I should be elated by the 32 pages which the 31 October “New Scientist” devotes to describing nine commercially ready new technologies, all of them electronic, which “are about to change - my - world”.
I’m not elated. I’m depressed, [a] because “my world” is a borrowed-time zone and I'll miss most of the fun, and [b] because only the rich kids in my day had any spare time for hobbies such as making crystal-sets or studying useless subjects like mathematics.
Hence my retreat into chindogu for a while - unuseless inventions superbly baked, Japanese style, but unbaked, halfbakery style.
How about my ENDLESS HOT SHOWER for atarters. One of your two feet, unless you have three, presses rhythmically on a pump pedal. From the pump, water goes up to and through a solar heater area on the roof, gets heated and is piped down to the shower head. It gathers in the shower base from where the foot-pump intake recirculates it.
A header tank with a ball-valve fills or lets the loop empty when you start or stop pumping. All you need is soap, water, a muscular pair of legs - and a solar panel the size of a tennis court on your roof. A sunny day would help too.-- rayfo, Nov 02 2000 I didn't know maths was "useless" I just thought it was "crap".-- imagooAJ, Nov 02 2000 And you need some kind of filter to clean the soapy, dirty, recirculated water. Yuck!-- PotatoStew, Nov 02 2000 Ah yes. Filtering. Let me think of a sufficiently ridiculous way of doing it. I know. Put in line an old-fashioned Alfa-Laval cream separator mounted so the showeree can crank it up to speed with one hand while soaping him or herself and ... hey dual showering is the answer!
One pedzls the pump and the other spins the separator to degunge the water. The "skim" runs to waste. The header tank will replace it so to keep up the heat lost by this dilution the area of solar cells will have to be extended. This can easily be done by building another room thereby increasing the roof area.-- rayfo, Nov 02 2000 Waugsqueke : Your mighty brain will have figured it out before I did. Your partner washes it.-- rayfo, Nov 02 2000 I wouldn't send my grey water through the solar collector. Why do people send fresh water through these rigs anyway? It should be like your car coolent system, full of distilled water and run constantly like you're talking about rayfo. When it's hot enough, use the conserved heat to heat the air or water inside.-- reensure, Nov 02 2000 fogfreak: And where's the fun in that?
A far better solution would be to use solar energy and mirrors to heat the bottom of a column of water, causing the water to rise to the top. A turbine or piston in the pipe would capture the energy of the expanding and rising water, and this turbine could be used to pump the water for the shower.-- pottedstu, Nov 22 2001 Not recommended for people who pee in the shower.
"I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the... ugh! fuck, what the?!... oh, yeah. Shit."-- horripilation, Dec 05 2002 That's a dirty idea.-- sidi, Jan 24 2004 random, halfbakery