can this produce useful electric energy?

[justcurioustwo]

file:///C:/Users/Tom/Desktop/SeaEngine/SEAPOWER48.jpg
Once all the bubbles are full of air, all you need to do is fill the lowest one to keep all the other air bubbles pulling together multiplying the upward force.

 

[brianmoooore]

Heat pumps certainly work, but they're not "getting anything for nothing".
They work by cooling the outside air and transferring that heat inside. Fortunately there's a lot of 'outside', so a bit of cooling is not a problem.

 

[DPG]

Heat pumps certainly work, but they're not "getting anything for nothing".
They work by cooling the outside air and transferring that heat inside. Fortunately there's a lot of 'outside', so a bit of cooling is not a problem.

Absolutely.

For anyone interested in perpetual motion I recommend having a read of Joseph Newman's stuff. Prepare to be entertained but ultimately disappointed (obviously). Much of his idea relied on flywheels of increasing weight - I imagine by now he must have one that weighs the same as a small planet!

 

[oscar21]

Heat pumps might work in theory but so do a lot of things, I've yet to see one that works at all without costing the owner an absolute fortune in electric.

There was an estate near to me called the Stamford Brook estate in Altrincham that was supposedly the next big thing in cheap heating using these things, it turned out so bad it made it all the way to parliament. People that rented were just upping sticks and leaving after a couple of months of electric bills, it was cheaper for them to pay the outstanding rent that it was the electric bill.

Then there is my plumber mate, he wants to get into installing heat pumps so made his own home the "show" job you need to provide. Massive extension all done to the latest regs with UFH and insulation everywhere, the rest of the house brought up to latest regs, new windows, insulation etc. The most sophisticated heat pump set up I've ever seen yet still he has to constantly put the immersion on to get anywhere near a suitable temperature needed.

He should have asked me for advice - if you are using the air from outside to heat your home, if its cold outside then its going to be cold inside, shouldn't take a genius to work that one out.

 

[brianmoooore]

Heat pumps might work in theory but so do a lot of things, I've yet to see one that works at all without costing the owner an absolute fortune in electric.
.

The powers that be rely on you hearing or reading one thing, but thinking something entirely different.
Heat pumps are very efficient. That does not mean they are cheap to run, and while the price of electricity is many times the price per unit of oil or gas, they won't be.

 

[Julie.]

The powers that be rely on you hearing or reading one thing, but thinking something entirely different.
Heat pumps are very efficient. That does not mean they are cheap to run, and while the price of electricity is many times the price per unit of oil or gas, they won't be.

Exactly!

We have a couple of air conditioning units - which are basically heat pumps, they do provide heating and cooling in both hot and cold conditions - certainly capable of maintaining any normal room temperature that we may desire - too cold in the summer, and too hot in the winter if we really want to.

And they do this for considerably lower kWhr or BTU than our boiler, but at a much higher cost due to the cost of electricity vs gas.

As such we use them only when really needed: cooling in the summer (the boiler doesn't do that), and a couple of times when the boiler went wrong!

 

[littlespark]

Just look at any 1980’s era storage heater.
Said to be 100% efficient, because all that electric energy is turned to heat….. just not let out exactly when you want it.

Efficient, but not effective.

 

[brianmoooore]

.. just not let out exactly when you want it.

Efficient, but not effective.

In my experience, there were an awful lot of mechanical time switches out there that had mysteriously stopped for about 14 hours or so, and then, equally mysteriously, restarted themselves.