How can we harness all the energy that is being wasted in our own homes?

Question

I am sitting here thinking of ways to make our homes more efficient and help reduce our waste of energy. As I look in my own home I cant help but notice all the energy being wasted and hey I want my gas and electric bill to be cheaper. There are many things that just waste energy. Such as; (1) why dont we use the heat that is being blown out of our furnace into the atmosphere more wisely. We all know our furnace chimneys get very hot and why are we not taking that heat (energy) and converting back into electricity. Even the Cloths dryer is just blowing that heat or energry back outside, the dishwasher is kicking off steam too. Couldn't we use this heat to harness more electricty. Maybe power a steam motor that will put power back into our homes and in turn making our appliances more efficient. Even when I fluch the toilet I set that lovely water swirally around and thats energy thats just being flushed away. Cont...

Can't that flowing water or gravity create energy. Ok maybe not alot but some. All these little sources of energy I think could add up. Couldnt we somehow send back some of that heat when we take a shower back to our hot water tanks to again make it a little more efficient. There are many more things I see but what is your idea for making are homes more efficient and smarter. How can we reduce our energy consumption (Please don't say get a programable thermostat) I mean new ideas. Couldnt we magnify the sun in the winter to heat our homes or even recapture the some of the light that is given off by lamps. How about this.... When you pull your car in the driveway set something up where you pull up a ramp (platform) and then when you get out the weight of your car would push down on a spinning turbine underneath the platform creating electricity. Again not much but its something. Another idea would be to creat static electricity when driving down the road and capturing it.

Answer 1

Build a windmil on top of your house and plant batteries in your basement. Then sell off your excess energy to the power company.

Answer 2

The main cause of loss of heat energy is out going seepage thru cracks and opening and low resistance insulating materials.
However it is not practical to make the house airtight so that no fresh air iintake from outside occurs. Wood need to breath and stale air to be replaced. There has to be some outside infiltration of fresh air.
The other Energy losses is electrical power usage.
Somethings are not necessary to leave on continuously, such as light. Clocks, television etc.

There is a limit how much heat can be exrtracted from the furnace chiminey flue because a certain amount of heat is necessary for exhaust,other wise we cannot get the fume out of the furnace.
The best way of harneshing energy in your house is to use passive and non passive solar panels. Their can provide hot water from the sun's radiation and also produce electricity which can be stored in storage devices.

The air conditioner in the summer is the biggest energy eater.
If you put trees around the house the shadow will keep the house cool with out use of air conditioner.

Answer 3

For starters you have the right idea about recovering the heat from the furnace chimney (flue). This is called thermal recovery.

You can feasibly route the flue through a heat exchanger with the incoming water line to pre-heat the water going to the water heater. They have been doing this for years at the industrial level. Sure it only raises it a few degrees but that is less energy that you have to put into it later. The drawback is that you have to add an induction fan to force the flue to exhaust but the fan uses less energy than what you are recovering.

Another thing you can do is instead of having you air conditioner condenser (the thing outside) drawing power for a fan to air cool the coils you could once again have a heat exchanger to pass the heat off into the water system.

Furthermore you have a hot water tank in the house. That alone is a waste of energy. It sits there day in day out keeping water hot that is only used when you do dishes, shower or wash up.

The hot water tank just sits there bleading off heat from the tank and pipes. If you put in a point of use water heater (little thing under the kitchen sink) it only heats the water when there is a demand for hot water. They also make a larger model for a shower and an even larger model so you can have just one unit for your whole house, but the larger the unit gets the less effcient it gets.

For example, if you have a point of use water heater that will heat 2 gallons per miniute (GPM) and you use 2 GPM you are not wasting hot water or the energy to get it hot. If your unit heats 5 GPM and you use 2 GPM you have 3 GPM worth of wasted heating energy.

Meanwhile most people have a 60 gallon tank of hot water they keep hot 24/7/365 and use their hot water supply 1.5 hours per day. This equates to 540 hours of use per year for somthing that is staying hot 8760 hours per year. Talk about waste.

You want to fix energy waste, start at the hot water tank.

To recover the mechanical energy from toilet flushing would require some sort of vanes for the water to push against and they would catch the "solids" let us say, and stop up the facility.

Shower water recovery is possible but I for one want to not have soapy water filled with sluffed off dead skin cells and hairballs spraying in my face. Ichy.

So all in all energy conservation is more efficient with better appliances and habbits rather than trying to recover energy from bad systems for reuse.

Answer 4

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