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The burning of wood is considered CO2-neutral because it releases the same amount of carbon that it absorbed during its life as a tree.
The CO2 put out by people debating the subject is probably worse than what that small wood fire puts out once or twice a week.
The Gravia lamp does not and will not work:
http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2008/03/03/stop-pr...
http://sustainabledesignupdate.com/?p=626
#2 Uses ELECTROmagnets or electric motors to spin permanent magnets and thus is not off the grid. It even has a television in the door!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigera...
#3 Was invented in the 1800s and is called a French Press.
#4 Is complete nonfunctional. The designer never did the math on it. With the most efficient LEDs it would last about two or three seconds as the weight fell to the floor.
#5 Actually a pretty good idea. Doubt it would have a good flash, but a simple digital camera wouldn't use much power. You will still need to get the photo off it, but you could have a solar powered printer I guess.
#6 Is just a normal bit of light storing green stuff stuck to a light bulb. Totally not off the grid. Plus it would block light while the light bulb is on actually reducing the effectiveness of it.
#7 Might work but I don't know how much charging you could actually get off it.
Sorry to ruin the list.
even if the total wattage was 1W you would still need to lift 1Kg 240m or 240Kg 1m
But that CO2 will be almost carbon-neutral if you're burning wood - in other words, it's biogenic as opposed to anthropogenic.
If you're worried about impacts from it, I'd concentrate on VOC's, PAH's and TCDD's. More pertinent than CO2.
2.) The "magnetic fridge" is a sham without a basis in any legitimate science.
3.) The espresso machine is cool if you like your coffee cold, I guess.
4.) The Gravia floor lamp has never been built and the concept is also a sham.
5.) the Twist Camera hasn't been built either.
6.) The "energy-free lighting" is just a CFL bulb with a chunk of glow-in-the-dark plastic on it.
7.) And the kinetic energy charger has also never been built and probably wont work effectively
Now what is the innovation here?
I agree that the woodburning jacuzzi is a bad idea for the reasons stated by the previous commentor. My favorite is the Kinetic energy charger. Way to go!
Or were you making a funny?
The floor lamps seems like the wrong numbers intuitively to anyone who's ever powered a light bulb using a bicycle. I know the lamps use LEDs, which are more efficient, but you have work pretty hard to generate just a few watts, so either that weight is very heavy or it wouldn't last very long.
Sincerely
Denise
Burning wood can be counted as zero comission in cardon dioxide and quite green because the carbon has gone in to the wood in the woods lifecykle and is a renewable source of energy. On the other hand if you would use normal electricity to heat up the bath tub, then the energy could come exsample from coal or oil and then the carbon emission would be plus, because that carbon has been tied up to earth and would not come back to atmoshpehere in normal way eventualy. Ofcourse if you are using wood, then you should also take care that you are growing at least the same amount that you are using. But that tub invention is mutch older, It basicly the same type as japaniese people use, but lousier tecnical desing. Mutch of the heat will go unused because of the type of the fireplace.
I too remeber that I´ve read that the Gravia lamp doesent work as they are promising and the fridge has some problems too.
The only item I would disagree with is your statement that burning wood releases loads of carbon dioxide. While this is true, it is carbon neutral environmentally speaking. That carbon was captured from the atmosphere during the growth of the tree therefore the net change is zero. The issue with fossil fuels is that burning them releases carbon that was taken out of the global equation long ago.
Also, the Twist Camera is a concept, which you should probably make more clear. And it's a fairly poor concept at that - how can you twist the end when that's where the USB plug is?
Personally I love this hot tub and the design is so simple and effective it's genuinely elegant.
The only true cause of global warming due to burning things is the burning of fossil fuels.
Think of the carbon in all the CO2 and flora and fauna and humans as one great big number that's been divided into what makes up all life. Well, a hefty enough portion of that number was stored underground with the fossilized plants and dinosaurs and over time became crude oil. So with, say (and this is a random number) only 60% of the carbon above Earth's surface today, we're at a low. We've adapted to the 60% carbon Earth and the burning of biomass (any living oraganisms including wood) just takes from that 60% and puts it into the same place. Meaning no fluctuation of greenhouse gases. The extraction of this (hypothetical)40% of carbon as crude oil and then burning it is slowly pouring that 40% back into the atmosphere and aboveground environment. So we're technically bringing ourselves back to 100% of original carbon. As you probably know the dinosaurs lived in a pretty much world wide tropical climate, so that's what we're headed towards again.
SO ANYWAY, my point is that burning wood does absolutely nothing against the environment. Only taking carbon from the fossil fuels does.
IF I MAY ADD..and here I have no actual idea, but for the refridgerator: Now, this is definitely not off the grid, cuz any magnet powerful enough to start cooling needs an electrical source.
Basically the tub is off the grid and short of moving to a volcanically active area it's as close as you're going to get to a "green" hot tub. I suppose you could use solar, but then there's the question of how much pollution is generated in making the setup to generate heat at night from a solar system.
Also, you may think I'm being too picky, but carbon dioxide isn't a buzzword, it's a gas and it has been around for a long time. It seems to me to be rather foolish to diminish a global problem by calling it a "buzzword".
cc
I'm totally with Dave on the Fridge. As mundane as it seems, it could be the most significant break through on this page. If the power usage of each fridge was reduced by 60%, it would go a long way to reducing household power usage.
Oh, and please, use your DutchTubs responsibly.
Your right about the fridge though, that would be awesome, wonder how that works...
The DutchTub actually is greener than a "normal" tub where the water is finally heated via fossil fuels like oil or gas, may it be directly or indirectly via electricity. But by using wood, which actually grew by absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere you are not really increasing the total CO2 circulating in the system. You're right though with all the other crappy metals and sulfur or nitrogen compounds that's a not so nice side effect of most fires...
The gravi-lamp has been thoroughly debunked. Quick back-of-the-envelope calculations show that it could not possibly produce more than a few minutes worth of light. It's designer (Clay Moulton, a student at Virginia Tech) has admitted that he never did the calculations to support its claims, and has recanted them. Unfortunately, the contest judges didn't do their homework either before giving the award.
Most climatologists are saying that the next 20 years are going to be the critical ones as far as the greenhouse effect is concerned. Therefore, burning a tree whose carbon won't be re-captured for at least 20 years is as bad as burning coal.
But carbon dioxide is only one form of pollution. It's one that has gone completely unnoticed for so long that we let it build up too much and now we are panicking about it but that doesn't mean that all the other sorts of pollution don't matter. Wood smoke contains carbon monoxide and loads of tiny carcinogenic particles. These don't have the same long term effect on the climate but they have a far more direct effect on our personal health.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-13-...
http://www.lungusa.org/site/c.dvLUK9O0E/b.23354...
http://burningissues.org/car-www/index.html
http://www.epa.gov/woodstoves/healthier.html
http://www.epa.gov/woodstoves/refp.html
The magnetic fridge link has gone 404 but I found a couple of articles about the technology:
http://www.physorg.com/news64851465.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/dec/1...
Unfortunately the articles are a little old but the spin-off company that was created to start manufacturing the fridges looks to still be doing things:
http://www.camfridge.com/Pages/news.html
Imagine a 100 story sky scraper. By comparrison the amount of co2 in our atmosphere would equate to the WAX covering the tile in the first floor of said sky scraper.
The propertys of the gas are important, and its effects can outweigh its ratio. In Co2's case, its because it reflects heat in ways water vapour does not.
Here's another tidbit for you... when Mt Pinatubo blew it spewed more shit into the atmosphere in two days than man ever has or ever will. We are still here, aren't we?
Again, co2 is at best a trace gas. Get over it. Study sun spot cycles and clue yourself in.
The effect that water vapor has on the heat reflected towards and away from the surface of earth is so massive that if there was no water vapor in the atmosphere our planet would be approximately 31 degrees Celsius BELOW our current temperature! This is resultant because at the wavelengths that thermal radiation travels at (between 3,000nm and 100,000nm) water vapor is practically opaque! That means that the said thermal radiation would reflect off of it the majority of the time.
On the other hand if all Carbon Dioxide was removed from the atmosphere of our planet the temperature would drop by a much smaller amount, approximately 15 degrees Celsius. This is because Carbon Dioxide is relatively transparent at the wavelengths of thermal radiation.
I mean at least look at Wikipedia if your going to pretend to know what your saying. Second section of the global warming entry it gives a breakdown of the effect of the effects of different greenhouse gasses. I wish you people would at least make have a try at getting your facts straight.
sorry 1.5 degrees Celsius not 15 degrees Celsius.
If we assume that 1 story = 10 ft, a typical handwave, then a 100 story building is about 1000 feet and as Google will show you, (0.038%) * 1000 feet = 4.56 inches, and 0.038% is the percentage of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. Personally, I'd avoid any buildings with four and a half inches of wax on the floor.
If I told you once, I told you a million times... don't exaggerate.
So the wax analogy is about right.
Burning wood is MUCH more green than burning coal, as wood is a renewable resource. The CO2 released into the air is taken up by trees which are then burned again. It's cyclical, meaning it has virtually zero footprint.
This is assuming the trees are grown at a rate matching the rate of burning, which is more and more becoming the case. Logging companies are beginning to log only new growth forests which they then replace. Coal on the other hand, takes millenia to replenish. If we were burning the coal at the rate it was being produced, it would also be zero footprint. This is obviously impossible for us to do with our current energy consumption.
When you use electricity there is an 80% chance that energy came from fossil fuels that were harvested from below the earth. When you burn wood the source is a co2 absorbing tree. There for the wood is far more green because it is offset by a tree that absorbed all the carbon that it took to make that wood...