. These hundred million tons of materials then would have to be HAULED,
Religious Subjects
each day, to wherever they were going to be dumped, which would require TENS OF MILLIONS OF
LOADED SEMI TRUCKS carrying the waste products! Wanna guess at how much extra Diesel fuel Public Services
would be required, and the cost of those millions of drivers and trucks which would forever be forced to Home Page
repeat that every day?
The point being, each week's news reports of magical solutions, which usually are HOPED FOR Main Menu
breakthroughs which are not quite ready yet, always leave out massively important facts, generally Email
related to the SCALE of the whole works. A few companies are getting extremely rich because they
manufacture wind turbine blades, wind turbines, and wind turbine towers, but amazingly enough, no one seems to have ever
done any actual calculations, or confirmed any actual long term performance, to see whether such tower windmills could ever
provide significant solutions. The reality turns out to be that around 5,000 giant tower windmills would have to be reliably
operating to provide just ONE GigaWatt of electricity. (The United States uses around 500 GigaWatts of electricity nearly
constantly!)
So IF it is seriously considered for the US to build around 1,300,000 tower windmills (for at least $15 million each) (think about
that for a moment, hundreds of times more tower windmills than there are McDonald's restaurants!), yes, a reasonable attempt
at replacing the coal now used in the US to produce HALF of our electricity could be possible. But each of those tower
windmills is said to contain around 800 moving parts in them, meaning that more than a billion moving parts would constantly
be wearing out and failing and needing to be repaired at the top of 250foot tall towers! Do you seriously think that is
PRACTICAL? Shouldn't the "experts" consider such aspects, rather than just wildly roaring ahead as with the Ethanol
adventure? Didn't "Thinking ahead" used to be a central part of all leadership? Where did it go?
A central problem is that only giant Corporations have the billions of dollars to invest in building enormous systems, which they
do in order to collect billions of MORE dollars from customers who send them monthly bills for gas or electricity or water or oil.
They ONLY think in terms of really enormous terms, in order to FORCE people to think they have to buy from those
Corporations and make them even richer and to make us even more dependent on them to supply our needs. Please note that
these various systems described here are designed and intended for INDIVIDUAL families to use. The difference is a difference
that the Executives in their Penthouse Offices can't comprehend. I find an example of this to be rather humorous! They love to
get the government to give them billions of dollars to build build things like Nuclear Powerplants which can supply a BILLION
Watts of electricity, so that they can charge a MILLION CUSTOMERS for the 1,000 Watts that each commonly needs and uses.
This is VERY profitable for them! They struggle with trying to figure out how they can change to the tower windmills you hear
about, because that one nuclear plant would have to be replaced by 3,000 giant, 300foottall tower windmills (each of which
cost around $20 million to buy plus the land cost and the installation costs, far more than $60 billion dollars!) They never think in
terms of actually supplying customers' needs, only the cost to build giant systems and the profit they can lust over! They also
think in terms of flatplate solar collectors, but the fact that they are only around 7% efficient means they would need massive
amounts of them. To replace that one nuclear power plant, they would have to buy and install solar cells on around 50 square
miles of land! That is around 32,000 acres! Not even considering that they sometimes fail, that enormous number of solar cells
is horrifically expensive. Notice that each square mile is around 27,000,000 square feet, so that would be talking about
100,000,000 solar cells per square mile, or about five billion solar cells to replace that one nuclear plant, many hundreds of
billions of dollars of cells and land and installation costs. Again, they never think about customers' needs, only the enormous
costs of their thinking in terms of BILLIONS of Watts! Do you see why they are very happy with the current situation of burning
coal for 50% of the US electricity and using nuclear for another 20%. Why would they even WANT to change to go to anything
which is enormously more expensive and also less dependable?
The news seems to often imply that the giant Corporations are 'nearly on the verge of using giant tower windmills or
spectacularly huge arrays of solar cells, but as long as they think in their BillionWatt way, don't hold your breath! Maybe in a
hundred years, yes. But not likely soon, for extremely practical reasons.
So YOUR thinking of only creating enough heat or coolness or water or electricity for one family or for a small
neighborhood IS the correct approach! And on top of that, you will be less dependent on those few giant Corporations which
seem to think that only they deserve to receive enormous profits for your utilities!
It used to be that a technology had to be well proven BEFORE it was ever divulged to the public. Now, products are aggressively
marketed and even sold, BEFORE they have even shown themselves to be functional products! The assumption seems to be
that once the manufacturer gets all the billions of dollars of sales, they will then be able to finance the R&D that would solve the
problems their product has! Isn't that rather backwards? (personal opinion!)
It seems to be common these days to hear terrifying news stories, such as a recent one regarding a VERY highly promoted
recent medicine where reports now describe that at least 260 people have DIED from that drug since late 2010 (and it is now
still early in 2012!) Pharmaceutical Corporations now seem to be free to immediately start MARKETING their latest drugs to start
receiving the billions of dollars of profits they lust for. IF they happen to kill off a few hundred Americans in the process, oh, well!
It used to be that even if a SINGLE person died or even got seriously sick or disabled, that Corporation would be forced to stop
and their Corporate reputation would be forever gone. Things have really changed, haven't they?
Given the coming economic downturns in the US and in Europe, it may become critical for INDIVIDUALS to explore self
sufficiency regarding survival. It seems likely that tens of millions of people will not have employment or other sources of
income, and it may come down to each person and each family having to improvise regarding obtaining basic requirements of
life. I truly hope that is not an accurate view of the coming future, but it seems worth at least considering. For now, the majority
of people seem oblivious to all of this and only a very small fraction of people are yet exploring alternative energy and related
concepts. Most people seem quite comfortable in trusting a few giant Corporations to provide for all of our needs, as they do
today.
I have discovered a personal complication in some of these Self Sufficiency systems! In general, I feel the modern social need
for having AVAILABLE the conventional electricity and natural gas and water, mostly because I do so many experiments that I
sometimes find that some idea did not work as well as I expect, and I then need to rely on conventional utilities. But there is an
amusing detail that I had never noticed in my utility bills (which is certainly also in yours!) Some months, I provide NEARLY all
the electricity I use, but I wind up buying maybe $3 of conventional electricity in that month. The Utility companies list lots of
different things in the utility bills, only one of which is actually the electricity! They charge me $24.28 each month for DELIVERY
CHARGES. Then, based on the total of product and delivery charges, the government adds in $4.85 in taxes. So even in a
month where I only actually BUY $3 of electricity, I have to pay about TEN TIMES THAT MUCH or around $32! The same
situation is true for natural gas supply, where I actually USE a tiny amount but every month I get billed for about $30 minimum.
The darkly amusing fact is that, in YEARS that I have been really serious about selfsufficiency, and I have actually USED
maybe $30 of Natural Gas in a year, I have had to PAY around $400 DURING THAT YEAR (nearly entirely for the
AVAILABILITY of conventional utility supply). And about another $400 minimum per year to have conventional electricity supply
available!
A darkly amusing result of these things is that even for a man who is so motivated about selfsufficiency as I am, some of the
motivation is faded! Even when I now get 'lazy' in not wanting to always carry bags of cut lawn grass for my HG 3a on really cold
days, the net annual cost of such 'partial reliance on conventional utilities' is barely noticeable regarding the bills! Having
become elderly and having some physical maladies is my usual excuse now, but I think it really is an element of laziness!
These various following subjects are discussed in great scientific detail in a set of linked presentations just below, for more
complete information regarding any of those supposed future energy supplies.
Around 1970, the US was known to have more Uranium than any other country. The USA mined and used up all the Uranium it
had during the Cold War, and by around 1992, all the 39 operating Uranium mines in the US had closed due to lack of
available Uranium! Ever since then, we have had to IMPORT virtually all the Uranium we use in our electric powerplants! Have
you noticed that NO ONE has ever told you about that? Fortunately, Australia and Canada have been selling us Uranium, but
even those supplies are getting used up. And the old reliable hydroelectric dams are getting near the ends of their useful lives.
The 700foot tall Glen Canyon Dam (in Arizona) already has frightening amounts of water leaking AROUND IT through the
sandstones of the region. This is weakening the attachment of the dam to the bedrock, and when that dam comes loose from
the rock and falls over, a true catastrophe seems certain to occur, AND SOON. In addition, the enormous reservoirs of those
dams have been filling with sediment for decades, so they have less water in them now and at less depth, so they have far less
capacity to make electricity than they used to have. Nearly all hydroelectric powerplants now have to release water FASTER
than ever before, just to supply previous (Government contracted) amounts of electricity, and yet the demand keeps increasing!
(It may actually be fortunate for that Glen Canyon dam's future that the level of the water in Lake Powell has been more than
100 feet lower than it should be, regarding that water leaking around that dam.)
I have studied these matters for more than 20 years and I see NONE of them as being realistic supplies of energy beyond
maybe the year 2020. That AIN'T VERY LONG from now! And so I have attempted to consider other energy related ideas.
Here are the few which I think might have a realistic chance of being a LARGESCALE solution
regarding electricity needs:
In early 2000, I discovered how tornadoes and waterspouts form. In early 2006, I came to understand the Physics of what
occurs and I even MADE a couple dozen very small tornadoes! I laughed because I thought it was a pointless and foolish
technology! But in August 2009, I realized how this might be the basis for a wonderful supply of electricity. An ENCLOSED
tornado (inside a modified metal farm silo) using MODEST AMOUNTS of SOLAR ENERGY to warm a pond of water, can
start and drive a tornado where ionized gases would revolve past coils of wire in the silo walls. I have not yet made any
tornadoes where more than 50 Watts of (solar) power was used (because I am a chicken!), so mine have all been very
skinny and weak, and I have not yet tried to ionize the gases in them. However, these have not just been momentary
tornadoes! I kept one spinning for nearly two hours, so longterm operation seems possible. Calculations indicate that a
farmsilosized artificial tornado should be able to easily produce at least 3 kiloWatts of electricity, plenty for any one
family. Yes, many millions of them would be required for any serious attempt at supplying our full energy needs, next to
each house! But at least it seems to suggest a POSSIBLE approach. Please realize that a good deal of knowledge
and expertise is important before trying to mess with tornadoes, as extreme danger might suddenly appear! I
have intentionally limited my experiments to very minimal amounts of power for this reason! Professional drivers on a
closed course. Don't try this at home.
Beginning around 1990, for more than 20 years, I have realized that the spinning of the Earth contains amazing amounts
of rotational kinetic energy, and IF we could somehow extract some of it, it would be possible to provide ALL the energy
used by all of civilization for millions of years while only having the tiniest effect on the Earth itself! Several years ago, I
learned that the Soviet Union had spent a fortune in pursuing the same potential energy source, between 1970 and 1990
(with a best performance of producing around 0.0004 Watt of power), which was even less success than I had
experimentally measured in early 2004 (where my small tabletopsized and crude devices each produced around 0.001
Watt of power). The Soviets used a method that was very different than mine! I was actually really disappointed in my four
experimental devices' performance, until a couple years later when I first learned that the Soviets had not even managed
to produce as much as I did! It's funny how perceptions can change!
Vaguely similar to the spinning of the Earth, I discovered that the Moon's gravity and its significantly tilted orbit causes the
Earth to significantly wobble every couple weeks (because the Moon is pulling the Earth's equatorial belt up and down
each month due to that orbital tilt), a type of Precession referred to as Nutation. There is an amazing amount of
mechanical energy which IS transferred from the Moon's orbital motion to the Earth's wobbling motions, enough to
provide MUCH of all of civilization's energy needs. But capturing that energy seems far beyond our human abilities.
In 2003, I was researching something else when I accidentally discovered an extremely efficient LowHeadHydroelectric
system. I even went to the trouble of completely Engineering and Designing an entire installation, even including parts
lists and material and labor costs! My system should have cost around half a million to build (half material and half labor)
and it would have produced around 8 megaWatts of electricity from a substantial stream flow. It turns out that the US
currently has around 7,700 Flood Control Dams, which are each roughly 20 feet high and on streams that have flows
great enough to worry about floods! I thought I had a wonderful new system to be used! If each of 7,700 EXISTING
flood control dams were modified to use ONE of my 8 mW systems, that would be around 60 gigaWatts of
constant power for the US! That would represent around 12% of all the electricity used in the US. Even better, much of
that electricity would probably have been generated LOCALLY where the enormous losses of the Power Grid would not
be involved!
However, there was a difficulty! It turns out that the US Army Corps of Engineers has absolute jurisdiction and authority
over ALL navigable waterways in the US. So I learned that I had to call them to make sure I had their permission. (This
was BEFORE they showed themselves to be totally incompetent regarding the miles of dikes they had built around New
Orleans, which failed miserably a year later!) The man I talked to on the phone certainly believed himself to be higher
than God! He told me that they did NOT want any suggestions from any amateurs. He then explained to me that IF there
was any such good idea, that THEIR people would have thought of it, as they had the smartest people on Earth! He then
insulted me, finding anyone who claims to be a Physicist to be stupid (and more, including some swear words), and he
even felt the need to directly threaten me regarding even thinking about touching any of THEIR dams, before he slammed
the phone down on me. The US Army Corps of Engineers has the ONLY game in town, and I will NOT play by such
abusive rules! I will NEVER release that (wonderful) system!
In June 2007, I completed the Design and Engineering and smallscale testing of a unique system to capture energy from
wind, which I call CW for Community Wind. The basic device is designed to supply a fairly consistent 1.2 MegaWatts of
electricity for a nearby town of around a thousand houses, at a total construction cost of around $1.8 million. That is only
around 1/10 the construction cost of the tower windmills that are aggressively promoted, and my CW system produces
several times more electricity than those tower windmills generally can provide, and the CW system is extremely durable,
where tower windmills seem to selfdestruct or catch fire every week! My reason for giving out the construction
information for the CW (Community Wind) was twofold: (1) roughly 100 LOCAL residents from that town could have
excellentpaying construction jobs in building the system (since it is primarily a number of rather conventional but very
large reinforced concrete walls); and if each of the 10,000 towns in the US which have populations greater than 4,000
would build one of these, they would collectively EMPLOY a MILLION people in goodpaying construction jobs (LOCALLY
and IMMEDIATELY) while also creating 12,000 MegaWatts of electricity from wind (which could replace 12 nuclear power
plants in replacing around 2.5% of the electricity used in the US. (A linked webpage fully describes CW). (2) the other
value I see in CW is that each community can build and own their own source of most of their electricity, providing some
level of independence and selfsufficiency.
The only other SIGNIFICANT largescale energy source I have yet noted is also related to the Moon, a sort of ocean tide.
This is a rather crude concept, but the general idea has been known and used for centuries. Imagine having a oneacre
reservoir (rather small) for water, maybe ten miles inland from an Ocean, where the twicedaily ocean tide causes the
reservoir level to rise and fall maybe 5 feet. Now imagine trenching and installing a watertight concrete culvert (like large
sewer culverts) the ten miles between the ocean and the reservoir. When the tide is out, the reservoir is empty, but then
during the next six and a half hours, seawater would flow through the culvert as the sealevel rises those five feet. So the
reservoir would become five feet deep after those six and a half hours. The culvert would then be CLOSED, so the water
is held there as the tide goes down. One acre of water five feet deep is around twelve million pounds of water. That
would then mean that up to 60 million footpounds of potential energy would be contained in that reservoir (at
low tide). If that (raised) water would be released through some mechanism that captured the potential energy, maybe
over a 3 hour period (180 minutes), then 330,000 ftlb of potential energy might be captured. This is the same as a
constant 10 horsepower for those three hours or around 7.5 kiloWatts of power.
OK. That is NOT on the scale of National energy consumption, but maybe much larger ponds could use this Tidal Energy
for greater performance.
The friction in the culverts should be minimal as the water flow would be very slow, just 10 miles over a six hour period,
less than half of walking speed. Energy conversion methods are not particularly efficient, but even if only 50% could be
captured, that would still be around 22 kWh of electric energy captured and converted to electricity, in that sixhour or
threehour period. It would occur again around 13 hours later, so around 40 kWh of electric energy might be available
from such a system.
There ARE two serious disadvantages to this idea! One is that salt corrodes concrete and salt deposits might also
accumulate inside the culverts. The other is that this method would be intermittent, only providing maximum electricity for
about 3 hours out of each 13 hours. STILL, it would be rather cheap to install, and where extremely few moving parts
could ever fail!
I only include this idea in the spirit of trying to be comprehensive in considering all available possibilities, and I personally
do not see broad application for it regarding our energy needs.
I do NOT see that any of the highly promoted things in the news has any realistic chance of doing more than an
impressive smallscale demo. That includes current solar (PV) products and tower windmills. I do believe that in maybe 50
years, PV technology will have advanced to where some PV approaches will be practical and affordable. But not yet! At
the end of this presentation are links to more complete presentations on each of the items mentioned above.
THEREFORE, the following concepts are primarily for INDIVIDUALS and not for massive corporate
installations!
Index of this presentation

ResidentialScale Supply of Electricity onsite
CommunityScale (megaWatt) Supply of Electricity locally
Producing Excellent Safe Drinking Water Without Drilling a Well
Fully Heating Any Home or Building
LowTech Full Solar Heating Any Home or Building
Heating Domestic Hot Water
Air Conditioning for Temperate Climates
Air Conditioning for Hot Climates
Refrigeration for Food
Freezer for Food Preservation
Sterilization of Medical Instruments or anything else
Cooking with assurance of no e. coli or any other pathogens
Fruit and Vegetable Production of FIVE TIMES normal!
SelfMelting Sidewalks, Driveways and more!
Miscellaneous things
Related Energy Subjects
Informational
Solar Cells. Photovoltaic Cells, PV, Electricity from Sunlight (Jan 2002)
Wind Power, Wind Energy, Practical Windmills (Residential, some Watts) (1975 and April 1998)
Tower Windmills and Electricity, Modest Efficiency (Community, 1.2 MegaWatts, a thousand homes) (June 2007) (a
million construction jobs and 12,000 MegaWatts of electricity Nationally)
Hydrogen as a Fuel for Vehicles as a Fuel for Automobiles and Other Vehicles (August 2003)
Electric Cars, Hybrid Cars, the Physics (April 2006)
Energy Storage Methods Efficiencies Methods
Energy Supplies of the World Petroleum, Coal, Gas, Uranium (Published), Coal, Oil, Natural Gas, Uranium (May 2010
Report)
Sun and Stars How the Sun Works Nuclear Fusion in Making Light and Heat
Electricity
Because of all the energyrelated website presentations in this Domain (linked at the end of this presentation), many people
constantly and excitedly tell me about their plans to be going "off the grid" and they do extensive bragging (UNTIL they have
actually started TRYING it!). Once they have actually already tried to do it, they are always rather discouraged and they have
lots of questions about how to make things work a lot better than they have discovered! In general, some salesperson has
described to them some amazing situation where the products THEY sell can solve all their problems (except possibly corns on
their feet or whether their favorite football team wins!) They often also see some videotape with some impressive demo of the
product operating under absolutely perfect conditions. And given that few customers have sufficient background to be able to
evaluate what they are told or shown, people often then buy many thousands of dollars of solar (photovoltaic) cells or an
expensive windturbine, or some other thing that is promoted as incredibly advanced.
It would be wonderful if the products were actually likely to be able to do that! But it RARELY actually occurs! It seems likely that
SOME DAY those claims may be credible, like twenty or fifty years from now. But for now, there is IMMENSE "optimism"
involved! The companies that manufacture such things always do their "official tests" under absolutely perfect conditions. If it is
solar, that means perfectly clear weather, exactly at noon, pretty near June 21 when the Sun is highest, wind blocked, and with
all other conditions carefully controlled. So, when they advertise "can produce 7 watts per square foot", that is technically and
legally true. However, when actual weather is added into the equation, and the fact that the Sun is NOT at that maximum height
except for a few minutes on one day each year, and there are many other losses, the REAL yearly performance that people
experience is often 1/10 of what salespeople generally try to promote. As far as I am concerned, that is outright deception, as it
is the basis on which rather expensive products and systems are being sold. Yes, they are VERY careful to have done those
very specific tests so they can minimize losing lawsuits, but beyond that, they generally seem to have just discovered some
types of products where customers seem willing to pay out enormous amounts of money based solely on what a salesperson
says! They see it as a gold mine! Didn't a lot of people travel around a hundred years ago selling Snake Oil as the answer to
absolutely every malady? Isn't there sort of a similarity? That Manufacturers and Salespeople should at least TRY to be honest
with customers? Where is THAT today?
There are separate webpages on photovoltaic cells and on wind power in this Domain, linked at the end of this presentation, if
you should want to better understand the actual Physics behind what ACTUALLY occurs. Since I am a research scientist, and
not trying to sell you anything, I have no reason to either puff up or denigrate any technologies. Yes, the text below mentions the
JUCA woodstoves which I invented in 1973 and which even now keep around 100,000 Americans warm every winter. But I
really do not care if you or anyone else BUYS those products (and actually never really did care, except to HELP people!). They
just happen to operate far better than any other things that have been sold. I suppose that is a bias of sorts, so DON'T BUY
ONE. THERE! My interest in ALL these pages is simply to try to provide you with sufficient information where you might spend
your money wisely, whatever you choose to buy!
AND, if you are patient enough to be prepared to wait twenty to fifty years, I suspect you might then be really pleased with a
wide range of solar and wind products then manufactured and sold, except maybe with the costs involved!
In my opinion, most major purchases need to meet certain requirements regarding AMORTIZING their own cost. That
is, they need to show me that they have a realistic chance of actually saving enough eventually so that they will likely eventually
pay off their own (installed) cost. Only then could any of them be considered as ways to actually SAVE people money, where
they could ever be seen as a way of actually saving any money on energy needs! When someone spends $12,000 for a wind
turbine, and another $3,000 for a tower for it, my first thought has to do with how long it is likely to last and how much
maintenance it will require. For discussion sake, say that it was likely to last about 20 years (relatively unlikely, as very few of the
windturbines sold in the 1980s are still working), and that it was designed and built so well that ZERO maintenance was needed
in those 20 years.
Thought: You could place that $15,000 in a Savings Account and earn maybe 5% interest over those 20 years, which would
result in your then having $39,800 in the bank.
If you are an average family, you have monthly electric bills of between $50 and $100 per month, or $600 to $1200 per year. In
20 years, you would spend between $12,000 and $24,000 for electricity. Yes, the cost of electricity WILL go up, but unless the
windturbine will supply you at least $39,800 of electricity (and it clearly would not, since you will not even USE that much in
those 20 years, even with no maintenance and perfect operation for 20 years), it will never even pay for ITSELF, much less
actually save you any money! IF you are willing to amortize over 40 years instead, yes, it has a shot of eventually paying for its
original cost. I am a patient person, but not THAT patient!
See the general approach to trying to figure out whether such things are worth buying?
This applies to Electric Cars or Hybrids or WindTurbines or Solar Concentrating Collectors or Solar Flat Panels and any future
devices that will claim to use Hydrogen. Even woodstoves!
How about the guy in Maine that constantly gets massive media attention regarding his "all solar" house? He freely admits that
he paid over $50,000 for the equipment on his roof. He even says that he got special deals on that equipment and that it
normally would have cost twice that, or $100,000! Reporters always visit DURING THE DAYTIME, AROUND NOON, IN THE
SUMMER, and WHEN IT IS SUNNY, so they see the system providing all the electricity his house needs (at that moment), and
even a little extra which he can sell to the electric company. However, even on such a sunny day, around 3/4 of the hours of the
day are when the Sun is down or too low in the sky, or in the wrong part of the sky, to be of much benefit. And, unfortunately, we
only NEED to have lots of lights on AT NIGHT, when no Solar is being collected. So, all night, even his famous house needs to
buy electricity from the power company. Since he is a very environmentaware person, clearly he does not leave lots of lights on
in rooms that are unoccupied! And the net result, FOR HIM, is that over a summer month, he generally does not pay for
electricity he uses.
Again, superficially, that seems incredibly impressive. However, his situation is much like the one discussed above, where during
the expected lifetime of the solar panels, there is NO chance that his initial costs will ever amortize themselves. He even admits
that, in telling reporters that his system will never actually pay for itself. But I wonder if his aggressive promoting of that
approach doesn't mislead others into buying many thousands of dollars of solar equipment, under the impression that they are
going to "save lots of money!"
I have not seen any reference to the actual total area of solar PV panels he has on his roof, but it may be around 2,000 square
feet. That would mean that the PV panels could realistically produce around 14,000 watts in the hour around noon on a very
sunny day. The weather is never that perfect, except possibly in the desert, so the Maine cloudiness factor must be included,
and we are down to around an AVERAGE 5,000 watts in that hour, or around 12 to 15 kWh of electricity in that entire sunny day
(after geometrical and other losses). Converting this to AC electricity which is acceptable to the local power company is not
easy, and involves some very expensive equipment. But say that NO electricity is used at all in the house in a 24hour period,
and all the electricity created would be sold to the Electric Company. Yes, you BUY electricity for around 15 cents per kWh, but
for starters, a good portion of that is for Delivery costs and an assortment of taxes. The actual cost of the electricity is probably
closer to 10 cents per kWh, but the Electric Company charges you several new expenses, specifically for them to constantly
confirm that any electricity you supply is at EXACTLY the correct frequency and EXACTLY the correct phaseangle to be
compatible for their equipment. They commonly charge some extra fees simply for having to waste their time to pay attention to
you! The result of all this is that you are not likely to even receive 5 cents per kWh for each of those 12 kWh that you could sell
them. That's sixty cents you might be able to make on that sunny day. You installed a hundred thousand dollars worth of
solar panels FOR THAT? Would that really merit the giant smug smile of "independence"?
You might note that at a MAXIMUM of producing $0.60 of electricity on really sunny days, you might realistically be able to sell a
MAXIMUM of around $100 of electricity in a year, even in such an amazing house. So then how many years will it take before
that guy in Maine amortizes $100,000 worth of solar panels on his roof? Answer: Around 1,000 years, if everything worked
really well and nothing ever broke down! Duhhh???
I actually FULLY support such houses, as EXPERIMENTS! And I think it is wonderful that he is NOT causing massive global
warming caused at the electric powerplant. Those things are fine! It is only the "misleading others into being receptive to things
that salespeople are ready to tell them to sell expensive equipment," which bothers me!
In the 35 years that solar energy and wind power have been aggressively promoted as sources of electricity, there have
ALWAYS been endless numbers of people who CLAIM that they sell electricity back to the power company, always with a giant
smile. This statement is nearly always made BEFORE they actually have any real experience! During those 35 years, I
have regularly tried to get ANY such homeowner to make photocopies of a year's worth of electric bills, so I could see actual
documented evidence of just how much they were paid back by the electric company! NO ONE has yet provided those
photocopies! I am certain it is because the most impressive performance they have ever seen would be laughably small! Did
their electric bills drop from $150/month to zero? Not even close! Did their electric bill OCCASIONALLY drop from $150/month
down to $149.50/month? I could believe that. Actually, their bill reductions might be much greater due to an AWARENESS of
conservation. It is all actually a GOOD thing, but I think those owners are ashamed for having spent so many thousands of
dollars and done so much bragging, to only have something like that to show to any Reporter! Personally, if I had invested
massively to get a fullblown solar installation or a Windcharger system, I actually WOULD have done what is called a Statistical
Analysis on the previous year's electric bills and also on the bills of this year, and even if it only resulted in me saving enough
money for a cup of coffee, I would certainly have showed the ACTUAL info to Reporters! Please realize that Reporters NEVER
see any ACTUAL data regarding these sorts of products, so their news reports are essentially what the person being
interviewed wanted to say! And THAT essentially came secondhand from salespeople FROM THE MANUFACTURER! The
simple fact that Reporters only visit such houses on bright sunny days (for solar) or windy days (for tower windmills, pretty much
stacks the deck regarding what viewers are going to see!
If you have explored the energyrelated pages in this Domain, you probably have noticed that most take a "bluecollar"
approach to most things, of discussing LOWCOST approaches to such subjects. Also, lowtech approaches to solving such
needs. This is the case here, where a VERY practical electrical supply approach is presented, which actually allows you to live a
pretty normal life! The people who are now offthegrid have to constantly be aware of whether it is sunny or not, regarding
whether they can turn on a light bulb! They tend to have an ACTUAL available electricity supply of maybe 250 watts to 400 watts
(IF they spent a lot for the equipment!) So they could NEVER consider using a vacuum cleaner or a toaster or a hairdryer
that uses 1500 watts or so! I propose a "better approach" here, and it is also generally FAR less expensive!
Changing these Devices???
I have discovered that VIRTUALLY all the people who actually try to build any of the following devices invariably decide that they
are smarter than me so they decide to IMPROVE the device they build. Most seem to also only read the first paragraph or two
of my description of what is important and how to build it, so they seem to feel even more free to build whatever seems to them
to make sense.
This is IMMENSELY FRUSTRATING for me! Even with my advanced education at the University of Chicago in Physics and
Engineering, it took me several months to Engineer and Design the free AirConditioning system. To then see thousands of
people blow that off, and only read enough to get the basic idea, and then slap something together, simply tells me that they will
get INFERIOR PERFORMANCE from what I had tried to provide for them!
Now, there ARE Mechanical Engineers who are capable of doing the math to improve my designs. I have no problem when
such people decide to alter what they will build. But that seems to be a tiny fraction of the people who actually build them!
My attitude is meant to be HELPFUL, in nearly every sense of the word. But I DON'T want to feel a responsibility when someone
makes bonehead alterations to any of my systems and then winds up having something that barely works at all!
My attitude might be expressed clearly regarding the "selficeandsnowmelter" system described below. IF someone can show
me that he/she can determine the Reynold's Number which applies inside that device, and then explain to me why that number
is desirable, I would welcome and encourage that person to make as many changes as they wish to that device! For anyone
else, who could not do that Engineering, I feel that they really need to build something very close to what I have described!
Comprende?
My Approach to Electricity Individual

Most of the lights in your house are probably incandescent lights. This means they can operate equally well using the common
AC current we get from electric companies or using DC current. The same is true of your toaster, and some other devices. It is
NOT true of computers or televisions (which have transformers) or most things that have motors, which are all designed to use
AC current. By the way, your entire house probably has large enough electric supply lines for 100ampere service, meaning that
you are able to totally ignore worrying about how much electricity you use at any moment, as long as ALL of them do not
exceed 100 amperes. (A 100watt light bulb uses just under 1 ampere.)
This seems to suggest a REALLY simple idea! Consider getting TEN standard car batteries (for around $500 total cost, and
maybe less if they give you a quantity discount, or far less if you get used ones.) and connecting them IN SERIES. You would
then have a supply of 120volt DC electricity. Better, a HUGE supply of it! Most car batteries are rated at being able to
provide 500 amperes for a short time (to start a car) and around 90 amperehours total actual energy capacity. This means that
each could supply a continuous 30 amperes for 3 hours before the batteries were drained! Being wired in series like that we
would have a supply of around 90 amperehours times ten batteries total of 120 volts, or in other words 11,000 watthours (or
11 kWh) of available electricity.
That is an impressive amount of available electricity!
Given that our normal family modernlifestyle use averages only between 1,000 watts and 2,000 watts in the evening hours and
far less during other hours, we are talking about having LOADS of electricity with this battery approach! I am talking about a
MODERN life style, where kids forget and leave lights on in rooms and all the rest. So you are looking at an electric supply
system that can provide ALL the electricity your (NORMAL) life requires for something like 24 straight hours before being
drained! And you CAN use things like the kitchen toaster (which operates for such a short time that it uses so little electricity
from those batteries as to have virtually no effect whatever!)
A SINGLE car battery contains a LOT of energy in it, enough to start your car engine! Ten batteries contain ten times that
amount of energy. Basically, a family could have massive Christmas decorations or operate a buzzbox welder, in other words,
have no realistic limitations regarding using electricity!
By the way, the US government makes it relatively difficult to obtain ten USED batteries! Companies that sell new batteries wind
up having lots of usedbutfineforourpurposes batteries which they then have to dispose of. They are not ALLOWED to sell
you or give you any of those batteries! Politicians feel that used batteries are too dangerous to have around and so strict laws
were passed to make sure that they are all given to companies that make a fortune in recycling the lead in them! I have
discovered that obtaining used batteries is not easy because of this, although I do not see the logic in having to buy 10 brand
new batteries when their capability is not necessary. It has been suggested that junkyards wind up having a lot of batteries that
they hate to have to pay to dispose of! Hard to say the quality of the batteries from a junkyard, but they should be very cheap!
You can estimate your current usage in other ways. Say your monthly bill is around $60, which means that your daily bill would
be around $2. Part of the bill is for other things, so if your electricity rate is 15 cents per kilowatthour, this suggests that your
(wasteful) daily usage might be around 10 kWh. This is comparable to the 12 kWh that we indicated available from the ten
batteries, which confirms that we really DO have an electricity source that can realistically support a modern lifestyle for a family,
without having to do Abraham Lincoln type reading by a candle! And even THAT level of usage is assuming that no recharging
was going on at all during the entire day!
(For all the devices that require AC current, you could buy an INVERTER, a device that takes DC current and converts it into AC
current. The important point here is that you would have LOADS of available electricity to drive all your TVs and computers and
refrigerator and hairdryers and microwaves and all the rest!)
People who attempt to go offgrid tend to worry about using even 20 watts for a few minutes, and they rarely have more than
one or two small lights on at any time. I am talking about being able to have a HUGE Christmas light display, for the hours from
dusk to bedtime, every day!
Of course, you would have to be able to CHARGE those ten batteries! This is a bigger issue than it might first seem!
Since one horsepower is equal to about 746 watts, our daily use of 10 kWh to 15 kWh of electricity means that we used up
about 13 to 20 horsepowerhours of electrical energy. This is a LOT, and it takes a SERIOUS effort to try to recharge that much
electricity!
You COULD try to use photovoltaics to do that, although in my opinion, they provide a pitiful amount of electricity. IF you are
going to seriously consider buying many thousands of dollars of them, find someone NOT working for that company who has
used them for at least a year, to find out how much electricity they REALISTICALLY are able to use from the solar cells. You
may be surprised. IF you had a waterfall or river nearby, you COULD build something to get electricity from a crude
hydroelectric setup. But my favorite approach is to simply get a bunch (10) of discarded 55gallon drums and an equal number
of old car alternators (I prefer GM). You probably need to buy a single sheet of top quality exterior or marine grade 3/4" plywood
(to make very large wooden pulleys!). Each setup will charge just one of the batteries.
So you cut ten of the drums in half, and make ten simple Savonius rotor wind turbines. In a 10.7 mph wind (the average here in
the Chicago area) (that is around 16 feet per second), that Savonius rotates at around 3 times each second (with no load) and
around 2 rps with a decent load. That is 120 rpm. The car alternator has a pulley on it that is about 2" to 3" in diameter. SO, if
you cut a circle out of that plywood which is maybe 20" in diameter, and make the appropriate groove in the outer edge for a
standard car fan belt to fit, you have essentially made a large wooden pulley to drive a fan belt, and you can then simply and
easily cause the alternator to spin at 7 to 10 times as fast, that is 840 rpm or 1200 rpm. Most alternators can produce most of
their power at those speeds.
Long ago, Rankine found that undisturbed wind contains power from kinetic energy (energy flux) equal to:
E = 0.5 * ρ * V3 * (area exposed to the wind).
Note that this is a simple application of the kinetic energy definition. ρ is the air density or 0.00237 lbf * sec2/ft3.
For the 16 fps average wind discussed above, and for a standard 55gallon drum Savonius, we have 0.5 * .00237 * 163 * 10
square feet or about 50 ftlb/sec. Since one horsepower is 550 ftlb/second, this is therefore about 1/11 horsepower, as shown
in the wind page analysis. We also learned there that the Savonius only has an efficiency of around 14%, so we really are only
getting around 7 ftlb/sec available to the alternator. That turns out to then be about 1/80 horsepower, or roughly 10 watts. So
with a single simple Savonius made from an old 55gallon drum, in an average wind, we can expect under one ampere
of power (at 12 volts) to try to charge each of the batteries.
(A momentary aside here! You have heard friends brag about they're "about to go offthegrid and about to be making 2,000
Watts continuously or 5,000 Watts continuously from some sort of wind turbine or PV that a salesperson has told them about! In
our windenergy page, we did the calculations that show that a LARGE farm windmill, 10 feet in diameter, at its higher efficiency
of around 30%, can only create about 120 watts of mechanical rotational power! When people repeat what salespeople tell them
about 2,000 watts or 5,000 watts, they have no idea how unrealistic that is! Except that in a hurricane, yes, that would probably
be true!)
Our 7 ftlb/second from our little (and cheap) Savonius is around 1/80 horsepower, or around 9 watts of power. The belt and the
alternator have mechanical losses, so 6 watts of actual electricity is pretty realistic for our 10.7 mph average windspeed. SO, we
set up TEN of these Savonius/alternator setups spread out in a yard or field, each connected so that it charges ONE of the ten
batteries. This is rather slow charging, granted, about the equivalent to a trickle charger, around half an ampere of charging
current. (Sadly, that total charging rate, of half an ampere at 120 volts or 60 watts, which is 24 hours a day when the wind is
blowing, is actually comparable to the DAILY AVERAGE charging of even fairly expensive solar PV roof panel charging
systems.) Because the GM alternators have voltage regulators built into them, they can merrily spin or not spin and always
gradually be tricklecharging each of the ten batteries.
(Some of this was invented and built around 1974 and improved around 1998. Other approaches have been more recent.)
IF you insist on seeing impressive claims, we could have given performance for when there happens to be a 40mph wind
blowing near you. Yes, that happens, and salespeople seem ready to use things like that as an example. Because wind carries
power at the thirdpower of the speed, when we nearly quadruple the windspeed, we then are working with wind that has more
than 50 times as much power (43 is 64) in it. So we could have been discussing here charging currents of 25 amperes for each
battery rather than just a half an ampere. And then we could be saying 25 amperes times 12 or 14 volts times ten alternators
and we could be puffing about producing 3,500 watts of power being produced continuously. Sure, as long as the wind keeps
going at 40 mph!
Now, getting back to reality!
Keeping in mind the massive electrical storage those ten batteries can have, you can merrily use up electricity as we are now all
used to doing! You could certainly use a standard kitchen bread toaster! I suppose you could even use an electric heater (1500
watts, around 5,000 Btus of heating) if you wished! But the chargers have to eventually give the batteries back the same amount
of electricity. At 0.5 ampere charging current, it could take quite a while if you seriously deplete the batteries by very heavy use!
If you have a lot of space available, and a lot of scrap drums, you could make more Savonius rotor assemblies! If you made
FOUR for each battery, then everything would charge at 2 amps, about 250 watts nearly continuously. In one average day, you
could then charge the batteries with 24 * 250 or 6,000 watthours or 6 kWh. Our modern life, with all of our appliances, generally
uses up around double that. SO, if you would want an ABSOLUTE NORMAL usage / wastage of electricity as we now do, where
we use up around 12 kWh per day, all you need to do is make EIGHT Savonius rotors for each of the ten batteries! You
probably would even have EXTRA electricity that you could share with neighbors! (In general, you have to figure that neighbors
would NOT be pleased with your yard! When they would see 80 ugly spinning old drums in your yard, it will be difficult for you to
convince them that it is really just modern art!
People who try to be "off the grid" tend to only have one or two small lights on at any time. What we are talking about here is
having the house blazing bright, and probably even covered by a gaudy Christmas display in that season!
Note that all this is FAR less expensive than the $10,000 or more that you probably would need to spend for a pitifully
inadequate bought photovoltaic or windcharger system, and it performs easily ten times better! However, if you have close
neighbors, they probably would not appreciate looking out and seeing 80 Savonius rotors always spinning! Worse, if you
economize by not actually using any bearings, they sometimes squeak when they rotate (like some rooftop ventilating fans do).
If you use GM car alternators, they each already have built in a voltage regulator, which keeps it from overcharging the battery,
so the alternator can simply be directly connected to the battery. As to finding enough scrap drums and alternators, that would
be up to you!
Obviously, it would be possible to BUILD Savonius Rotors that were larger, say 3 times taller and 3 times wider, so that a single
rotor could provide all the electricity for one battery. THEN you would only have ten of these buggers in your yard! Notice that
the single car alternator still has massive extra capacity. We would still be only charging at around 4 amperes (the equivalent of
eight of the 0.5 amp drumversions), and car alternators are generally rated at around 60 amperes. Yes, when you have a
storm and 30 mph winds, where (27 * 4) 108 amperes of charging could be available, you would be limited to the 60 amperes
that the alternator would allow, but that really only means that you could turn on even MORE lights when it is stormy!
There is one further issue to consider. Say that one of the Savonius rotors seizes up or falls over, or a belt breaks or falls off, or
an alternator fails. It would be good if you could know that! Otherwise, ONE of your batteries might no longer be charged and
might completely get drained. However, there are really simple solutions to this! One of the very simplest is to get 10 electronic
resistors of 100K value. Wire them in series, and across the entire 120 volt DC output of your system. Connect a wire from each
wire between batteries to the same wire between resistors. Add sensors, voltmeters, or assorted other things to monitor the
voltages between each pair of resistors. As long as everything was working right, the voltages should always stay very close to
0, 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, etc. IF any of the voltages got more than a volt away from those known values, you would know that
something was wrong in a battery, alternator or rotor. Simple, cheap and easy.
These comments have been focused on Savonius rotors made of old 55gallon drums, because they are so dirt cheap and
quick and easy to make. (See the WIND presentation in this Domain for detailed information.) But solar IS possible, especially if
and when solar PV panels get a lot cheaper and a lot more efficient. Also, if you have either a waterfall or a consistently flowing
creek or river accessible, that energy could also provide the power to drive the alternators. If you have an outdoor woodfired
boiler, it could produce steam to drive small turbines to drive the alternators. If you approach this all creatively, you can find
good solutions to nearly anything!
Personally, I like the idea of making an INDEPENDENT set of wiring inside the house for 120 volt DC. The same SIZE of wire,
14 gauge or 12 gauge, is fine, but I recommend getting some different color wire, such as pink or blue so no one would ever
confuse it with the house's 110 AC wiring! Each room could have two separate ceiling lights, possibly in a single device, one
being a bulb that was supplied by 110 AC and the other bulb that was supplied by the 120 DC. Wiring the light switches might be
an adventure, but certainly easily solved.
There are two new concepts which I have been experimentally researching during 2010. One is actually a variant of a Solarto
Electricity system which I had invented by 2001 and which I was in the process of building a fullscale demo of, in April 2003. I
had made small demos earlier that could produce MEASUREABLE electricity, but this was intended to provide enough electricity
for around twenty neighbor's houses. I thought that something like that might be seen as desirable! I was incorrect about that! A
parttime bureaucrat in that tiny town informed me that IF he saw any evidence that I was proceeding on building that demo, he
would immediately Condemn and then Demolish my house! And I soon learned that no one would stop him from doing that if he
decided to! So rather than the neighbors getting free electricity for the past eight years (something like $250,000 they have
therefore paid for electricity that I felt pretty sure I could have already given them!) Sort of funny, isn't it?
In any case, during 2010, I have discovered a variant of that earlier device, one that has the performance of my 2003 system
but which is remarkably cheap and simple to build in around two hours! I may soon be living in a tent on vacant property, if that
strange man Nolan has his way in Demolishing my house to punish me for challenging his infinite authority, but I am currently
providing the necessary instructions for that new device, like I have done for several other useful systems. It is at Making
Electricity from Solar, Wind, Water, More mbsoft.com/public3/electzzz.html My demos of this are constantly impressing even
me, and THAT is not very easy to do!
The second concept was briefly mentioned above. It seems certain to be something that will require years of research and
refinement before it could ever be used on a practical basis. As a young man, I chased at least half a dozen tornadoes, as I was
impressed with the power they contained. Above and in a linked webpage, my fascination has persisted and between 2000 and
2009, I learned how the physics of tornadoes operates, and even got up enough nerve to create a few dozen of them (REALLY
little, very CONTROLLED ones!) I proved to myself that there seems some potential there when I kept a tiny tornado spinning
for around two continuous hours (in my basement!). Being practical, I do not see that the tornado concept has any realistic
chance of providing significant electricity before the year 2020 or so, or maybe even later yet. But it is the sort of thing that
intrigues me!
My Approach to Electricity Community

There is actually a wonderful new approach regarding capturing the power in wind and converting it to electricity. It is
NOT in building giant towers and having enormous windmill blades spinning on top of them, at $15 million and more per shot. It
is also not in the very smallscale systems that some people get talked into buying from persuasive salespeople! It is actually in
between!
It is a variation of the residentialscale Savonius Rotor approach, but with several sophistications added in for greater
performance. And also built on a far larger scale!
It turns out that the NORMAL wind (at around 10mph speed) that passes through one square foot of area contains about
5.0 Watts of mechanical (kinetic) power in it. If through an area 100 feet tall and 2,000 feet wide, and including the effect that
windspeeds are higher at higher altitude and that the power in wind is proportional to the CUBE of the windspeed, that area of
wind contains around 4.4 megaWatts of wind power. It turns out that by building some large concrete walls, and a few other
simple devices, a reliable 1.2 megaWatts of electricity (and usually much more) can be captured from this area of wind.
THAT is about the amount of electricity that roughly one thousand modern homes USE NOW!
A local business or bank would need to agree to put up around $1.8 million dollars for construction. Nearly half of that will be
paid to about 100 LOCAL construction workers in building the concrete walls! About onethird of the total cost will be spent on
buying and trucking in a lot of sand and gravel and Portland Cement with which to mix the concrete (onsite).
At a common cost of electricity today, 15 cents per kiloWatthour (nearly half of which is often Delivery fees and taxes), with
really constant wind, that amount of electricity might be sold for around $1.7 million EACH YEAR! In a year, or certainly before
two full years, the ENTIRE FACILITY would have paid for itself in profits from the electricity produced! (NONE of the giant wind
farms can even say if or when they will ever be able to be a profitable business! And they concede that dependence on
many tower windmills will RAISE the cost of electricity a LOT!)
In addition, it turns out that in 1992, the US Government initiated a Program called the Production Tax Credit (PTC) which is
now 2.0 cents credit for every kiloWatthour produced for the first ten years of operation. Even if all the electricity produced
was given away for free, this credit can be about $210,000 for each of the ten years, in other words ENTIRELY paying for the
entire $1.8 million construction cost of the whole facility!
In addition, such LOCAL projects in each small town could encourage and inspire local businesses and local banks to again get
back into their normal operations! If only 10,000 towns decided to each do this, each hiring 100 construction workers in
the process, you might notice that is a MILLION NEW JOBS, all of which are goodpaying and fulltime! Not bad, eh?
(This was first fully Engineered in 2008)
This system is presented at: Tower Windmills and Electricity, Modest Efficiency Practical LargeScale WindGenerated
Electricity (Community, a thousand homes) (June 2007)
Heating the House

There are traditional ways of heating a home without needing fossil fuels. Fireplaces have been used for centuries but they are
generally worthless as they generally lose so much heat up the chimney that their MAXIMUM overall efficiency (of the energy
that was in the wood being burned) is commonly only around 11%, or around 18% for factorybuilt fireplaces that have some air
passages in them. Our JUCA F9A unit (beginning in 1975) was the only real exception to that which we know of, with its 65%
overall efficiency.
There are many brands of woodstoves which now have decent efficiencies. The older Potbelly and Ben Franklin stoves only had
around 25% efficiency, but modern airtight woodstoves are often above 60% efficiency (although they brag about even higher
numbers in carefully controlled tests). Unfortunately, the airtight woodstoves have two enormous problems. The first is that by
forcing a fire to try to burn without sufficient oxygen, it cannot burn very well and that both tends to create pollution and creosote
and also has lower efficiency as a result. The second is that the price of nearly any of the quality airtights is over $3,000, and
they are all really tiny products (which was necessary for their airtight products to pass government pollution testing), making it
difficult for an owner to ever haul and burn enough wood to even pay for the woodstove! (That amortization thing again raises
its head! Partly due to the tiny firebox not being able to burn enough wood to make using it very worthwhile, and partly because
many owners tend to stop using it after one winter of enthusiastic use!) Again, the only exception to this that we are aware of
was the (NONairtight) JUCA B3B/B3A woodstove, which, since 1973 had an overall seasonal efficiency of around 81%, and
which was actually a central furnace which happens to burn wood. However, the JUCA units had a disadvantage in that they all
use rather large and powerful blowers to spread the heat throughout a house. That is normally not a disadvantage, except when
the electricity for the blower must be generated onsite! The JUCA woodstoves were invented in 1973. (A link to the JUCA web
site is in the links at the end of this presentation.)
Therefore, far better than any of the above is the HeatGreen 3a unit which YOU can build with around $200 of common local
materials! (Some day there will be an HG 4a unit!) This system is unique in NOT having any flame or fire! It allows waste
organic materials (cut grass, leaves, weeds, crop residues, etc) to NATURALLY decompose, which happens to release amazing
amounts of energy, which this technology then efficiently captures. It still boggles my mind that the cut lawn grass and leaves
and other organic residue from a single acre of land ABSORBS around 170,000,000 Btus of sunlight in the process of
photosynthesis in making those materials, which then all must be RELEASED because of the Conservation of Energy! So that
single acre calmly and quietly releases around 170,000,000 Btus of heat energy during the year, while your house likely only
needs a supply of maybe 50,000,000 Btus for the entire winter! Duh? Entirely GREEN, too! The operation of an HG 3a seems to
be an acquired skill, but once it is mastered, the operation commonly releases more than 95% of the chemical energy in the
organic materials that are put into it to decompose. That is tremendously better than any woodstove or fireplace! (This was
invented in 2007) (This system was offered to Europe, the European Union, and the government of the Ukraine in 2007, and
then to dozens of leaders in the Ukraine in 2008, although no one then seemed interested in enabling homeowners to keep
their houses warm, when the Russian supplies of natural gas were shut off those two times.) Two webpages are important
regarding that device, the first of which explains what it is and why it works, at:
Alternative GREEN Furnace NonFossilFueled Brief Discussion HeatGreen A NonFossilFueled Home Heating
Furnace System (March 2007) (biodecomposition)
The second contains all the instructions to build one!:
Alternative GREEN Furnace NonFossilFueled Construction HighPerformance HeatGreen Home Heating System
Version 3a (Construction) (March 2007) (biodecomposition)
We have yet other nonfossilfuel approaches to heating a house and its hot water. One is lowtech and the other is highertech!
Using Solar Heat to ENTIRELY heat a House or Hot water or Both

The lowtech approach involves duplicating the effect of the interior of a closed black car in a parking lot on a hot Summer day,
where extremely hot air is created, but here on a much larger scale. We describe a variety of ways to do this, with the simplest
being essentially like the structure of a blackpainted hotairballoon chamber, along with a large fan or blower. During hours
that the sun is shining, the air inside the balloon chamber gets hot and is then immediately transferred into a very large heat
storage chamber (which we hide underground and call the SubBasement heat storage). We describe a system where a
single day of bright winter Sun can collect and store enough heat for an entire month of heating a mediumsized
house near Chicago. Again, this is all a lowtech approach and system, so it is not very expensive but it might also not be
viewed as being very sophisticated! (The subbasement CAN be moderately expensive to build.) Neighbors might NOT be
impressed! Still, it heats the house without needing any fossil fuels or heating bills!
Solar Heating LowTech Active System for Buildings and Water (April 2007)
Heat and Cool a House (hidden) (1977, Nov. 2000)
Finally, in a more sophisticated way, and highertech, if you do not want to have to carry grass and leaves to put into a HG 3a
for heating, there is an alternative, but it is somewhat more expensive to have. It is the NorthWarm wholehouse 100% solar
heating system. It was invented and fully Engineered in 1978 and 1979. There are two Versions. The first is most efficient,
where the house is NEWLY built with the Version 1 system intimately being part of its structure: (We are confident that a Version
1 would be able to ENTIRELY solar heat a home for the entire winter in most locations in the southern half of Alaska, and
certainly nearly anywhere else.)
Solar Heated House (1979)

The Version 2 is a more limited variation of Version 1, for EXISTING houses, where a separate twocargaragesized out
building must be built and with underground heat tunnels between that structure and the existing house.
NorthWarm SolarHeated House Version 2 (1979)

The Version 1 of the NorthWarm system is so efficient and so effective that it INCLUDES an air conditioning system as part of
Version 1! That air conditioning system has been made available to the public (for free) beginning late in 2000, and it is the Free
A/C system discussed below.
Chilean Miner Inspired Idea!

This concept is probably too expensive and difficult to do, but it certainly is intriguing! During the Summer of 2010, the Chilean
miners endured a constant temperature down in their mine of around 95°F. This was due to the fact that the Earth has a lot of
radioactive material in its Core, and the heat from all that radioactive decay gradually makes its way up through the Earth's
rocks to escape at the surface. The Chilean miners confirmed that at around 2500 feet deep, all the rock is around 95°F. So this
idea would be to bore TWO relatively large diameter boreholes (a foot in diameter seems sufficient) below your house down to a
depth of around 3500 feet. You would use a conventional furnace blower to force air DOWN one of those boreholes which
would then force air to come back up through the second borehole. The house air would be next to rock that was around 120°F
for several minutes, and so the air would warm up to that temperature. So you would have a FOREVER supply of wonderfully
warm air available to your house's rooms, WITHOUT needing any fossil fuels or even any of the other stuff described here! The
ONLY downside to this idea is that you would need to rent really exotic equipment to drill such deep and large boreholes,
meaning your name probably would have to be Rockefeller!
Alternatively, if some spectacularly strong water pump could be obtained, two much smaller pipes might be sent down a single
borehole. The premise would be to pull water up that 3500foot deep well, and since that water was always at around 120°F,
just send the water through standard hydronic room radiators, to heat each room of a house, forever. The problems here, in
addition to the cost of the 3500foot borehole, are that the pump (at the bottom) would have to pump water at around 1700 PSI,
and that all the pipes would have to be extraheavy to withstand that pressure.
SelfHeated Bedroom!
There are MANY additional technologies which can be applied to solve the daily needs of people. Here is an example to
demonstrate that if you set your mind to finding solutions, YOU should be able to come up with some that will greatly benefit
your life and family!
Say that you have a bedroom which is ten feet square and eight feet tall, a little smaller than average, maybe, but it will be used
here for this example. That bedroom therefore has a TOTAL SURFACE AREA of 520 square feet (easily calculated). Now say
that you insulated the heck out of the walls, ceiling and floor of that bedroom, to somehow get everything up to R100 insulation.
(Most bedroom walls are not insulated at all, except for the walls that are exterior walls.) (You should note that R100 takes a
LOT of insulation! It is 20" thick of foam insulation, and even thicker fiberglass!) Now say that the average temperature of
adjacent rooms is left to cool during the night (unheated, to save money on heating bills) and they drop to around 45°F during
the night. And you like to have your bedroom at a cozy 70°F, even warmer than most people do. We can calculate the total heat
loss of that bedroom from these figures! It is the total surface area times the temperature differential divided by the Rfactor of
the insulation. In our case, this is 520 * (70 45) / 100, which is about 130 Btu/hour.
It turns out that the human body, when asleep, commonly burns up around 80 Calories per hour, which converts to about 320
Btu/hour.
If that bedroom had been absolutely sealed tight, the (one) human body inside it during the night would be GIVING OFF around
320 Btu/hr, while the room was only LOSING around 130 Btu/hr! (due to the incredible levels of insulation installed surrounding
it). This is actually the EXACT same reason that a sleeping bag works to keep you warm in any climate!
You can also see that these calculations show that even if the adjacent rooms were at below zero temperatures, that one
human body would STILL be able to keep the room as cozy as desired!
There IS a disadvantage in this system! The heating source (the one body) has such low heat output that at the START of a
night, the room could take some time to warm up, because the air in the room and all the objects within it must all be warmed up
as well. Again, when you FIRST get into a sleeping bag, you can be cold for a minute or two, but then become toasty warm fairly
soon. In this case, we need to heat up a LOT more mass of materials to get the whole room warmed! And also, IF a door is
opened where really cold air was able to fill the room, it would again require some time before all that air was again heated to
the desired temperature.
I have tried this and it works! Amazingly well! But I actually then modified my experiments to involve the equivalent of a canopy
bed, where the delay of warmth was then rather minimal in getting the air inside the canopy chamber and the bed warmed, just
a few minutes, where then I would loosen the canopy walls once I became toasty in bed, where the room then gradually
warmed during the night.
One WONDERFUL aspect of this is that IN THE MORNING, I always woke up to a wonderfully warm bedroom, even
though it was technically unheated and even when the outdoor temperature was below zero! LEAVING the cozy bedroom to
go to a rather cold kitchen, was a different matter!
Note: It is NOT a good idea to SEAL such a bedroom, because during the night you consume oxygen from the air, and you don't
want to cause any situation where you might not have sufficient oxygen in the air you were breathing. In fact, THAT is why we
used the parameters we did, where the heat being released by the body is nearly three times what is actually necessary to heat
the room, such that a MODERATE amount of air circulation can be allowed through the room. Again, it is NOT a good idea to
get ENTIRELY inside a sleeping bag, but to arrange it so that your nose is able to use air which is outside the sleeping bag!
Otherwise, you could easily use up too much of the oxygen inside the sleeping bag and possibly have a health emergency
result.
A Variant regarding House Air Circulation
Many years back, I realized that the electric fans used for cooling down modern automobile radiators can circulate an enormous
amount of air. A bonus to me was that they used only 12volt electricity, and I was surprised to learn that they only used a few
amperes of current. So, of course, I decided to experiment! Instead of using a 12volt car battery, I used a 6volt battery. THIS
WAS GREAT! At half the voltage, there was also half the current, so it only drew 1/4 as much electricity, which commonly turned
out to be around 8 Watts. The fan spins slower, and is very close to silent, while moving large quantities of air. For comparison
sake, YOUR central furnace probably has a SQUIRRELCAGE BLOWER which can force air through narrow air ducts in
quantities that your air conditioner requires in summer, and no one ever told you that that blower generally requires more than A
THOUSAND WATTS of electricity whenever it is running (which is most of the time)! So, in addition to you paying for expensive
fossil fuels as heating bills, you also pay significant amounts more for the electricity used by that large and strong blower! First,
you need to know that a FAN cannot generate the PRESSURE needed to drive air through a duct system, only a BLOWER can
do that. But people learned decades ago that there are certainly times when such blowers are not actually necessary, and
Ceiling Fans are popular in many houses. In any case, my usage of several car radiator fans, operating on six volts, is
essentially like using socalled portable window fans to circulate the air in a room. I find it to be surprisingly good a way to
provide excellent comfort, without having to constantly run a 1,000 Watt furnace blower to do the same thing! Not only do I avoid
the 15 cents per hour ($3 per day or $100 per month) that the furnace blower uses up in electric bills, but I even have the
flexibility of using either AC or DC electricity to circulate my house air! (Actually, that above statement is not precisely true. The
electric Utility STILL continues to charge a monthly Delivery fee just because their electricity lines are connected (which I choose
to do as a backup system). And so they have the excuse to charge me a Delivery charge, even when the monthly total of
electricity had been zero, and then all the taxes kick in on that. So I still get a monthly electric bill, and will until I feel confident
enough about never needing them again to have their powerline disconnected from the house. Similarly, I pay around a $15 per
month Delivery charge for natural gas, or around $180 each year, even though I have gone entire years not using virtually any
natural gas! Since I happen to live in the middle of a small city, I have chosen to continue to pay those Delivery fees. If I was still
living on a lonely farm, I certainly would already have had the electricity shut off. I had already gone more than ten years with an
absolutely full LP gas tank (19731983) due to heating the large farmhouse with the JUCA SuperFireplace I had invented for it.
but, I guess, for now, I am still willing to give Utility companies a modest amount of money for products and services that they do
not actually provide. Maybe that is because I am pretty old now and have different attitudes!
Heating Domestic Hot Water for a house

Generally, people concede to spending several hundred dollars every year to buy either natural gas or electricity to heat water
in a hot water heater, and to store it there. The hot water inside the storage tank is constantly and forever LOSING heat through
the thin insulation in the walls around the tank. However much hot water you actually use, you PAY FOR far more!
So a variant of the HG 3a device is designed to only have enough capability to heat the domestic hot water and not also heat
the whole house. The standard HG 3a also has the capability of having a long coil of large diameter water pipe inside it to be
able to do both jobs at once.
However, there are MANY ways to try to heat domestic hot water! There are many products sold which try to use solar energy
to heat the tank, but they tend to have very minimal effectiveness. They are sort of variants of the black plastic bag you can buy
for camping where you hang it to get heated in sunlight so one person can later take a shower. They WORK, but with very
limited capability. There are products sold as swimming pool heaters which are similar, and which can have some value, but it is
limited.
There are a LOT of ways to heat a MODERATE amount of domestic hot water! Some small tanks have been manufactured and
sold to go inside a woodstove or fireplace, which work, but many were poorly designed and they have the capability of bursting
due to extreme high steam pressures which can develop in such environments. Such devices must have several safety valves
on them to release excessive pressure.
Here is another approach. I have never heard of anyone trying to do this, but it certainly has plenty of capability of heating
domestic hot water for a family. It is actually based on an OPPOSITE application of a characteristic of Ideal Gases of what is
described below for providing food refrigeration, food freezing, and the earliest (1846) form of building air conditioning. In this
case, the SAME device is used, but the underground cooling is not used, only the heating effects of compressing air. See the
animation graphic below of the air conditioning system. It is a simple and cheap Savonius rotor windmill driving a simple large
rigid piston in cylinder to MODERATELY COMPRESS natural air, in this case into HALF the volume. The ideal gas laws show
that when natural air which starts out at a deep soil 52°F temperature is COMPRESSED into half its volume, the air HEATS UP
to around 215°F temperature! We picked the deep soil temperature as the LOWEST temperature of available air to draw into
the cylinder. If the weather happened to be warmer, then the temperatures would be higher still.
The device for this purpose would NOT have the outlet pipe underground, and indeed, it would need to have very good (R20 or
better) thermal insulation around it. We would WANT it to get up near that 215°F and to STAY there! So we would now have
very hot air inside a long 4" diameter pipe, which has excellent insulation surrounding it. We then put a 3/4" copper tubing inside
the middle of that hot air, and send pure water INSIDE that copper pipe. That water would gradually HEAT UP from the
extremely hot air surrounding it! Presto, a supply of hot water for any faucet or shower or bathtub!
WHY does this work? Well, you have probably seen an air compressor. The head and block of that compressor has cooling fins
all around it, but it still gets so hot that you can seriously burn your finger by touching it. That heat is ENTIRELY due to the air
getting hotter as it gets compressed! Specifically, the actual Ideal Gas Law which applies for air when it is being adiabatically
compressed, is T 2 / T 1 = (V1 / V2)0.4. Temperatures are measured in absolute scales. So you can confirm that if we compress
the air to HALF the original volume, this simple formula shows the 215°F resulting temperature we mentioned above.
The actual temperature you would get depends on diameter of pipes and if you are using a storage tank and other such things,
but the point is that a temp of 215°F is surprisingly easy to produce, and WITHOUT needing any fire or flame! Down below, we
describe how to overcome the effects of the volume of a storage tank and the piping.
The QUANTITY of hot water depends on how long the pipe is and how much copper tubing is inside it. It MIGHT even be
possible to combine this water heater with a standard hot water TANK to then have a supply of 40 gallons or whatever of hot
water for reliable usage. It also strikes me as possible to have each of the hot water pipes to kitchen and bathroom faucets fed
by separate coaxial heater tubes, so that INSTANT hot water would come out of any faucet. (I HATE waiting for the heated
water from a tank to have to run through the house piping to get to where I am waiting for it!)
It might also be possible to create that heat due to the air compression, use it to heat water up, and THEN send that
compressed air down into an underground tube or tank (as described below regarding food refrigeration) and therefore get yet
another benefit from the simple device! Cool?
Yet another possibility is to focus on the compressionheating effect to create WARM AIR to try to heat a house! I will probably
try that in the process of doing these other things, but I personally doubt that the power that can be captured by a Savonius
Rotor would be sufficient enough to do significant heating of a room or house. Heating domestic hot water? Easy! Doing food
refrigeration and freezing? Easy. Bigger scale energy needs require greater amounts of energy to start with, per the
Conservation of Energy!
One point in ALL of these discussions is that the TRADITIONAL ways of doing things are NOT the ONLY way to approach
solving needs! Apparently, no one before has ever thought about using WIND POWER to directly heat domestic hot water! Why
not? Because they were not creative enough! AND they were spoiled by having endless supplies of cheap fossil fuels to use up!
My point is that if YOU apply a lot of creativity, you may find other solutions to any or all of these human needs. Do it!
Providing Safe Water for the House

For European and North American homes, please see the presentations at: Pure Distilled Water for Emergencies when Wells
are Unusable and Pure Desalinated Seawater Distilled Water for OffGrid Residents.
for the explanation and simple plans to build an inexpensive system provide plenty of safe (distilled) drinking water. If there is
NOT available any well or river or other source of water around, the systems can usually provide around 10 gallons per day in
US climates. The systems are easily enhanced to provide larger quantities of water. If rainwater is collected, it can be
processed. Also contaminated river water can, or most other supplies of water, to provide as much as 250 gallons of
ABSOLUTELY PURE (distilled) water per day. And if you happen to be near an ocean, the second link above is the same
system used to desalinate seawater (or nearly any other source of water, such as gray water or even sewage), to provide
absolutely pure water to drink or bathe in.
When people try to go offgrid, they often do not realize that if they need to have a deep well drilled, the pump then necessary
uses a LOT of electricity in raising that water a thousand feet or whatever! On top of that fact is that often the giant trucks that
carry the well drilling equipment often cannot get to really remote locations, and huge extra charges are then involved in boring
the well in the first place. These systems presented here do not require boring a well or even having a powerful pump. They
actually remove humidity from the atmosphere, in amazing quantities!
(This system was invented and Engineered in 2007. We had previously invented a rather different system to provide pure
drinking water using any source of water, whether it was seawater, graywater, polluted river water or anything else, in 2004.) (It
has been amazing that UNICEF and OXFAM and the other giant NGOs have had absolutely no interest in this and the earlier
devices for this purpose. When the Boxing Day Tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people, and eliminated safe water
supplies for millions more, we and several similar small companies OFFERED to provide FREE SYSTEMS which could have
immediately been sent to the damaged villages. We (and the other companies) were told to SELL the equipment we had and
then to send them the money from those sales, so that THEY could then decide to allocate the money to buy what they, the
"experts", decided was needed. Bureaucracy often drives me crazy, and that was a prime example. Several of our companies
had systems which were ready to be crated up to be shipped to Indonesia, where the people there would then have had good
access to excellent water within a few days. Instead, UNICEF and OXFAM bought bottled water from companies in the US for
several dollars per bottle, paid a fortune to ship them around the world to get there, and then handed them out for a few days,
until their supplies of bottled water ran out. The local people then had NO good supplies of water for at least a year afterward,
and many still do not, even several years later. Why can't bureaucrats comprehend common sense?)
Air Conditioning the House

One simple and inexpensive method of air conditioning, IF you do NOT have an extremely hot climate, is with the "Free A/C"
system which we have offered since late 2000. It was actually first invented and fully Engineered in 1979 as part of the
NorthWarm 100% fully solar heated house, but which was then offered to the public in late 2000 to try to offer to help with
California's electricity shortages.
Home Air Conditioning (1978, December 2000)

A guideline is the temperature of the deep soil (four feet deep) in any location. There are two easy ways to determine this
number. One is by adding the day and night average winter temperatures and the day and night average summer temperatures
and dividing by four to get an overall average temperature for that climate. The deep soil will be very near that temperature. The
second method is to pump some water up from a well and measure its temperature, which should be close to that same
number. If that number is lower than 60°F (16°C), the Free A/C should work fine, including removing humidity from the air. If it is
up to about 70°F (21°C), it can provide moderate cooling but probably no dehumidification, meaning a dehumidifier would be
needed OR the Hot Climate device below could be used. If the deep soil is above 70°F (21°C), the Hot Climate device will likely
be a good idea, although the Free A/C can still PARTIALLY cool down an extremely hot house or room, down to near the deep
soil temperature.
That presentation is VERY long and comprehensive, in order to include all the necessary information for understanding the
concept and the system and for actually building it for a few hundred dollars total cost. It essentially is a Technologically
Engineered version of a natural cave, where summer coolness is natural. However, in the realization that some people have
applications that are in peculiar climates or soils or the building is a giant tennis club complex, we made available a Technical
Packet of the Engineering data and equations. For that, from the start in November 2000, we have asked that a person give an
anonymous $250 to any worthy Charity such as a Soup Kitchen or Homeless Shelter or Food Bank or others. Amazingly, over
5,900 people have requested the Technical Packet so far! Assuming they all gave the requested gifts, that means that as a side
effect of this Free A/C, nearly $1,500,000 has been given to needy causes! Cool! In many ways!
A Variant Version for Hot Climates

A rather different system can be used in extremely hot climates, where the Free A/C does not perform very well because the
ground is not cool enough. It actually could be used anywhere on Earth! It still involves underground tubes, but also some
added components that enhance the effects. It is actually an application based on one of the first inventions of refrigeration
around 1844, by a guy named Gorrie. Some external power is necessary, which can be obtained from a simple and inexpensive
Savonius Rotor windmill or from flowing or falling water. Then there is some mechanism that acts as a low pressure air
compressor. Here is a drawing of the general arrangement. Many variations are possible.
Specifically, this drawing is for an EXTREMELY hot climate, where we chose a 4 PSIG pressure differential in order to produce
really cool air no matter how hot the air or building or ground is. Because of that relatively high pressure differential and the
large amount of cool air needed for air conditioning, this configuration would require a substantial amount of power, from the
wind or from a river or waterfall. In a less severe climate, or if less cooling boost is needed for the standard Free A/C, it might be
possible to change the crank offset to 1.9" instead of the 3.8" we chose here. That would create a lower pressure differential,
around 2 PSIG instead of the 4 PSIG we selected here, and also less air would be processed, making the power need from the
Savonius Rotor far less. For a climate where the soil is only moderately warmer than usable for the Free A/C, such a change, or
even less yet, might make sense. The basic construction would still be identical.
Artwork provided by Niranjan Boteju
(If you have taken a long time reading the above, this animation may have stopped working, and you might REFRESH your
browser to see it all working.)
This drawn example pumps about 1.5 cubic feet of air in each stroke, around 50 times per minute, so it would provide about 75
cubic feet of cool air per minute, not a lot but useful, because it can be quite cool. The maximum pressure that this arrangement
could produce (due to the ratio of the fraction of the drum volume at max and min, 32.5"/25.75") is around 4 PSIG. When air at
that pressure is released to atmospheric pressure (inside a house), it naturally expands and cools by about 41°F. That process
is technically called the JouleThompson Effect, an application of the Ideal Gas Law, where the air is throttled through a narrow
escape path. (You HAVE already seen this, big time, in using a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher! The CO2 inside the tank is at a
pressure, and essentially at room temperature. When you squeeze the release trigger, carbon dioxide is released through a tiny
throttle orifice. You have noticed both how COLD the escaping carbon dioxide it but also that white ice crystals form around the
orifice due to the amazingly cold escaping gas! We do NOT want or need the high pressures of such fire extinguishers, but the
concept is the same.
On a 120°F afternoon in India, and the deep soil temperature is 85°F, this system could fill an underground tank with some
SLIGHTLY compressed air (4 PSIG) which was first heated due to the compression but then cooled to 85°F due to contact with
the deep soil. When that compressed air gets released (inside a house, that JouleThompson Effect) that air can cool by an
additional 41°F, and that air arrives in the house as cool as 44°F. Since the air is at below 60°F, humidity condenses in that air
so that the house air is not only cooled but dehumidified, exactly what traditional air conditioners do!
A modest supply of air at 44°F can easily cool and dehumidify the air of one or two rooms in a very hot house on a 120°F
afternoon in India! Duplicate units or one of larger size and capacity could easily cool and dehumidify the air of ANY entire
house!
Notice that this is a RECIRCULATING system, where the house air is reused over and over. A popular habit in some countries
such as India is to use SinglePass Ventilation, where windows stay open and any cooling effect is immediately discarded, which
is extremely wasteful of cooling effect! All advanced Air Conditioning systems recirculate the house air, as does ours. Instead of
having to start with outdoor air at 120°F, it is far easier and more efficient to start with air from inside the house which may only
be at 95°F.
There is an extremely wide range of climates and house sizes for which this system might be used. If you choose to just make
something similar to this drawing, it will certainly work, but some Engineering calculations can be useful to make sure to build a
system which works GREAT!
Some numbers: The device as drawn processes 1.25 cubic feet of air every second, and compresses that air by 4 PSI or 576
pounds per square foot. Multiplying, we see that 720 ftlb/sec of mechanical power is involved. This can be converted to 1.3
horsepower or 980 watts of mechanical power. One PSI is equal to about 6900 nt/m2 (or Pascals) and 1.25 cubic feet of air is
equal to about 0.0354 m3. Multiplying 0.0354 * 6900 * 4 equals 977 Watts, confirming our numbers. A relatively large Savonius
Rotor would need to be built to capture this much wind power. At the other end of the system, we have 75 cfm of air or about
360 pounds of air per hour that is released to capture around 41°F temperature differential from the house's air. Air has a
thermal capacity of about 0.25 Btu/pound. Multiplying, this is around 4,000 Btu/hr of cooling. That is not an enormous amount
but it certainly could cool a room or two very well. If the deep soil is cooler than 85°F, the cooling performance can be much
greater.
The local average windspeed determines how much power there is in the wind's motion. You want to make sure that the
windmill is powerful enough to compress the air with the winds that are usually around! For example, in the US, a common
windspeed is around 10 mph, and that speed wind contains around 5 watts of power per square foot of wind area. This can
indicate how LARGE a Savonius rotor or other power source might be necessary. The pressure that the piston has to push
against and the area of the 22" piston and the rate at which the piston is moved, determine how much power is used in
compressing the air. In the process of compressing that air to this example 4 PSIG (in a standard adiabatic process), the Ideal
Gas Laws show that the air naturally heats up by around 42°F in temperature, up to about 127°F. Additional cooling power is
gained by then letting that selfwarmed compressed air cool off in the underground pipe and storage tank (down to around
85°F), and then we have already noted that releasing the pressure causes the air to drop down to around 44°F in being
released inside the house. You can see how it is possible to estimate how much air conditioning effect can be obtained just from
some math calculations!
I CHOSE the dimension of the crank offset of about 3.4" to set the 6.8" distance the piston moves back and forth inside the
drum cylinder. Note that the drum does NOT have a lid on the back side. I CHOSE the length of the connecting rod to set the
RATIO of the two volumes of air inside the drum cylinder (32.6" / 25.75"), to establish the (maximum) PRESSURE created and
therefore the added cooling effect when the partiallycooledbythedeepsoil compressed air is released into the house. I
strongly suggest doing a little simple math if you intend to change any of the dimensions shown here.
Please notice that BOTH of the two large pipes connected (toward the right in the drawing) are ALWAYS underground, in order
to gain cooling effects from the deep soil, and both go completely to the house and inside it. The INTAKE pipe draws hot air
from INSIDE the house, up near the ceiling, at say 95°F, which gets cooled to the deep soil temperature of 85°F in that first
(INTAKE) underground pipe. The compression in the drum cylinder causes that air to heat up to around 127°F. As that self
warmed air passes through the OUTLET underground pipe, it cools back down to around 85°F again, but it is now compressed.
There CAN be some additional benefit of burying a storage tank in that OUTLET pipe near the house, in order to give that air
some extra time to cool down to the deep soil, but that can depend on many variables. Once the OUTLET pipe is INSIDE the
house, it needs to be controlled by a pressure release throttling valve, which can also be a reduction in diameter of the pipe and
a solenoid valve. A wall thermostat could control that solenoid valve to then only release the very cool air when a room called for
it.
This hot climate A/C is actually a variant of the Refrigeration and Freezer system discussed below. This modified A/C system
was invented in 2008.
Air conditioning is a process that uses up a good deal of power (as you may have noted by the powerful compressor running
outside your house which eats up massive amounts of electricity). So the A/C version here is likely to require a larger Savonius
Rotor than old 55gallon drum which is adequate for the refrigeration or freezing usage, is likely not large enough for significant
A/C production. Below, we describe how simple changes can be made to change the crank throw and the connecting rod length
to greatly change the capacity and performance of this system.
Providing Refrigeration and a Food Freezer

These functions are very closely related to the A/C system just described, with essentially the same system being
built for all three (the third being the hot climate A/C just above). The only real differences is in dimensions of
components, and whether there is value in insulating or not insulating the pipes. This approach CAN even provide
comfortable air conditioning for ANYWHERE, even near the Equator!
The refrigeration system involves underground tubes, but also some added components that enhance the effects. It is actually
based on one of the first inventions of refrigeration around 1844, by a man named Gorrie. Some external power is necessary,
which is obtained from either a simple and inexpensive Savonius Rotor windmill or from flowing or falling water. Then there is
some mechanism that acts as a low pressure air compressor. Here is a drawing of the general arrangement. Many variations
are possible.
Artwork provided by Niranjan Boteju
This drawn example, which involves a SMALLER 20gallon steel drum, pumps about 0.6 cubic feet of air in each stroke, 30
times per minute, so it would provide about 18 cubic feet of cold enough air per minute for usage in a refrigerator. We will
consider an example here of deep soil at around 65°F. The maximum pressure that this arrangement could produce (due to the
ratio of the fraction of the drum volume at max and min, 18.6" / 14.7") is around 4 PSIG. When air at that pressure is released to
atmospheric pressure, by that JouleThompson Effect of releasing the pressure through a throttle valve, it drops by about 41°F.
No matter what the air temperature or deep soil temperature or house air temperature might be, air that is drawn FROM the
refrigerator box should not be above around 40°F. The deep soil temperature is generally of no use whatever for this INTAKE
air as it is already cooler than the deep soil is, as it likely would WARM the air up, just the reverse of what we want! Therefore,
we use SMALLER DIAMETER 2" PIPES for this (as compared with the A/C presented above) AND that INTAKE pipe needs to
have GOOD thermal insulation around it. The (slightly) compressed air gets released (inside a refrigerator box) and that air
can cool (as it expands) by an additional 41°F. After it is compressed to our 4 PSIG pressure and then cooled by contact with
deep soil, the compressed air should get down near 65°F and then drop by that additional 41°F due to the expansion, to arrive
in the refrigerator as cool as 24°F. That is cool enough to refrigerate food safely in the 35°F to 40°F temperature range.
The PRESSURE needed for the refrigeration is dependent on the SOIL TEMPERATURE. As a guide, if your soil temperature is
lower than about 65°F, 4 PSIG is fine. Up to 75°F, a longer connecting rod should be used so that a higher pressure of 5 PSIG
is created (nothing else needs to be changed). Up to about 85°F soil temperature, 6 PSIG should be created. The reason for
this difference is that the goal is to provide air at around 32°F, and that requires different amounts of differential cooling down
from the deep soil temperature that we have available in a specific location.
In other words, in nearly any location in the US, if you choose to just make something similar to this drawing, to create a max of
4 PSIG, it will certainly work well.
Some numbers: The device as drawn processes 0.6 cubic feet of air per stroke or 0.3 cubic feet every second, and compresses
that air by 4 PSI or 576 pounds per square foot. Multiplying, we see that 170 ftlb/sec of mechanical power is involved. This can
be converted to 0.3 horsepower or 230 watts of mechanical power. One PSI is equal to about 6900 nt/m2 (or Pascals) and 0.3
cubic feet of air is equal to about 0.0085 m3. Multiplying 0.0085 * 6900 * 4 equals 234 Watts, confirming our numbers. A
relatively commonsized Savonius Rotor could capture this much wind power. At the other end of the system, we have 18 cfm of
air or about 85 pounds of air per hour that is released INSIDE THE REFRIGERATOR BOX to capture around 41°F temperature
differential from the refrigerator's air. Air has a thermal capacity of about 0.25 Btu/pound. Multiplying, this is around 900 Btu/hr
of cooling. That is not an enormous amount but it certainly could cool a refrigerator full of food very well.
The local average windspeed is likely to be sufficient to produce the limited amount of cooling needed inside a refrigerator box,
as long as the door of the refrigerator was generally kept closed, so that a crude 55gallondrum Savonius Rotor should be
sufficient. The pressure that the piston has to push against and the area of the 18" piston and the rate at which the piston is
moved is moderate, and those parameters determine how much power is used in compressing the air. In the process of
compressing that air to 4 PSIG, the Ideal Gas Laws show that the air heats up by around 42°F in temperature, up from the initial
40°F to about 82°F. This newlywarmed compressed air is then cooled off in the underground pipe and storage tank (down to
around the local deep soil temperature, which is 52°F near Chicago but will be assumed to be 65°F in this example for a more
southerly location). So now we have a supply of air compressed to 4 PSIG which has cooled in the OUTLET pipe (and storage
tank, which might be an old hot water heater tank), which is NOT insulated such that it can COOL down to the soil temperature,
so the air drops to about the deep soil temperature of 65°F. We have already noted that releasing the pressure causes the air
to drop down by about 41°F, to around 24°F, in being released inside the refrigerator box.
I CHOSE the dimension of the crank offset of about two inches to set the 4" distance the piston moves back and forth inside the
drum cylinder. Note that the drum does NOT have a lid on the back side. I CHOSE the length of the connecting rod to set the
RATIO of the two volumes of air inside the drum cylinder (18.6" / 14.7"), to establish the (maximum) PRESSURE created and
therefore the additional cooling effect when the compressed air is released.
Notice that BOTH of the two pipes connected (toward the right in the drawing) are ALWAYS underground and both go
completely to the house and inside it. Also that the INTAKE pipe is wrapped with thermal insulation. The INTAKE pipe draws
relatively warm air (maybe 40°F) from INSIDE the upper part of the refrigerator box. The thermal insulation around the INTAKE
pipe keeps that somewhat cool air from being heated by the soil which is likely warmer than it is. The compression in the drum
cylinder causes that air to selfheat by the 42°F we have already discussed, up to around 82°F. As that selfwarmed air passes
through the OUTLET underground pipe, it cools back down to around 65°F of the deep soil again, but it is now compressed.
There CAN be some additional benefit of burying a storage tank, such as an old hot water heater tank, in that OUTLET pipe
near the house, in order to give that air some extra time to cool down to the deep soil temperature, but that need can depend
on many variables and many locations will not need it. Once the OUTLET pipe is INSIDE the house, it needs to be controlled by
a solenoid valve, which can also be a reduction in diameter of the pipe. The existing temperature thermostat inside the
refrigerator could then automatically control that solenoid valve to then only release the very cool (24°F) air when the
refrigerator thermostat called for it.
A common 55gallon drum Savonius Rotor should be adequate for the refrigeration or freezing usage, for most climates.
For all of these drumcompressor systems, the ACTUAL pressure you will create will be less than we have calculated! How
much less depends on specifically what you build! Here is why. We used the ratio of the volume INSIDE the drum under the
piston to calculate the pressure ratio and therefore the maximum final pressure. That is not actually the case! The OUTLET
flapper valve does not actually separate the volume of the drum from the volume of the pipe connected to it, including any
storage tank you might include, all the way up to the solenoid valve that can release the air pressure. Fortunately, there is an
extremely simple way to correct for this! You could INCREASE the dimension of the crank on the Savonius Rotor shaft (and you
will then also have to change the connecting rod length to cause the RETRACTED position of the piston to be the same as
before). These are simple changes which you could make at a later date if you so decided that they were necessary. There are
only two concerns about doing this. (1) If you are using a drum which has ridges for structural strength, you can't have the
piston try to pass by such a ridge during its movement, both for the air leakage which would occur and for mechanical problems
of the piston possibly getting stuck in that groove! (2) If you use a storage tank that is LARGER in volume than the drum
compressor is AND you operate it to produce a high pressure, the movements of the piston might get very extreme.
Note that TWO or more of these systems could feed compressed air into the same buried storage tank and house. Regarding
providing Air Conditioning, this might be a simpler solution than in building a giant Savonius and drumcompressor!
Construction Details
You probably need to make at least one of those Savonius rotor windmills. It MUST be a RECIRCULATING system, where air
from inside the refrigerator is cooled and sent back into it, much like how conventional refrigerators work.
For doing the actual calculations, you would need to use ABSOLUTE temperatures, based on 459°F. Therefore, a deep soil
temperature of 65°F [like for Alabama] can also be described as being 524°R, in a temperature system based on absolute
zero).
You have dug a pit a few feet deep where you have securely mounted the (horizontal) steel drum and also the mounting
supports for the Savonius Rotor windmill, completely below the surface of the ground! We create a crude lowpressure air
compressor, and can even use a disk of plywood for the piston, which we then surround with weatherstripping to reduce air loss
past the piston. Our crude compressor only has two Strokes, Intake and Compression/Exhaust.
You will then simply dig at least one trench to bury maybe 100 feet of the appropriate diameter PVC or metal pipe. (If you are
going to do A/C, you may need to dig several [parallel] trenches and put several PVC pipes in, to be able to provide the amount
of airflow necessary for cooling a whole house.)
The entrance of that/those pipe(s) is/are connected (underground) to the house/refrigerator air. So step one is to COOL the
(house) air (or NOT HEAT the refrigerator air!) in the (first) underground tube(s) down to near the deep soil
temperature
The exit of that/those PVC pipe(s) is/are connected to send the air past the INTAKE flapper valve inside the drumcylinder. As
the piston recedes inside the cylinder, it causes a suction effect which causes the flapper valve to be pulled open, allowing the
incoming air to enter. The Flapper Valve can be as simple as an eightinch square piece of thin rubber such as from an
automobile inner tube, with two pieces of thin aluminum metal attached to it. A STRIP of aluminum is BOLTED to the drum end,
ABOVE the pipe entrance, squeezing the flexible rubber between. This allows the rubber piece to HANG FREE and block off the
opening due to gravity. The other piece of aluminum is mounted to the BACK of the hanging area, possibly with strong
adhesive, and being a CIRCLE of maybe 6" diameter. The purpose of this piece is to keep the rubber FLAT, so it would not get
blown open by air pressure! An additional RING of rubber might be attached (by adhesives) AROUND THE OPENING in the
drum end, to even better ensure airtightness of the flapper valve when it is closed.
The Savonius windmill, spinning up above at around one time per second, turns the simple crankshaft lever. The two Flapper
Valves then automatically open and close as necessary. The piston never moves at even walking speed, so friction and wear
and tear against the drum walls is minimal.
This then creates slightly compressed air, which gets sent into the second pipe. The pressure begins very low, but as long as
there is wind to blow, pressure would keep being added into the OUTLET pipe (and buried storage tank), as long as air was
being provided at least as fast as it was being removed for usage. Here is the first really important part here. In the process of
compressing air, it heats up! This is a natural situation which always occurs. So Step two is in compressing the air in the
drum/compressor, to CAUSE it to heat up like that! Air is pretty close to what is called an Ideal Gas regarding such things.
This is technically called an isentropic adiabatic compression, because it does not change the Entropy of the air in the process
of the compression. There are simple and standard equations (provided below) that can calculate the temperature the
(compressed) air gets up to, due to this effect of the adiabatic compression.
Step Three is in sending that selfwarmed air through a second underground tube, to again let it cool down to the
deep soil temperature.
When you RELEASE that pressure, the same formulas apply again! But this time, since we are releasing the pressure, the air
COOLS DOWN. This is the fourth and final step in the process, where cool or cold air is produced!
FYI, the science of the description above is nearly EXACTLY what happens in your home A/C system and your own refrigerator
and freezer! We are just describing very lowtech ways of accomplishing each of those steps, without having to use Freon or
Ammonia or other refrigerants. In case you are curious, before Freon was discovered, all refrigeration and freezing equipment
used either ammonia (which is a very dangerous material and not like the very diluted stuff you use at home) or compressedair
refrigeration. So this is not as though we are recommending some bizarre concept! It is actually generally considered an
OBSOLETE concept, as THIS concept of refrigeration was actually invented in 1844 by a guy named John Gorrie! Compressed
air refrigeration was used fairly broadly for the rest of the 1800s and into the 1900s, but when Ammonia refrigeration was
developed, it rapidly took over the bulk of the refrigeration market. Unfortunately, when such Ammonia equipment would fail and
release concentrated Ammonia gas, people tended to die! So safer substitutes, generally the family of Freon refrigerants, were
invented! (Freon or ammonia or any other refrigerant has one advantage over our type of airbased refrigeration. During the
phase just after the compression, the refrigerant CHANGES STATE from being a compressed gas to becoming a liquid. The
heat exchanger which does this is therefore called the Condenser! That changeofstate involves a great deal of energy being
removed from the refrigerant, far more than just cooling a gas or liquid can give up. This then allows GREATER refrigeration
effect when that compressed [and cooled] liquid refrigerant later has its pressure released.) Our theme here is that YOU can
accomplish the SAME refrigeration or freezing processes with a lowtech crude cylinder airpump that you can make. Yes, you
will be using Gorrie's technology of 160 years ago, but it is certainly WELL proven! And it works excellently! You are free to
spend $700 on a conventional refrigerator that forever uses a lot of electricity! Gorrie's and our approach is DIRT cheap (pun
intended!) and it uses very little external power, which a crude Savonius rotor windmill can provide. Ditto for Third World
people who have no available electricity and do not have $700 to buy a new refrigerator anyway! Finally, you may have
thought ahead and considered using a furnace BLOWER or a FAN to do the compression. Won't work! Blowers and fans are
great at MOVING air, but they are lousy at COMPRESSING it. Some (expensive) Industrial blowers can develop 1 PSI or 2 PSI
pressure, but we will see below that that is not enough for our needs.
If you have ever used a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher, you know that frost forms around the outlet, and the valve can even
freeze up and clog! It is NOT because carbon dioxide is naturally cold or anything! But it was COMPRESSED when it was put
into that fire extinguisher. When that pressure is released during use, the rapidly expanding carbon dioxide that comes out can
become extremely cold, due to this exact same Ideal Gas effect we are discussing here (in our final phase of the releasing of
the pressure).
Food Freezer
This is EXACTLY the same device, but the connecting rod would be made longer! That shifts the position of the piston farther to
the right in the drum cylinder, which increases the maximum pressure which it can produce. In general, it is necessary to create
about two additional PSIG of pressure for food freezing than for food refrigeration. Referring to our Food Refrigeration system
discussed above, if we make the connecting rod around six inches longer, the piston is shifted over to the right about six inches.
We would need to avoid the areas where the drum has ridges, but other than that, the system discussed above could then
create around 8 PSIG of pressure.
(For now, we are still discussing here a moderate climate where the deep soil is around 65°F [like maybe Alabama]). Say that
we only compress the air to just around 8 PSIG. This is REALLY easy to do! (With just your mouth, you can provide around 2
PSIG pressure to blow up balloons, etc, so 8 PSIG is a very minimal pressure to be producing with the drumcompressor.). After
this minimal compression, the air only rises to around 599°R or 140°F. This rather warm air goes through the second
underground tube system and is cooled back down to near the 65°F of the deep soil. Remember that our air cannot
CONDENSE, but it accomplishes the same effect in that second underground tube as a Condenser does with a refrigerant.
When we later release that pressure, we find that the air gets cooled by around 65°F. For this climate being discussed, this
would result in air at 0°F, which would be excellent for sending into a food freezer.
But in a hotter climate, as in an African jungle where the ground temperature is near 100°F, this would result in air at around
35°F, suitable for sending into a refrigeration box, not cold enough to create ice, but still plenty cold enough to preserve food.
For that extremely hot African climate, a slightly higher compression would be necessary to provide freezing of food. We will
consider a variety of other climates and applications below.
You might see from this example that you may want to select a specific pressure for the system depending on the climate that is
present and the application you intend to accomplish. That pressure can be established by choosing how much air you will run
through this system to compress, AND by how fast you will be releasing that compressed air at the other end to produce the
desired cooling effect. It NEVER hurts to overdesign a system, where it either does or can provide more compressed air at
higher pressure than you actually need, because you can always control the actual cooling effect by adjusting the rate that air is
released in the refrigerated chamber. Below are the formulas and a bunch of examples to guide you regarding this stuff.
Refrigerator
For refrigeration in our example climate, you COULD simply allow a smaller amount of the 0°F air into a refrigeration box, but
you could also use a lower pressure for the system. If you used 4.5 PSIG pressure, the compressed air warms to around
105°F, you cool that down in the second underground tube system, and when you release that pressure, the air drops by
around 37°F down to around 28°F, perfect for sending into a refrigeration box.
Air Conditioning
If your only interest was in providing moderate air conditioning, you might choose 3 PSIG pressure. The compressed 85°F air
from the house warms by about 24°F to around 109°F due to being compressed in the drumcylinder, and then drops back
down to the 65°F deep soil temperature in the outlet tube, and then drops down an additional around 26°F when the pressure is
released, down to around 39°F. That is low enough (below 60°F) to cause nearly all the water vapor in that air to condense,
which dehumidifies the air to the desired level. That air would then be sent directly back into the house (where it had initially
come from!) as cooled and dehumidified air!
You could even provide less air conditioning! You might choose 2 PSIG pressure. The compressed 85°F air from the house
warms by about 17°F to around 102°F due to being compressed in the drumcylinder, and then drops back down to the 65°F
deep soil temperature in the outlet tube, and then drops down an additional around 18°F when the pressure is released, down
to around 47°F. That is low enough (below 60°F) to cause nearly all the water vapor in that air to condense, which dehumidifies
the air to the desired level. That air would then be sent directly back into the house (where it had initially come from!) as cooled
and dehumidified air!
All three of these functions will work fine no matter how hot the climate is! So any house or building anywhere in the world can
have refrigeration, a food freezer, and air conditioning, without using any electric power at all! Even a remote hut in a jungle
near the Equator can therefore have air conditioning! And more importantly, safe food preservation! The only difference, as we
will soon see is regarding the pressure we need to compress the air to!
Configurations for Third World Remote Villagers
The examples above can generally be used in nearly any location on Earth. They can also be used in most Remote
OffGrid Locations in the US and Europe. If the climate is EXTREMELY hot, then slightly higher compression
pressures will likely be needed, as calculated below.
We are needing a VERY MINIMAL compressing of air (and nothing else), and so there are many alternate ways of doing this
moderate air compression. You could find a piece of large diameter metal pipe or sturdy tubing, and make the cylinderpump
out of that instead of using a drum
You might be surprised to learn that MANY commercial air compressors use such flapper valves to allow air into and out of the
compressor cylinder, and they can generally produce more than 100 PSI of pressure! Your homemade flapper valves may not
be that excellent, but they do not need to be, because the pressure you will need are far lower.
These devices are simple enough and they are made of items that may be available even in Third World locations.
Cooling Calculation Equations
Here is the main formula which is used for these calculations. It is essentially the Ideal Gas law, where the air is under adiabatic
isentropic conditions, specifically for air at the temperatures that we are discussing:
T 2/T 1 = (P2/P1)(n1)/n
n is a number that is specific to a type of gas and the process occurring. For air in isentropic expansion or compression, n is
very close to 1.4. This results in that exponent being around 0.287.
T 2/T 1 = (P2/P1)0.287
All you need to remember is that these are ABSOLUTE pressures and temperatures, meaning that a normal day might start out
with 15 PSI air (atmospheric pressure) (called 15 PSIA, which is also 0 PSIG, or gauge pressure) and 527°R temperature (the
absolute temperature that is the same as 68°F.)
Example Calculations
So if we have a 120°F day and we want 0°F air for a food freezer, the left side
would be:
579°R/459°R
so the fraction is
1.2614
Because of the exponent, the ratio of the pressures is therefore
2.245
Since the ambient air pressure is 15 PSIA, this means that the bellows or cylinder would need to produce around 15 * 2.245 or
34 PSIA which is also 19 PSIG. This can be hard to achieve, especially with bellows. So for full food freezing when the air
temperature is 120°F, the underground intake tunnel may be necessary. In that case if the 120°F air is cooled to the 80°F deep
soil temperature before it gets compressed, and we would have a different calculation, where the fraction would be:
539°R/459°R
so the fraction is
1.1743
1.75
This results in needing only 15 * 1.75 or 26 PSIA or 11 PSIG rather than 19 PSIG to get the needed freezing. This is a significant
improvement, and it is ENTIRELY due to the effect of the INTAKE DUCT cooling the air BEFORE it is compressed! It still would
be solid freezing food at 0°F on a day when the air temp is 120°F, an impressive accomplishment!
Say that we have a 100°F day and we want 30°F air for a food
refrigerator. The left side would then be:
559°R/489°R
so the fraction is
1.1431
1.59
This results in only needing 15 * 1.59 or 24 PSIA which is 9 PSIG to be provided by the bellows or cylinder to provide the
needed refrigeration.
And finally, we can consider using the underground intake tunnel for this refrigeration. In that case if the 100°F air is cooled to
70°F before it gets compressed, we would have a different calculation, where the fraction would be
529°R/489°R
so the left fraction is
1.0818
1.31
This results in needing only 15 * 1.31 or 19.5 PSIA which is 4.5 PSIG where a bellows or a simple cylinder pump can easily
provide that for the desired refrigeration.
We have not really discussed here the AMOUNT OF ENERGY involved. THAT is the analysis which can determine just how
large and powerful the air pump must be. For food preservation by refrigeration or freezing, we feel those calculations should be
unnecessary here, as the dimensions and figures described above should all be fine for any climate (for one family). But even if
it should turn out that not quite enough refrigeration is obtained for an application in Indonesia, we would then simply
recommend making a duplicate second system to provide the additional refrigeration needed. (The calculations can be fairly
involved.) For full airconditioning applications, those calculations are likely necessary to do, and a local Engineer should be
found to do them for you. They involve first determining the total amount of energy (actually power) that would be required for
the cooling effect desired. Then a multiplier is used to account for the fact that the different processes here are not perfectly
efficient. This then gives the amount of power that would be needed to be removed in the phase where heat is lost from the
compressed, heated air in the (second) underground tube, and you can then work backwards to calculate the amount of power
required in compressing the air in the first place.)
Providing Medical Level Sterilization of Food and Other Items

Medicine has known for about 150 years that if food or medical equipment is heated to above around 125°F for a few minutes,
all known dangerous pathogens and organisms in it are killed. Therefore, the HeatGreen 3a device is excellent for such
functions, as it generally provides heat in the range of 140°F to 150°F.
Food Cooking without needing any Fossil Fuels

For the exact same reasons as the sterilization discussed just above, cooking food inside the HG 3a unit results in food where
no adverse pathogens or organisms can possibly still be alive, such as E. coli bacteria, which results in food that is probably
safer than the food we have all eaten during our lives!
However, the food cooks rather slowly, much like a SlowCooker or a CrockPot.
Efficient Food Growing

The HG 3a heating system which uses dead grasses and leaves in a decomposition process, creates an exhaust of gas that is
extremely enriched in both water vapor and carbon dioxide, as well as being at around 130°F to 150°F. All three of these are
wonderfully beneficial for a small greenhouse. The heat can provide heat to allow the greenhouse to operate in cooler months.
The water vapor provides high humidity in the greenhouse which is excellent for plant growth. But most important of all is the
fact that the carbon dioxide can be used to easily increase the concentration of that gas inside the greenhouse by about a factor
of three. Researchers during the 1990s found that virtually all plants grow many times faster and better when there is such an
excess of carbon dioxide. Research on strawberries, for example, resulted in five times the amount of berries, they were
sweeter and less acidic, and they were rated better tasting by food testers.
So, as either a sidebenefit of the HG 3a heating the home, or as an independent system exclusively to service the greenhouse,
the HG 3a unit can enable a small greenhouse to produce five times the fruits and vegetables during a normal growing season,
in addition to the possibility of heating the greenhouse all year and thereby producing far more crops yet. Generally, really small
greenhouses are hardly worth the effort as they produce so little, but if that same small greenhouse can produce five times as
much, or possibly ten times as much food as normally, the whole concept of selfsufficiency regarding food becomes far more
realistic.
Now, I realize that some people might be scared at the idea of going into a greenhouse which had a carbon dioxide
concentration of three times the outdoor natural of around 388 ppmv. I suppose that 1100 ppmv might SOUND scary! But
carbon dioxide is NOT dangerous at all, and you will likely be very surprised to learn that in YOUR house during the winter, the
relatively closed house tends to accumulate the carbon dioxide that you exhale all winter, along with some more produced when
your (gas) kitchen stove cooks. How high does it get? 4,000 ppmv is not unusual, and is NOT DANGEROUS! If you have ever
attended a really long lecture in a really old auditorium, have you ever gotten drowsy? The reason might have been more than
just the boring subject! Thousands of people exhaling carbon dioxide in an auditorium that has a poor air circulation system can
have 10,000 ppmv of carbon dioxide late in the lecture! And when amounts get that high, the most common first symptom is
drowsiness!
It occurs to me that there is an entirely different subject which I am not aware any scientist has ever researched! Lots of people
grow house plants. Some of those plants seem to grow amazingly well DURING THE WINTER, behind glass windows! The
FACT that the house air likely contains (wonderful?) added carbon dioxide MIGHT be providing this effect for those house
plants!
SelfMelting Sidewalks, Driveways, Garages and more!

This is actually a more sophisticated version of one of the items mentioned in the next section. There are TWO very different
versions of this! The first is something I came up with around 1980, where BEFORE a sidewalk or driveway or garage slab is
poured or paved, a series of closely spaced (one foot apart is my choice) pattern of parallel plastic 4" (ABS) tubes, which are
sold as Field Tiles. I like them because they only cost about 1/3 of what the similar 4" PVC pipe costs, where both perform
nearly identically for this purpose. At the end of the sidewalk which is near the house, a plenum is made (which can even be
poured concrete for simplicity) and a buried and INSULATED warm air duct from the house feeds it, through a DAMPER which
can shut it off to not waste house heat. The opposite ends of the tubes also go into a plenum which feeds a short duct which
sticks about a foot above the ground nearby. This last is necessary to keep the tubes from filling with rainwater and vermin, and
which allows the used house air to exit, allowing room for new warm air to enter the pipes.
You have already figured out the rest! A cold sidewalk which is covered by ice or snow at 32°F or lower normally needs YOU (or
a teenaged son!) to go out to shovel it clear. But by opening that damper, your house heating system, whether a conventional
furnace, an HG 3a device or the NorthWarm Version 1 Totally Solar Heated house (heat storage in that case) can feed warm air
through those tubes. That warms the ground around the tubes. Heat naturally rises so the concrete sidewalk immediately above
it quickly warms up. Getting the concrete up to 50°F is easy and does not take too much house heat. The snow and ice laying
on top of that nicely warm concrete sidewalk quickly melts!
In fact, if you plan ahead maybe an hour, you can have the sidewalk ALREADY at 50°F as the snow or sleet begins to fall, and it
IMMEDIATELY MELTS and your sidewalk REMAINS CLEAR of any snow or ice. Not even just avoiding having to shovel snow,
but absolutely icefree sidewalks that NO visitor might slip and fall on and sue you!
Pretty cool, huh? Or WARM, actually!
Late in 2010, I discovered what I consider an even better version of this! NO HEAT FROM THE HOUSE IS EVEN NECESSARY
OR WASTED!
NO ducts from the house heating system here! Find some nearby Farmer who has a tractor with a posthole auger on it, and
with compliments, possibly money and possibly beer, have him drive his tractor to your building site! He would bore what seem
like a LOT of postholes, in either two or three rows (depending on how wide your sidewalk is) and every foot or two along its
whole length.
Why?
Because YOU are then going do DROP into each of those holes a VERY SIMPLE and VERY CHEAP "thermosiphon heat
exchanger" into each of them, and cover them all up with a few inches of dirt or gravel ballast for the sidewalk. By the time the
concrete truck shows up to pour the sidewalk, they would never know that there is anything underneath!
Why do this?
Have you figured it out? In a climate like Chicago's, the DEEP SOIL never drops to below about 52°F during the winter. You are
going to make simple HOLLOW TUBES with END CAPS to drop into each hole. There is a natural process called
Thermosiphoning where WARM air or water RISES and COOLER air or water SINKS. Inside each tube, the air near the bottom
is HEATED by the 52#176;F soil surrounding the tube (WARM) and up near the top the air inside the tube is COOLED by the
winter cold surface temperatures (COOL), including the concrete sidewalk.
Thermosiphon immediately occurs (just like in the pot of water you boil on a kitchen stove) and the net effect is that HEAT from
the deep 52#176;F soil gets moved to warming air inside the top of the tube, and therefore the soil and concrete sidewalk above
it.
The result of this is that YOUR SIDEWALK then ALWAYS stays near 52#176;F through the entire winter, constantly and
continuously being warmed from the Earth's enormous supply of heat!
You then have that situation of the preheated sidewalk, where snow or sleet immediately melts as it falls! Snow accumulates on
your yard on both sides, and can become 12" inches deep, but the sidewalk will ALWAYS remain snowless and iceless!
Details? For a sidewalk, in anywhere except northern Alaska, Siberia or Antarctica, 4" PVC or iron pipe seems to be fine. Iron
pipe end caps cause that choice to be a little more expensive, but if you have a welding machine, you could weld on end disks
of steel onto the pipe. In fact, the TOP end cap might then be an 8" square plate of 1/4" plate steel, to create an even LARGER
SURFACE of the warmth to more widely warm the sidewalk which will later be above it.
How deep, or equivalently, how long should these things be? Certainly THREE FEET is a minimal, even for a sidewalk. No more
than four or five feet for any sidewalk application. The Tractor posthole borer (without some simple modifications to go deeper)
can commonly only bore holes which are three or four feet deep, so you might check with the Farmer first before making them.
IF you want to go topdrawer, you could complicate things a bit. It turns out that this arrangement causes thermosiphoning that
is somewhat disorganized inside the tubes, and therefore less of overall efficiency in transferring heat up to the sidewalk. For a
sidewalk, I do NOT see the following improvement to be necessary! But a smaller tube (2" diameter PVC or iron pipe) can be
installed INSIDE each tube, centered and about four or six inches SHORTER than the main tube is. This allows the heated air to
rise through an OUTER passageway, where it is also exposed to sidewalls which are somewhat warm, and the cool air at the
top sinks back down through the smaller central tube passageway. Thermosiphoning works a LOT better this way! That inner
tube must NOT go all the way to either the top or bottom, and needs to be HUNG to permit easy and smooth airflow.
To make a driveway selfmelting, I recommend LARGER tubes, 8" in diameter and WITH the central smaller tube inside, AND
longer, and therefore deeper. The posthole auger needs to then have that modification to be able to bore deeper holes. And the
holes can be a little farther apart, where I consider a grid of holes two feet apart in both directions should be fine. I consider a
MINIMUM of 5 feet and an ideal 8 feet deep to be the goal. PVC is not available at reasonable prices in such diameter, so I
recommend buying several 20foot lengths of the 8" iron pipe or steel tubing (at least 1/4" thick) and using welding equipment to
cut them to the lengths you will need and then weld on the two end plates of 1/4" steel, again with the top one being optionally
square and larger, maybe 16" square. You will then also be able to weld in either an inner steel tube or at least support brackets
to support an inner 4" PVC plastic tube.
Under a new garage concrete slab floor, the driveway guidelines are fine. The garage would then always stay at 52°F or
warmer, so the engine will always start immediately and you will get into a car which is NOT horribly cold!
There ARE other applications of this which are obvious. EVERY city now spends MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to buy a bunch of
snowplows to mount on the city's trucks and for the wages of the snowplow drivers and for many tons of road salt that they use
up every winter to try to melt fallen snow. So each town and city can obviously SAVE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS normally spent
that way (every year) by adding this snowmelting feature under every street as it is scheduled to be repaved.
By the way, since the PAVEMENT is then NEVER SUBJECTED TO FREEZING TEMPERATURES, NO POTHOLES COULD
EVER FORM (which are not only ugly and dangerous but expensive to fill in and repatch). And the LIFE OF THE PAVEMENT
would certainly be MANY YEARS LONGER, meaning millions of dollars which now has to be budgeted for annual road repairs
might be far less!
The City Attorney of every town and city should also love this, as there would then be VERY FEW VEHICLE ACCIDENTS since
cars and trucks would not be sliding around on snow or ice covered roads! They simply cannot occur!
Those same City Attorneys should love the fact that pedestrians would be SUING THE TOWN LESS OFTEN, as they would not
be falling due to slipping on public sidewalks or when crossing public roads!
Continuing this theme, city store owners would love being able to have a parking lot for their customers which would NEVER
HAVE ANY SNOW OR ICE! MORE customers, eh? And walking FROM that icefree parking spot to their store? Icefree
sidewalks, of course!
Not bad for a system which is invisible, requires NO fossil fuels ever, and which should last for more than 40 years, and which is
not horribly expensive to install in the first place!
State Highway Departments might also want to try to make icefree highways, although their situation might not be cost effective
due to having to modify so many miles of roads.
But AIRPORTS definitely SHOULD install this IMMEDIATELY for their runways. Imagine an airliner being able to land on a
PERFECTLY CLEAR AND DRY RUNWAY, even in a snowstorm or hailstorm or sleet storm? Only a 50footwidth of the runway
probably needs to be modified, but most of its length should be. Yes, that might be a fairly expensive project, BUT IT ONLY
EVER HAS TO BE DONE ONCE in the airport's lifetime! The devices for an airport runway should be sturdier than I have
otherwise described above.
Miscellaneous Things
There are actually a large number of other uses for these basic concepts. We will briefly mention a few:
These first several are simply a pattern of buried PVC or field tile tubes, buried at TWO different depths! One set of the tubes
would be at a depth of at least three feet, so the surrounding temperature of the deep soil would be around 52°F or so. The
other set of tubes would be just a few inches below a specific surface area. IN WINTER, the 52°F air going through those tubes
(pushed by a blower of some sort) would WARM up the surface immediately above it.
Say you were in a snow climate but you hated shoveling snow! It would be possible to create a large chamber or lots of
(air) tubes deep underground, where the air is always around 52°F around Chicago. You would then dig (many?)
SHALLOW trenches just under your driveway, place PVC air tubes there, and connect the two systems. A blower would
be used to RECIRCULATE (the nearly unlimited supply of) 52°F air from deep underground to pass through those tubes
just a few inches below your driveway. The effect is to HEAT the driveway surface to well above freezing! When it
would snow, most would IMMEDIATELY melt and flow away, because the surface was likely to be in the 40s°F, but even if
it snowed so hard to accumulate, it should only take a few hours for the driveway to clean itself! Cool, huh? A self
shoveling driveway!
The exact same thing for sidewalks, although it may not be worth the trouble to dig up existing sidewalks! But it seems
great for NEW sidewalks!
Again the same for the plot of land where your garden will be! You probably could plant several weeks earlier, with
nearly absolute assurance that the roots could not be damaged by frost!
My dogs were always house dogs, even when I had nine of them in an old farmhouse. But I know that some people use a
doghouse where a dog must sleep on cold nights. Imagine if it was on a pad of ground that was always at 52°F or better?
And a duct of 52°F air could even feed the inside of the doghouse, providing a much more comfortable temperature. In
addition, that same setup could send some 52°F air into the doghouse during hot summer days to provide air
conditioning! Other than a television set, what else could any dog want?
How about sending some house heat under an unheated garage? The concrete FLOOR of the garage would never be
below about 52°F, even on the coldest day of the year. If the garage had some insulation, the entire interior of the garage
should rarely ever be below that. So on that extremely cold morning when it was below zero, you could get into a fairly
warm car, AND it would start immediately, because its engine was nicely warm to start with!
A farmer could use this same basic concept where the deep underground warmth could be send UNDER OR THROUGH
a small pond, to keep the water from freezing, so that a reliable source of water was always available for cattle.
In principle, the same concept could be done with WATER pipes and a conventional water well as source. Since that
water would come from even deeper, it would be even more certain to always be at 52°F. However, that approach DOES
require a water pump and IF that pump ever failed or electricity ever shut off, there would then be a lot of pipes filled with
water just below a surface that might be extremely cold, where large numbers of pipes might all burst. I am not that
interested in a waterfilled system.
See the general theme here? With some creative thought, there are an immense number of uses for nearly unlimited amounts
of 52°F air. It is certainly excellent for air conditioning in the summer, but these examples show ways it can also be very useful
in winter, even though it is at such a low temperature (52°F) that it might initially not seem useful at all!
Similarly, there are a lot of possible uses of the 150°F humid air that the HG 3a unit can provide. Etc.
There are also SUMMER applications for the twosetsoftubes concept. Here is a rather silly application, which will never be
installed! I spent much of my adult life playing semipro volleyball, and a lot of that was in extremely hot beach sand! Most
players wear little stockings to keep from burning their feet during long tournaments! Obviously, I realized that if this
arrangement of two sets of underground tubes was installed, with one set four feet deep to capture the coolness of 52°F deep
soil (or sand) and the other set just six inches deep, to run that cool air through the extremely hot (120°F) sand, we could have
enjoyed far more pleasant tournaments! The expense of doing that is far too great for just the benefit of some sissy volleyball
players not having to wear socks!
Pneumatic Power or Hydraulic Power

This concept could probably not ever be used in advanced countries like the US, as others would likely complain. But in many
places in Africa or Asia or South America, there might be value in this. I have not tested this one, but it is clear that it will work as
described.
Imagine buying around 30 lengths (ten feet each) of 4" diameter PVC (thickwall) pipe, along with the couplings and solvent
cement for it. They will be erected in a vertical tower, with guy wires for stability, or inside a drilled well or in a cave. At the very
top of the PVC pipe would be a funnel that could collect rain from an area that might be 6 feet square. The bottom of the whole
thing would be blocked off with an end cap, but first there would be a Tee and reducers to provide a small (1/2") connection to
standard piping.
When this was first installed, it would be empty of water, right? But a first rain, of maybe 1/2" total rainfall, would funnel around
1.5 cubic feet of water (ten gallons) into the tube. That would fill around 18 feet of water into the tube. Very little water would
ever evaporate from inside it, so after about 15 more rains, the entire 300 feet of the tube would be filled with water.
Why is this of any use?
Well, the PRESSURE in the water increases by about 15 PSI for each 32 feet of vertical water stacked up. So we have provided
around 150 PSI of water pressure to the standard piping we attached at the bottom. This pressure could be brought to a nearby
air tank arrangement, where a tank of compressed air at 150 PSI would then be available. This could power things like paint
sprayers or automotive pneumatic tools or assorted other equipment.
The pressure of the water itself could be used for hydraulic equipment. It may be best to use the pressurized water to transfer
pressure to hydraulic fluid (to avoid corrosion issues) but then some hydraulic equipment could be driven by this energy source!
As always, note that this is absolutely GREEN, and where the results are comparable to conventional air compressors or
hydraulic pumps, but without needing any electricity to run any motors or any other fossil fuels to drive any other power
supplies.
This is another concept which may not be of any great value. It's inclusion here is again mostly to show you that some creative
thought can find wonderful new solutions to many problems of modern life!
Warning
Some people find a handful of my hundreds of webpages and they get all upset about them! The one that seems to cause the
most horrible comments at me is the one (actually two) SolartoElectricDevice. The webpage does NOT actually describe how
it was built or why it works, but just simply that I had built a very smallscale version of it early in 2003, and I was satisfied
regarding it working as the equations had indicated. But the communications from people, nearly all centered on greed and self
centeredness, especially businesses, were so offensive that I decided to dismantle the tabletop demo units and destroy all the
papers regarding it. I found it really amazing at how many hundreds of people had DEMANDED that I either GIVE it to them or
EXPLAIN how they could make one, and nearly all of them even explained why, so they could set up a manufacturing company
and SELL enormous numbers of them so they could get rich. Let's see! MY invention! MY demo proved it worked! And THEY all
thought they deserved to become billionaires! In any case, apparently, many people felt that I went over the top in expressing
my descriptions of such things in that webpage! Sorry. But I try to be honest and straightforward, and I guess I had harsh
feelings regarding that whole chapter! That device may NEVER be disclosed! Hundreds of people have tried to do a Perry
Mason to convince me to disclose it to them! Nope! There is another one about a LowHead Hydroelectric device, which,
courtesy primarily to the US Army Corps of Engineers, will NEVER be disclosed! I even had COMPLETELY designed that one,
including parts lists and pricing out all the components, and all production manufacturing, because I actually thought there might
have been some interest in around 60,000 extra MegaWatts of electricity in the US! (That's around 12% of ALL the electricity we
use!) But the C of E has absolute control of the 7,700 small flood control dams which now have no function but to try to reduce
floods, and they made absolutely clear to me that IF there was a good idea, THEY would think it up, and that just before a guy
hung up on me, he threatened me regarding even touching any of the 7,700 dams that they control! I find that sort of funny! He
may not be as smart as he seems to think he is! And there is another one about water purification and UNICEF and Oxfam
(mentioned above), with the same sort of theme. Maybe I sometimes don't play well with others! At least when they begin by
insulting and threatening me!
So, try to avoid those few webpages of mine, as I guess I was not as nice and friendly as I try to usually be!
Summary
We consider it important to note here that these assorted systems are all very economical, all very simple to assemble and
install, all made of materials that are easy to find locally nearly anywhere, and all likely to operate for many years without any
breakdowns or malfunctions! I tend to think in a bluecollar way, rather than always designing the most complex devices I can
come up with!
One of the central aspects of attempting to be Independent is that you would not need a steady stream of repair people coming
to fix things that had gone wrong! Another is that the ONLY sources of energy required for these things are absolutely GREEN!
The HG 3a unit operates entirely on leaves and grasses that you can certainly find locally. The refrigeration and freezer and
electricity recharging MIGHT require some wind power from some very simple and crude Savonius rotors (unless you have a
waterfall nearby or other obvious source for mechanical power). The devices to provide safe drinking water are equally
independent of any powergrid or LP gas delivery truck or any gasoline tank!
By the way, the HG 3a presentation mentions a FUTURE capability that I believe that system will be capable of, that of creating
a substantial amount of electricity, possibly based on the Seebeck Effect of thermoelectric generation, but somewhat modified. If
someone every finds a way to use an HG 3a for such a function, it might provide a whole new way of supplying us all with
electricity, even maybe for future electric/batterypowered vehicles! But that is liable to be some years off! (I expect to add a
variant HG 4a device sometime soon!)
This is NOT an energyrelated idea, but it seems interesting so I figured I should mention it. You know that people complain
about Cabin Fever during winters, where people become depressed because they are trapped inside of buildings due to really
cold weather. It is commonly blamed on the lack of seeing the Sun.
So in my unique ways of finding unusual solutions to problems, I bought FOUR 42" flat screen TVs (which were on serious sale!)
I used the mounting bolts that they intend for the TV to be hung from a wall, to instead hang them from the ceiling above my
office desk, in a 2 x 2 pattern. So they covered around four feet by seven feet of ceiling area. I chose TVs which have the
capability of accepting input signals from a computer, and so all four were connected to receive their video signals from the
computer. I then used a set of four cheap cameras to record videos of four adjacent areas of the sky on a sunny summer day
with white clouds going by!
I then LOOPED the videos to repeat, and so a wonderful blue sky with small white clouds are a wonderful distraction as a
SKYLIGHT, even though it is not a skylight at all! I made a variety of videos, including a summer rainstorm, flocks of birds
passing over, and others, which I can display as I wish. I actually made another video where the Sun slowly passes over, just
like I was outside, but I have not watched that one because I am not sure that the very bright image of the sun might damage
the flatscreen TV screen by being too bright.
This is also GREAT at night! I have wonderful stars every night, including patterns of stars like the Southern Cross which are not
even visible from the US! I have the Moon go over occasionally, and even have it do a Lunar Eclipse! Even better, I can hit a few
computer keys and see a telescope view of the Moon or of Saturn or of the Pleiades or the Andromeda Galaxy or about
anything else. I suppose I could even have Superman pass overhead! (Or Santa in his sleigh!)
My BRAIN knows that it is not actually a skylight, but the rest of me seems to fully accept it! Maybe when flatscreen TVs get
even cheaper, this idea may become more practical!
Weight Loss? Obesity?

OK. The following are NOT related to selfsufficiency in the traditional sense, but I think the definition might be stretched a hair
to be able to include these links!
Bodyfat, Weight Loss, the Physics of Body Weight Control

Bodyfat Accurate and Easy Determination
Bodyfat Percentage Determining Accurate Bodyfat Easily (Automatic Calculator)
Dieting A Physicist's Weight Loss System A Sleeping Weight Loss System!
Shouldn't selfsufficiency also relate to controlling bodyfat???
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10/4/2015 Self­Sufficiency ­ Many Suggestions

Self­Sufficiency ­ Many Suggestions

Index of this presentation

Community­Scale (megaWatt) Supply of Electricity locally

Producing Excellent Safe Drinking Water Without Drilling a Well

Fully Heating Any Home or Building

Low­Tech Full Solar Heating Any Home or Building

Heating Domestic Hot Water

Air Conditioning for Temperate Climates

Air Conditioning for Hot Climates

Refrigeration for Food

Freezer for Food Preservation

Sterilization of Medical Instruments or anything else

Cooking with assurance of no e. coli or any other pathogens

Fruit and Vegetable Production of FIVE TIMES normal!

Self­Melting Sidewalks, Driveways and more!

Related Energy Subjects

Changing these Devices???

My Approach to Electricity ­ Individual

That is an impressive amount of available electricity!

E = 0.5 * ρ * V3 * (area exposed to the wind).

Now, getting back to reality!

My Approach to Electricity ­ Community

(This was first fully Engineered in 2008)

Heating the House

Using Solar Heat to ENTIRELY heat a House or Hot water or Both

Solar Heated House (1979)

NorthWarm Solar­Heated House ­ Version 2 (1979)

Chilean Miner Inspired Idea!

A Variant regarding House Air Circulation

Heating Domestic Hot Water for a house

Providing Safe Water for the House

Air Conditioning the House

Home Air Conditioning (1978, December 2000)

A Variant Version for Hot Climates

Artwork provided by Niranjan Boteju

Providing Refrigeration and a Food Freezer

Artwork provided by Niranjan Boteju

Configurations for Third World Remote Villagers

Cooling Calculation Equations

Because of the exponent, the ratio of the pressures is therefore

Because of the exponent, the ratio of the pressures is therefore

Because of the exponent, the ratio of the pressures is therefore

so the left fraction is

Because of the exponent, the ratio of the pressures is therefore

Providing Medical Level Sterilization of Food and Other Items

Food Cooking without needing any Fossil Fuels

Efficient Food Growing

Self­Melting Sidewalks, Driveways, Garages and more!

Pneumatic Power or Hydraulic Power

Why is this of any use?

Weight Loss? Obesity?

Bodyfat, Weight Loss, the Physics of Body Weight Control

Shouldn't self­sufficiency also relate to controlling bodyfat???

This presentation was first placed on the Internet in November 2007.

Energy­Related presentations in this Domain:

This page ­ ­ Self­Sufficiency ­ Many Suggestions ­ ­ is at http://mb­soft.com/public3/selfsuff.html#refrig

Link to the Public Services Home Page

Link to the Public Services Main Menu

E­mail to: Public4@mb­soft.com

C Johnson, Theoretical Physicist, Physics Degree from Univ of Chicago

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10/4/2015 SelfSufficiency Many Suggestions

SelfSufficiency Many Suggestions

CommunityScale (megaWatt) Supply of Electricity locally

LowTech Full Solar Heating Any Home or Building

SelfMelting Sidewalks, Driveways and more!

My Approach to Electricity Individual

My Approach to Electricity Community

NorthWarm SolarHeated House Version 2 (1979)

SelfMelting Sidewalks, Driveways, Garages and more!

Shouldn't selfsufficiency also relate to controlling bodyfat???

EnergyRelated presentations in this Domain:

This page SelfSufficiency Many Suggestions is at http://mbsoft.com/public3/selfsuff.html#refrig

Email to: Public4@mbsoft.com