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i was searching about gravity and stumbled on these amazing alternative energies. they are apparently not limited to windmills and solar panels. i dont know how fields of corn be a source of alternative energy though.
Good idea, I hope he make it work commercially well. I see no details, but I assume he uses leds, which won't need much current maybe 1.35 dcv. Weights made to drop, and so turn a threaded rod, which is geared to a small generator, which feeds a battery. A dc motor can be turned into a dc generator pretty easy. Pretty much you need a way to turn the motor.
There were boats once that used the starter motor as the generator, basicle a relay switched the way the current went, The starter/gennie was engaged to the teeth on the flywheel all the time.
I am fasinated with hydralic rams to move water for no more than the cost of the ram. Once it is set up to run, there are no more costs at all hardly. might be once a year you rear it down and replace gakets, lube it up and run it free for another year.
You can buyt these for a lot of money or build one for almost nothing, from scrap pvc pipe.
Corn? it's in your gasoline now probably, and engines like dragsters can run on just alcohol. In gasoline ethenol does very little to nothing, other than take up volume.. At the current 10% you are wasting about 10% of your dollars. Gasoline engines don't burn ethenol well and so don't create power of it, On some cars this will show as lost miles per gallon.
Then with corn like other woody products you can burn the stocks if there is excess..That can power bio-electrics, but not very well since corn crop is raised one time a season.
There are far better cornstock like plants that can be raised to harvest 3 times a season. These plants unfortunatly are illegal in the USA, and add nitrogen to the soil which corn doesn't do at all. That is why corn needs to be rotated as it does. Corn is hard on soil. SO this gets political.
Great idea, but that 2 ton weight thing is a bit much for most folks to be resetting at the top of the lamp. If they get the snags worked out, I'd get one! I'm not a fan of the grid. I would really like to get to the point that I only use electricity for 'electronic' gadgets and otherwise live without. This sort of lamp would sure beat coal oil, though, and be more sustainable in the long run. I've also been looking into the led wind-up flashlights and lamps. The technology is getting really good along these lines nowadays. I'll look forward to the day that a house will not even need to be wired (yet you still have electric devices)--every device that we use (that uses electricity) will be self-contained. That would be cool.
ChisC, did it say 2 ton weight some where? I just scanned it quick. I would think a 2 pound weight would be over kill. I took the lamp to be a table sized lamp, did I get it wrong?
LOL 2 tons and I bet I could dream up a Death Ray machine
ChisC, did it say 2 ton weight some where? I just scanned it quick. I would think a 2 pound weight would be over kill. I took the lamp to be a table sized lamp, did I get it wrong?
LOL 2 tons and I bet I could dream up a Death Ray machine
Yeah, you know, that second article is kind of weird. It's talking about a floor lamp. It does say 2 tons for the weight to power the LED's and that they will need to become quite a bit more efficient for it to be practical and get the weight down. But on the other hand, the article gives the impression that the thing is ready to rock--not with a 2 ton weight! I can just see the lawsuits now when someone puts 10 of them in their family room and the live load exceeds the LRFD engineering tables by a factor of 10!... gee, I set up that last lamp and the floor joists just exploded under me and turned to powder! Then the whole home just sank into the earth as I crawled out of the rubble... now there's just this big crater.
I'm going to have to read it again more carefully!
Me too, as I didn't read it at all. I took a fast glance at the piccy and saw a weight and a rid and figured the weight was a bug nut fixed in a slider so as it dropped real slow it would turn a big gear slow and run a small gear faster, to drive a toy car sized motor as a little gennie to make 1.35 dcv, then I wetn out for chores and did my la la routine a while looking at trees and chose I gotta do.
Had I read anything at all and seen 2 TONS, I would have had a much different reaction...
Yeah, the lamp thingy looks like a bust, short term anyway........
But the "gravity motor" looks like something worth looking into......
I'm already playing with solar panels, inverters, and batteries, if one of those gravity motors could be used to turn a (or several) high output automotive alternators to charge a bank of batteries we might be onto something..........
I'm not sure the why or how of "howstuffworks" allowing frames like that, but the gravity motor is an old old old perpetual motion idea that has been debunked many times. IOW, the site is a rip-off trying to entice the gullible out of their money.
LEDs and gravity lamps (essentially clockwork escapement power) - is something like that possible - yeah, sorta. A reading lamp LED is typically powered by three button batteries. The wattage required is extremely small. You can certainly rig a weight and a small DC motor to generate some power. How long you could continue is another issue, as are the conversion losses.
On a humorous basis you could... take a recliner chair, mount it on a seesaw with an equal weight on the other end of the seesaw... attach a cord from that weight to a ratchet and gear assembly which then ultimately resolves to the shaft of a hobby motor firmly attached to the floor... the leads from the motor go to an LED reading lamp attached to the top of the recliner... A person comes up to the seesaw, lifts the chair (which requires little effort because of the counterbalancing and release of the ratchet)... then climbs a few steps and sits in the chair... the light comes on as the motor/generator starts turning... After about an hour, the chair is back at ground level, so the reader goes for a snack or to pee and returns and repeats. We used to call this sorta stuff Rube Goldberg.
I strongly suggest you all get a freshman college level Physics text and READ IT. Learn the math needed to understand the physics. Follow the physics course with a basic engineering text on motors and other electromechanical devices. This will save you countless hours of useless speculation. Or you could subscribe to "Homemade Power" magazine although most of their stuff is expensive and of questionable reliability.
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