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> "Kamen believes that aside from mansion owners, the Beacon 10 is just right for businesses like laundries or restaurants that use a lot of hot water. With com

by Crito 12y ago

> "Kamen believes that aside from mansion owners, the Beacon 10 is just right for businesses like laundries or restaurants that use a lot of hot water. With commercialization partner NRG Energy, he’s so far deployed roughly 20 of the machines." If the primary use for a potential customer is going to be heating water, essentially doing heat->generator->electricity->heat->water, how is this a good idea? Surely people who want to heat lots of water would do better if they cut out the middlemen and just did heat->water. Of course electricity is more versatile than hot water, but if your primary focus is on heating lots of water and you are already committed to making heat yourself, it seems senseless to me to not just apply the heat directly to the water.

lutorm 12y ago
The hot water is a byproduct, you don't use the electricity for it.
fryguy 12y ago
I think the idea is that you're heating up water anyways [for laundry/dishwashers], you might as well get power out of it. It's kind of the same principle as if you're using an electric heater, you might as well run a bunch of bitcoin miners that generate heat to lower the amount the heater has to be on, since they're both resistive loads. And with the miners, you get some coin as well.
tsotha 12y ago
They wouldn't be using electricity to heat the water. Of course you would end up using less gas if you just heated the water directly like most of us already do for our morning shower. The efficiency of any heat engine depends on the gradient between the input and output temperature. So if you have a constant supply of cold water the Stirling engine can operate very efficiently, and the cold water becomes hot water which you can use for other things. Of course, like I said, this is true of any heat engine. You can do the same thing by heating a boiler and using the steam to drive a turbine, which also generates waste heat for other things.

by Crito 12y ago

lutorm 12y ago

The hot water is a byproduct, you don't use the electricity for it.

fryguy 12y ago

I think the idea is that you're heating up water anyways [for laundry/dishwashers], you might as well get power out of it. It's kind of the same principle as if you're using an electric heater, you might as well run a bunch of bitcoin miners that generate heat to lower the amount the heater has to be on, since they're both resistive loads. And with the miners, you get some coin as well.

tsotha 12y ago

They wouldn't be using electricity to heat the water. Of course you would end up using less gas if you just heated the water directly like most of us already do for our morning shower. The efficiency of any heat engine depends on the gradient between the input and output temperature. So if you have a constant supply of cold water the Stirling engine can operate very efficiently, and the cold water becomes hot water which you can use for other things. Of course, like I said, this is true of any heat engine. You can do the same thing by heating a boiler and using the steam to drive a turbine, which also generates waste heat for other things.