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Wind electric water heater

Electric heating of water tank from windpower
 
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Simple turbine turns dynamo powering a DC electric heating element in insulated pipe, connected at entrance to the solar heating storage in warm countries, or to the hot water storage tank, in cold countries.

No need to connect to the current electric element, no on grid considerations, no need for special permits from electric co. Safe, quiet, gives you hot water on cold days, at an extremely low cost of production, installation and maintenance.

Prior art: Wind driven heating piston, Wind heat, and the baked Israeli product: Wind water heater. (All to be given links soon)

pashute, Jul 09 2013

Wind heater MaxwellBuchanan's "better than electricity" idea - uses physics. Not this idea in any way. [pashute, Jul 09 2013]

Wind Driven Heating Piston Bcrosby's mechanical energy idea I too have been thinking of since age 17, but it's not this idea... [pashute, Jul 09 2013]

Dude Rooah http://hasviva.co.il/?p=15269
(Hebrew) Wind heating water storage tank (Hebrew play on words with the name David Earning) Extremely expensive connects to a specific solar water storage tank. My idea does not use the existing electric heating unit, therefore it is faster to install, cheaper and simpler. [pashute, Jul 09 2013]

More Prior Art Windmill_20powered_20friction_20oven
[MechE, Jul 09 2013]

[link]






       Water for cattle that freezes in winter could benefit from having a cow head size hole melted in the covering ice of the watering trough.
popbottle, Jul 09 2013
  

       although electricity>heat is pretty reliable and efficient, wind>electricity is less so. So why not go mechanical? Get the wind turbine to turn some form of water-churny device? A propeller/centrifugal pump or whatnot. The advantage being that the resistance would scale with speed to some extent, so your windmill would be naturally braked. You don't need any swanky wiring/electronics/rare Earth metals etc.
bs0u0155, Jul 09 2013
  

       With either wind powered mechanical water heating or electrical water heating, it seems you ought to be driving a heat pump, not using resistive or friction heating. Sure heat pumps aren't cheap, but if you're going to go to the bother to construct a wind turbine, you might as well harness it well. Though the same argument could be made for simply using a quality inverter.   

       Now if you're using rainbow wind wheels I can see how there might be an advantage to this solution. Pure mechanical heating would be much harder to hook up to a large number of small turbines, and the circuitry to convert the output of all those small turbines running different speeds could be expensive and not very efficient anyway, so using an individual resistive heater for each turbine might make a lot of sense.
scad mientist, Jul 09 2013
  

       Water is nature's heat sink. There are more effecient conductors, but none so enveloping. Developing heat is not the issue; it's developing heat quickly and consistently. And with that assertion, I cede the floor to the math guys.
Alterother, Jul 09 2013
  

       rainbow turbines connected to lighter than air ant powered cluster balloons.   

       Seriously, its not doing it better, its doing it simpler, cheaper, and with available parts. Images coming up hopefully next week.
pashute, Jul 09 2013
  

       Electrical energy is a bit like money; it is fungible (especially in the presence of a grid), there are various ways of getting hold of it, and the non-criminal ways are always costly. So "generate electricity by method X and use it for purpose Y" ideas tend to be a little tedious.   

       However, there just might be a case for dumping *surplus* electrical energy in a not-quite-useless way such as this, in cases where storing electricity is more costly than generating it (which I suspect is often the case), and there is no grid connection.
spidermother, Jul 10 2013
  
      
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