These are two very dapper looking gentlemen. I wondered how a friction heater works, and his method was basically a metal tube with a spinning core of wood that produced the friction. Apparently, it could heat a house. Wikipedia mentions he started a company with this idea.
kind of makes sense to turn wind or hydro energy into heat for cheap. they can easily pump out several kW of power. Definitely cheaper than an electric system.
But it would probably be more mainanance free if you used some sort of fluid to generate the heat. Like spinning a propeller in water not to move water, but to generate heat. Or whatever shape is most efficient at turning rotational energy into heat. ““Tesla turbine”” would be pretty simple and cheap to construct, perhaps it could work.
If you use a vertical wind turbine, you could have it all on one shaft, have an insulated hot water tank on the bottom where the rotational energy is converted into heat.
Kind of like this except not so wonky and you probably would have some copper pipe coils to extract the heat.
You could even have a wax motor or something that automatically passively turns the turbine off if the water gets too hot.
Of course, you would have to work it all out so it all works with your average wind speeds while delivering usable heating power.
You could also do it with induction heating instead of a fluid, like glue a bunch of magnets to the shaft and turn it in a metal tube. But then you might as well have an electric generator attached, considering the cost of those materials.
Lets say you need 1000kWh per coldest winter month in a 100m² apartment, then you’d need about 1500W of continuous power production. The capacity factor of wind turbines is ~30%, so let’s say you’d need about a 5000W wind turbine to heat year home during winter.
So you would need something at least that big. Perhaps you would need like 3 of these, depending on how efficient you are at turning the rotation into heat.
There has got to be some major flaw here, I wonder why this isn’t a more common use of wind power.
You can skip all the costs of expensive electric motors/electrics, you don’t need a seperate hot water tank. The energy is abundantly available, it works in winter. All the friction “losses” in the bearings in the tank actually increase your efficiency lmao. If you have the windspeeds to make it work, it seems like a no brainer.
The biggest loss is probably where the shaft enters the hot water heater.
