My buddy Scott is saving $3000 a year on his energy bill

If you want to get bullish on America all you need to do is think about all the little guys coming up with ways to save on their energy bills. Well we have a genius buddy (a bit on the nutty side) that has been stringing together his wild ideas and is now saving more than $3000 annually on his home energy bills. Here is how he is air conditioning his house using solar energy and lake water.


My buddy Scott runs hot water under his floors for heat, turns lake water into air conditioning, and he is curently building an electric car. If we can get some people to send this blog post around the Internet and get some comments about this post, I think we can convince him to start writing this stuff up and sharing it with the world. Oh yeah, he also built a rear projection TV for a fraction of the cost.

The main body of this post (below) about how Scott air conditioned his house using lake water is actually an email. As such, Scott just typed this off the top of his head in answer to a question, How did you do it? It is a bit choppy.

Here ya go, how Scott air conditioned his house using lake water. Please feel free to comment and share this with others.

Basically, I went over to the MSU (Michigan State University) salvage yard where the university sells any junk they want to get rid of. I happen to see two humungus heat exchangers sitting their in a wooden crate. I asked the guy and he said they were brand new "never used". Just ordered and then sent for salvage. Knowing that they were filled with copper, I offered the guy a few bucks to get them out of his pile of junk. What I paid for them, versus what they are worth if I just hauled them down to the copper recycler was about 8 times my money. However, I am not in it for the cash, so I stuck them in the ductwork of my furnace. I found a Solar powered pump ($84), and hooked it up to a Solar panel (Bobby D is working on a Chinese supplier for the best prices), and dug a hole in the ground, deep enough to get 55 degree water.

(If you live on a lake, you want to get the water from below 10 feet). Heck, even Kevin knows from drinking polluted lake water in New York, the water gets colder deeper down. [Hopefully, Kevin will do some research and learn about all the US Naval experiments which were done in the Finger Lakes in the 40s and 50s. Some very nasty chemicals in those waters.]

So the sun shines, and the pump moves the 55 degree water through a pipe (aka hose), through the heat exchangers, and then you dump it wherever you want to (like in the sewer, or in your yard, etc). Heck, it is only 1 gallon per minute. Or you could do something really "cool" with it (get the pun?) Warning: big name Blog material coming up next.

HydroKool Systems

You take the "waste" water and run it up and spray it on the roof. I learned this from my friends on the island of Grand Cayman. If you bounce around the islands, like Jamaica, St. Thomas, etc. you will learn these cooling tricks. But you need to rub elbows with the big "movers and shakers" of NYC who have the huge yachts down there, like those people Bobby D knows.

So the cold, 55 degree water, meets the warm air in your house. The result is that the hot air becomes cold and the cold water becomes hot. I think I learned that part from watching that TV show "Are you smarter than a 5th grader". A solar fan spins and sends the cold air up to replace the hot air which came down the duct. Now as long as the sun shines, everything moves along nicely. If you are really serious, you just hook up a $78 battery instead, and have the battery power everything, and just use the solar panels to charge the batteries. Then you can run it during the night. However, if you learn about the moon, it doesn't really heat your house at night, so if you really keep you house cool during the day, it is OK to sleep all night while the system is NOT running.

Of course, the engineers at Siemens already know all of this stuff. I guess they are a lot like the car companies. They go around and buy up any systems which will reduce the gas consumption of your vehicle and "deep-six" it. You have all heard those true stories about the little guy who made an amazing carburetor in his garage, just to have Ford step in and buy it up...never to be seen again.

Any way ... I got to go. Some team from Carrier is at my door offering me $238 to stop writing about total nonsense.

Got to go!!

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