Wash Your Clothes Without Water.. or at least 90% less water

Now here is an invention worth blogging about; a washing system that cleans your clothes using 90% less water than a normal washer! This would not only conserve water, but potentially eliminate or minimize drying needs leading to reductions in energy consumption.

The product was actually created by a team of students at the University of Leeds in the UK. The team formed a company called Xeros and hopes to conquer the American market with this hot new invention.

How does it work? While this product is this in the development phases, essentially what it will do is use little nylon beads (to the right) to capture and lock in stains in the molecular structure of the nylon. This product is said to use less detergent and 90% less water, potentially eliminating the need for dryers. These little beads can even be recycled.

What does this mean? Well the company claims this machine would save 1.2 BILLION TONS of water each year, enough to fill 17 million swimming pools. They also claim "if all US homes converted to the Xeros cleaning system, the reduction in carbon footprint is equivalent to taking 5 million cars off American roads."

If you haven't notices, with these new technologies, I have been focusing on costs. Now how much will this product cost you? Well, since it is still in the development phase, there isn't much about the costs of this new system for washing. However, according to the company website this product, should save some $$, 30% of direct operating costs to be specific (according to the company website). I think the image to the left does a great job at displaying the savings. Not only would this save us as consumers money, but it would save the environment as well which is a pretty sexy thing to be doing these days.

Its hard to see a downside in saving water, energy and money. However, who knows how well these will even work? Considering they are still in the testing phases, it is hard to tell. We'll just have to wait and see.

If you want to learn more about these products visit the Xeros' website.

Powermat: the crazy charger that lets you go cordless

Back to my Technical Entrepreneurship project my group kept telling me about some mat that charges everything without a need to plug in those devices. Having never heard of this, I decided I was going to figure out what all the fuss was about. Essentially, when you plug in this mat that acts as a charging station (with a small price tag of around $75) you can set any device on it to charge, providing you have purchased a Powermat receiver (about $25 on Amazon.com). So for about $100 you will never need to plug  your phone in again? This sounds like the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of. I guess you would never have to worry about loosing your charger but really.. 100 bucks to charge a device?? Obviously someone thinks this thing is worth it because the company is still in business but we will see for how long.

Another concern I have is how much energy do these things take to 1)power themselves-since they are always plugged in and 2) power other devices? I couldn't find much online about their energy consumption but it would seem like this thing could be a power eating machine. What have you guys heard about these things?

To watch a video about what this can do follow this link.

Personal Energy Generator? This sounds familiar..

As I was searching for an article about a cool new invention, I came across this bad boy.

You are probably asking yourself.. what the help is that weird stick looking thing with a frog on it? Well it is actually called nPower® PEG and what it does is harvest kinetic energy. Why I found this so interesting is because of one of the projects we did for my Technical Entrepreneurship class. It dealt with making something that normally ran on the grid, work without connection to the grid. My group threw around the idea of using kinetic energy to create power but didn't get anywhere with it. They advertise it by saying "have power everywhere you go".

I have two main concerns about this patented technology.

One: how accessible is it going to be to the general public? Are the prices for these things going to be threw the roof? 

Two: Even if there is a way to make this affordable, is it really going to produce that much power? On the website it claims 10 minutes of walking produces a measly 1 minute of talk time on an iPhone 3G. How much walking does someone really do in a day? I would like to guess that they use their phone a lot more than do whatever this little thing needs to produce energy. The only place I see this actually working would be during long hiking/running/biking trips when connection to an outlet is limited.

To read more click here. 

Let me know your thoughts on this new product.

Harvesting Energy in Unusual Ways

So over the last few weeks one of my group projects called for an invention that would make something that normally uses electricity and make it work without connection to the grid. The whole class came up with amazing creations such as a shaker flashlight, bike powered blender, and sun powered night lights to name a few. My group decided to go with a more unique approach. We wanted our project to be almost a 'light bulb' for people, to draw attention to the energy we are unintentionally creating each day and how it could be harvested.

Our idea is called "The Revolving Revolution" and it works by spinning a revolving door and using that motion to store energy to power things. This could be used anywhere there are revolving doors or turnstiles. In a nut shell it works by rotating gears as the door spins which are hooked up to a generator that powers a rechargeable battery. Then we have a switch where we can turn a light, powered by the revolving door, on and off using energy that would have other wise been lost.

In reality, it isn't going to power a house for all day long and save massive amounts of energy. But this could spark ideas for other free power alternatives, and all the energy saved would add up!

Visit our website to learn more and submit your e-mail if you like our idea!