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A Dutch company has launched a new type of wind turbine that is small enough to fit onto the roof of a house. The turbine looks like a Nautilus shell, and their website explains how it works:
Most today's wind turbines require that a difference in pressure between the front and the rear side of the rotor blades be maintained in order to be effective. However, this difference in pressure also has a negative effect called "drag".
Our turbine rotor captures the kinetic energy of the wind due to its speed, and, by reversing the wind and reducing it to almost zero Beaufort converts it into mechanical energy. By doing this the wind speed's effect (in kinetic energy) on the rotor is maximized and "lift" is obtained by the wind's acceleration over the rotor plane.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02 2014, @11:15PM
"For heating and cooking we use natural gas."
There's your problem. Your energy accounting is dishonestly hiding a sizable chunk of your use in a fossil fuel you forgot to account for.
(Score: 1) by Zinho on Tuesday June 03 2014, @12:40AM
In the context of reducing electrical usage I think it's fair to consider natural gas use as a viable alternative. I cook year round and heat in the winter with gas, too; I'd use a gas clothes dryer as well if I could. We recently switched to using a clothesline to dry clothes, and we're down to about 1,000 kWh/month if we don't run air conditioning.
I think the biggest difference between us is location - I'm in south central United States, and hankwang is in the Netherlands. Where I live we average 18 days above 100F (37.5C), and in 2011 we had 71 days above that temperature. I'm curious about the water pump for the heater, is that radiant flooring?
In any case, hankwang is using close to 10% of the electricity I am. That's astounding to me. I'll have to look at my appliances to see if there are savings I could make there.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by carguy on Tuesday June 03 2014, @11:52AM
Another data point, we are two people working from home, a couple of laptops on all the time. The water boiler (baseboard heat) and hot water heater run on gas, everything else is electric. Location is downwind of Lake Erie in a 1963 brick ranch. The only insulation that it was easy to add was to take the attic floor up to a total of 18" (~0.4 meter) of fiberglass. It has never hit 100F here, although with warming it may get there soon. These factors both moderate summer temps and usually limit A/C (a smaller unit, but not energy star) to a few hours in summer evenings. The basement has a small de-humidifier running about half time in the summer to control mold. We mostly cook meals at home, eat dinner out once or twice a week. A recent "energy star" fridge made a big difference compared to the previous fridge from the 1980s. We are both good about turning lights off, but for reading in the evening hours still use 100W incandescents (eyestrain from CFLs); looking forward to trying brighter LED "bulbs". We dry about half the clothes on a rack indoors, more in winter for the humidifying effect.
I'm looking at putting the cable box (a constant draw) on a timer, so it boots up before our typical TV watching in the evenings--but it would be more convenient if the cable company had a box that idled at lower power. If we renovate the kitchen/utility area we will change over to a gas range (cooktop) and oven, as well as a gas clothes dryer.
We're currently around 400 kWh/month (yearly average) including A/C for a few months in summer. If we average the 8 or 9 "non-A/C months" it's just under 300 kWh/month. It would be hard to get down to the hankwang / Netherlands level here, but we do have room for improvement.
(Score: 2) by hankwang on Wednesday June 04 2014, @09:42AM
Regular radiators/convectors; the pump to get the water from the heater (Boiler? Not sure about the US/English terms) to the radiators takes about 100 W when it's running. The heater recovers heat by condensing the water out of the exhaust gases, but this will work best if it operates at low temperatures. I try to maximize efficiency by keeping the water temperature as low as possible (70 C/158 F when it's freezing, 50 C/122 F during spring/autumn). The penalty is that the pump has to run for more hours. When we use hot tap water, the same heater will heat up the water in the closed heating circuit, and use a heat exchanger to heat up tap water; also then, the pump will run. No hot water is stored when the tap is not running. This is a very common setup here in Netherlands; I'm not sure how domestic heating works in the US. Coming winter, I'll try to do some optimization on the electricity/gas usage of the heater. :-)
An energy meter (I think they're called Kill-a-Watt in the US) and a notebook can be very revealing. A colleague of mine discovered that his fancy espresso machine, which was switched on all day during the weekends, was a huge power drain. Our home is exceptional as it has an a/c system (inherited from the previous owner); when I discovered that it uses 130 kWh/yr on standby, I installed a 4-euro switch and saved 26 eur/yr in electricity.
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