Your Dryer Could Make Electricity Too
Clothes dryers throw off waste heat that could be a useful form of energy –if it could just be harnessed. Even enough energy to run half of all your household appliances.
Co-generation; sometimes called combined heat and power (CHP) is already starting to be used by factories and data centers to save energy by creating both heat and power.
But until now, low heat has not been harnessed in creating electricity. Most existing technologies are efficient only at temperatures above 400 °F, and a lot of waste heat just isn’t that hot.
But Ener-G-Rotors has just developed an innovative new technology that one day might have your clothes dryer supplying half the electricity in your house as well, and cheaply enough to deliver a payback in two years.
They initially plan for commercial use but also hope to target consumers with a one-kilowatt system.
That would be enough to supply half their electricity. Check your utility bill to see your total kwh used in the month: if it is approximately 500 kwh per month, a two-kilowatt system is enough to supply your electricity needs.
Ener-G-Rotors says “Our technology is more efficient and simpler than anything else out there right now,” he says. “There aren’t many technologies that are going to work here. And we think we have the lowest cost of any of the technologies out there.”
So imagine getting half your electricity from your dryer…with help maybe, from that other energy hog – your fridge.
From MIT
Photo by Olivia Megalis
7 Comments so far to “Your Dryer Could Make Electricity Too”
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January 24th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Erm… perpetual motion machine anyone?
How can a clothes dryer, which is consuming alot less than half the electricity you use in your house then be made to supply half of it? You can’t get more out that you put in, basic thermodynamics. It may be that you get half of the power used by the dryer back in which case its simply a more efficient dryer, nothing more. what you’re suggesting this device is capable of sounds to me to be nothing short of magic, involving the suspension of quite a few laws of physics.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
January 25th, 2009 at 11:11 am
What mandrill said.
January 25th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Vaporware. The company is still ‘developing’ the product, does not have a product.
It is really nice to have someone ‘looking’ for new technology, but nobody is going to benefit today from the efforts which hope to produce something ‘eventually’.
March 7th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Nice post
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November 3rd, 2009 at 9:43 pm
This is a great idea, as tumble dryers use a tremendous amount of energy.
You can use spin dryers such as at http://www.laundry-alternative.com instead of or to complement conventional tumble dryers, as they are about 100 times as energy efficient.
May 11th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
I'm ready to test one.
January 15th, 2012 at 1:47 am
This article is the most inaccurate, misleading piece of drivel I have ever had the displeasure of reading. I will go through section by section:
Clothes dryers throw off waste heat that could be a useful form of energy –if it could just be harnessed. Even enough energy to run half of all your household appliances (Rediculous. Even if you could somehow miraculously extract every watt of wasted power from the dryer you would get no way NEAR the required to power half a household. How can the _wasted_ energy of *one household appliance* power *half a household*?)
Co-generation; sometimes called combined heat and power (CHP) is already starting to be used by factories and data centers to save energy by creating both heat and power. (1. how can *creating* heat save power? 2. they save energy by *recapturing* heat in the form of wasted energy.
But Ener-G-Rotors has just developed an innovative new technology that one day might have your clothes dryer supplying half the electricity in your house as well, and cheaply enough to deliver a payback in two years. (What the fuck? Since when do clothes dryers *supply* electricity? They *require* electricity to operate, at no point in time can a dryer ever generate electricity. The payback in two years referenced here is the time it will take to pay for the device installed to the dryer that will _increase its efficiency_. With the money you save by paying a little less for the dryer to operate, over two years, that money will have paid for the device itself.)
I don't have the will to carry on but nearly every sentence in this article is misleading or outright wrong. You don't get energy FROM the damn thing. Remove or amend this article for the good of mankind.