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Urban Wind Turbines

posted by martyb on Monday June 02 2014, @06:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-answer-is-blowin-in-the-wind dept.

lhsi writes:

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by hankwang on Wednesday June 04 2014, @09:42AM

    by hankwang (100) on Wednesday June 04 2014, @09:42AM (#50994) Homepage

    I'm curious about the water pump for the heater, is that radiant flooring?

    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. :-)

    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

    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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