Basically, I noticed that the room was heating significantly when I turned it on. Way faster than what you should expect from its power usage (about 250W avg.).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but by converting air moisture to liquid water using a compressor, the dehumidifier is releasing the latent energy of water vapor (0.627Wh/L) in addition to its own energy usage.
I measured that my dehumidifier required +/- 1kW/h to get 1L of liquid water from the room. This it's overall heating efficiency is about 1.6x, which is way better than any electric heating system that is not an heat-pump.
We live by the coast, so we have a few small dehumidifiers for mold prevention but have not been using them much. I am going to test this out and see if it works. I don't particularly mind bundling up, but the toddler can't make it through the night with the blankets on. So if this does work, seems like it would be the perfect solution.
The latent heat does get released, but the question is, where does it go?
In an air conditioner, which also condenses water vapor from the air, the heat released goes into the refrigerant, which means it ultimately gets put into the atmosphere outside from the condenser.
A dehumidifier is basically an air conditioner without an outside unit, so the heat from the condensation of water vapor goes into the refrigerant, but then gets put into the room from the condenser, instead of outside.
That is why it can feel less cold when temperatures fall lower than 0 degrees Celsius (32 Fahrenheit): Most of the moisture in the air becomes solid and falls to the ground.
Don't we all love those wet cold days?
I assume it would only work well in places where there are significant humidity swings, I didn't read the paper very carefully though.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/adma.202300...
Not sure what you mean, Watt already has a unit of time in it.
Some kind of energy harvesting device that could generate a few milliwatts in ambient indoor conditions would be very useful. We have lots of things with AA batteries in them that use very little power but need a new battery every year or so. That's the potential here. This isn't going to replace oil.
A another common unit for energy is kWh (kilowatt.hour)
A kilowatt generator can produce one kWh/h (by definition)
But if there’s that much latent energy, I really have to think that there could be some kind of atmospheric, “local ecological” side effect on microorganisms or “something” at scale. It’s not like nature lets massive amounts of energy go completely unused.
In fact, an Air-gen device made from protein nanowires, which was kept in the ambient environment for over 3 years, still produced a similar voltage output ...These time spans are much longer than the typical hydration time, supporting the sustainable mechanism based on a dynamic equilibrium ... The Air-gen device is not a “perpetual motion engine”, because the energy comes from the electrostatic energy (not kinetic one) of discrete water molecules in a vast open source.
Does this mean that the energy they're harvesting is a result of imparting a charge on otherwise neutrally charged water molecules, but because it's infinitesimally small compared with the "vast source", you can disregard any net effect from the perspective of the harvester?
If so, this doesn't feel "right", because this implies that a charged particle's state is at a lower energy state than a neutral one. If that were so, wouldn't the universe tend to that lower energy state by default?
Again, I'd appreciate if someone could tell me where the energy is supposed to be coming from, because "TANSTAAFL" seems to be being violated here.
Presumably it doesn't instantaneously happen due to insulating effects in the air.
Of course it is fairly weak, but it is continuous and simple. There has to be uses for it.
What does this mean? Was this written by AI that can't distinguish between a physical footprint and a figurative carbon one?
