Kevin Warnock

Takagi brand tankless water heater

On my bus conversion I plan to have two propane water heaters. These will be low flow on demand models that can heat up to 1.6 gallons per minute. That’s plenty in a vehicle where water should be carefully conserved.

There are two main styles of on demand water heaters in this low flow category.

The first style is vented to the outside via a chimney, just like most on demand and tank style gas water heaters.

The second style, so called vent free, is not vented to the outside. This means all the combustion gasses stay inside, just like when you use an unvented gas fireplace or a Mr. Heater Buddy space heater.

The vent free propane water heaters cost slightly more than conventional vented on demand water heaters. Presumably the extra expense is to pay for the safety features not found on the vented models. The ventfree water heaters have a low oxygen sensor that will shut off the gas flow if there is insufficient oxygen for proper combustion. Improper combustion can produce more deadly carbon monoxide gas, which can kill you if it builds in concentration.

I am happy to pay more for safety. I already have a carbon monoxide detector on board since I use a Mr. Heater Buddy heater while I continue the build out of the interior. That heater also has a low oxygen sensor like the unvented water heater.

About a week ago I had what I think is a bright idea:

Install both vented and unvented water heaters routinely in all buildings that offer hot water to their users.

The reason this is a good idea is that both types of water heaters transfer only a portion of the heat they produce to the water passing through them. The rest of the heat either goes up the chimney or into the room depending on if the heater is vented or vent free.

When it’s cold enough outside that heat is required indoors, then it would be wise to use the vent free on demand water heater. Part of the heat will heat the water, and all the remaining heat will be deposited into the living quarters with the same 99%+ efficiency as if the gas were burned in an vent free fireplace.

When it’s warm enough outside that air conditioning is required indoors, then it would be wise to use the vented on demand water heater. Part of the heat will heat the water, and most of the rest of the heat will be sent up the chimney and out of the air conditioned space, saving electricity that would otherwise be needed to remove the surplus heat from a vent free water heater.

This could be complicated to set up and control, but not if one does the following small amount of extra work.

Run separate hot water lines from each water heater to the fixtures. Under the counter where the faucet valves are, install a three way valve before the hot water faucet valve.

Buy two faucets, and make sure they are the kind where you drill three holes in the counter top and mount three separate parts into their respective holes. Such faucets are called widespread faucets.

You’ll want two faucets because you will need nice looking matching knobs for my system. You’ll need to modify the second hot water valve and handle so that the part that’s above the counter line is unchanged, but the part that’s below the counter line will be mated to the three way valve I specified above.

This extra knob will control which on demand water heater is used when you turn on the hot water. If you set the three way valve to position A, then the vented water heater will be used and the vent free heater will stay off. If you set the three valve to position B, then the vented water heater will stay off and the vent free heater will be used.

If you need a greater amount of hot water, you could put the three way valve in its middle position, which would cause both water heaters to be used simultaneously.

This proposed system gives built in redundancy in case one heater fails.

Such a system would work for houses and offices as well, with a big benefit for water savings. Vent free water heaters only deliver 1.6 gallons of water per minute, so this would limit how much hot water a user can waste. If users insist on mimicing the flow of a normal tank style water heater, more than one 1.6 gallon per minute vent free water heater could be installed in parallel such that they would all start when the hot water faucet is turned on. That is provided code permits this, of course.

Both styles of water heater are available in propane and natural gas versions, so what I suggest here can be applied to all manner of installations, providing of course that building codes where you are permit such a system. Here’s a natural gas traditionally vented model that at the time of this writing sells for USD $175.99.

I care about such efficiency because I am building my bus conversion to be a model of efficiency. For example, I am installing triple pane windows with steel insulated window shades, for a total of 5 unbroken surfaces separating the indoors from the outside when the shades are drawn at night. I am also installing 8 inches of foam insulation on the roof, for an R rating of almost 60. I am hoping to be able to heat and cool the interior just with solar energy. I will have the propane water heaters on board for use when it’s too cloudy to warm enough water with the rooftop solar hot water collectors I plan to build.

Compressed Air Energy Storage. Graphic from http://treehugger.com.

Today solar and wind plants sometimes provide round the clock output by using daytime power from the sun to pump water up hill to a resevoir, which is then allowed to flow downhill through turbines at night to generate electricity. This takes space and water, which probably makes it unworkable at home. This form of energy storage is called Pumped Hydro Energy Storage.

There is also another storage method called Compressed Air Energy Storage, which works like it sounds — air is compressed with solar energy and the compressed air is used later to run a turbine to generate electricity. I can see that working for industrial scale systems, but for home use I see it as being too noisy, given the racket my Harbor Freight air compressor makes filling an eight gallon tank. I wonder how noisy the residential Honda natural gas compressors are to fill your compressed natural gas Civic automobile in your home garage? I bet they’re not silent.

What I propose is to lift rocks or sand with solar or wind generated electricity. Then, when the sun is down or the wind is calm, lower the rocks or sand back down and have the cable spin a highly geared generator to make electricity. The mechanics of this would seem to be similar to what’s been developed for electric vehicles with their regenerative braking systems. In such systems, a heavy car is brought up to speed at great cost in energy, and when the driver steps on the brakes, that energy is harvested and put back into the on board batteries where the energy was earlier, before the driver stepped on the accelerator. An elevator of weights in the backyard or basement would work similarly, and would be far less complex to design and build than an electric vehicle, I suspect. The most complicated part would probably be figuring out how to pull large irregular amounts of electricity out of the system, to run a hair dryer for a couple of minutes, for example. Since houses draw power almost all the time, the weight would always be in motion, but ever so slowly if the only load was a few electric clocks at night during moderate weather when neither heat or air conditioning is needed.

My friend Jim Castelaz over at the very cool startup Motiv Power Systems has a lot of very smart engineers working on electric power systems for buses, and I suspect any of them could figure out in minutes if this blog post has any merit. I simply don’t know how to calculate how big a weight would be needed to store enough energy to be practical. What I do strongly suspect however is that this is not far fetched. Sure the weight may need to be 100 tons, but so what? That’s not going to dent the earth, and since sand can be used, the weight can be carried in via wheel barrow if needed, by one person.

The big benefit of this is that the efficiency would not decline like with batteries, and such a system could last for decades with proper maintenance, like elevators do in buildings. Also, there are few environmental hazards with such a system. No explosive gasses emitted during ‘charging.’ No chance of explosion. No chance of getting acid burns. No worry if the system freezes. Easy to understand and repair. Easy to manufacture. I love it.

There is also no issue with an idle system losing power just sitting there. So this could also work for backup power for data centers. Seems far easier to engineer than huge concrete flywheels on the roof like I’ve heard about.

Maybe ocean shipping conainers could be used as the energy storage elevator cars. How much would a container with sand weigh, anyway? Would it burst from the load if you tried to lift it by the lifting points? How much trouble would it be to reinforce a container to handle the weight if it were filled with sand?

I love this idea, which I had while falling asleep November 23, 2011 at 1:45am and I wrote up minutes later on my blog so I would not forget it. I finished refining and editing this post today, December 20, 2011, when I made it public to my readers.

It turns out I’m not the first to think of storing electricity via lifting weights. Have a look at this educational piece from a website that describes itself as about primitive Christianity. Here’s a discussion about using weights hanging from an ocean seasteading platform. Here’s an even more thoughtful analysis from someone who also independently thought of doing this. Finally, here is a presentation by Gravity Power Storage which is proposing to build utility scale versions of what I describe here, with 2,000 ton weights storing megawatts. I came up with this idea independently. While I could have discarded this post upon discovering lots of other prior work in this field, as shown by these links, I am publishing it anyway because I am proud to have independently developed this idea, and I think it deserves more attention. It looks like Gravity Power Storage has concluded I am not nuts. Thank you.

The idea of storing energy in heavy weights is so elementary I suspect this idea dates to soon after the harnessing of electricity by man. What I want to know is whether my idea is practical. If it is, why has it not been implemented more widely?

Yes, in much of the United States, the power utilities are required to buy any electricity you make and then sell it back to you when and if you need it. This makes the power company into nearly a perfect battery that sidesteps the energy losses inherent in chemical battery storage.

But what if we could get rid of electricity companies over time? Do we really need to have electricity companies? If we cover the roofs of our homes with solar photovoltaic panels and switch to electric bicycles and live close to our jobs, perhaps there would be no need to import electricity from afar.

Sure, my system as described would cost over USD $10,000, even in quantity. But so does a swimming pool, and there are plenty of those around, with many sitting idle most of the time. A pool also requires a big hole in the ground, so there are lots of hole digging experts around. A pool of water probably weighs 100 tons, so such a huge weight at home has been routinely handled for centuries. The alternators and inverters required by my idea are commodities. Elevator mechanisms are commodities. Tying everything together will take some expertise that needs to be developed, but I don’t see any insurmountable challenges.

Again, a system like I describe will have a long and relatively trouble free life span. Such systems probably can store enough power to last a week provided electricity use is cut to what an off grid solar house uses today. All houses ought to cut down their usage to such levels, even without adding the on site storage component. There are very efficient appliances out there already. Heating can be done with solar hot water collectors. Everything needed has been invented and is already made at scale.

If what I write about is practical, let’s just implement it already. Cheap and efficient electricity storage is a market likely to be worth tens of billions of dollars. This is exciting enough that I could be persuaded to work on this full time. If you’re an engineer, please run some numbers and let me know what you conclude.

1.5" diameter drain fitting on the left and a 4" diameter drain pipe fitting on the right. Photo from http://scorevalve.com/

On January 27, 2011 I wrote a post suggesting people could live a more comfortable retirement if they stopped frittering away their money by buying necessities in quantities far smaller than made sense. The example I used was dental floss. We all need it, but we typically buy it in tiny little packages that we have to keep buying every couple of months forever.

This is stupid.

It would be far better to buy a roll of dental floss the size of a softball and have it last for a decade. Think about how many plastic containers for dental floss you’ve thrown out over the years and multiply that number by billions. That’s a lot of plastic containers.

Another product the world almost universally buys in too small a size is waste water pipe.

In the United States and all the other countries I’ve visited, the diameter of the drain pipes under the sinks, bathtubs and showers is about 1.5 inches. This is too small for our own good. Because of this small size, there is a section in every grocery and hardware store that I know of where I can purchase caustic chemicals that I am instructed to pour down the drain and into our water supply. Think of the huge tanker trucks of this drain ‘cleaner’ just slobbering their contents into our water treatments plants every day of the year. Yuck!

We buy these nasty products that will burn out your esophogous if you drink it because building codes call for drainage pipe that is too narrow in diameter to not get clogged up periodically.

I don’t know if it was a giant conspiracy between Mister Plumber and Joe the Plumber, his colleagues and their ancestors, or if nobody has seriously considered the societal benefits of super sizing the world’s drain pipes. Super sizing your meal is bad. Super sizing your plumbing is good.

But consider this: When was the last time the pipe connected to your toilet needed to be unplugged by anyone? I’ll bet the answer for 99.9% of the population is ‘never.’

Sure, the toilet trap can get stopped up pretty easily, but a USD $7.99 toilet plunger or a USD $8.78 toilet auger can take care of that for no incremental cost. The toilet user can clear the obstruction without pouring caustic chemicals into our water supplies.

But the 4 inch diameter pipe in the floor that carries the toilet waste away almost never gets clogged. Sure, there are truly rare situations like a tree root breaking into an old ceramic pipe in the backyard. But generally, a 4″ pipe is very hard to clog up with household or human waste. Here’s a video showing common drain pipe and how to calculate how much to slant the pipe so it drains properly.

What I propose is the the plumbing codes be modified planet wide so that only 4″ or larger pipe is used for all drains. It’s that simple. Problem solved. Billions saved over time. When can I schedule my TED talk?

Probably half the service calls of plumbers are to unclog drains. I can’t imagine any plumbers like this monotonous work. They can do something more fulfilling in life with their newfound spare time. Sure, many plumbers would go out of business, just like many buggy whip manufacturers went out of business. It’s a good thing to eliminate dumb repetative work, and cleaning drains century after century is certainly dumb when the solution is so easy and cheap.

Think of the brilliance of putting in 4″ drains under sinks, bathtubs and shower stalls. If you drop your engagement ring in there, just reach your hand in an pluck it out yourself. No need to dismantle the trap when you can stick your hand right into the trap. If huge hair balls accumulate, just stick your hand in the trap and grab them. Elapsed time? 10 seconds. I would suggest there be a grate over this larger opening, and I further suggest this grate be removable without tools. Some sort of child resistant solution would be best. I don’t want to read about a newborn infant being given a bath and falling down the drain never to be seen again! If a baby can pass through the birth canal, a baby can navigate a 4″ drain pipe trap, I suspect. Just to make this fool proof, I recommend a pencil thick rod be permanently affixed at the bottom of the U trap, perpendicular to the fluid flow. That would prevent a baby from squeezing past but since you can get your hand down there easily, hair and other obstructions could be cleaned away in seconds.

We already have sinks that have large diameter drain holes in them — they are called kitchen sinks with garbage disposals. In the sinks I propose, one wouldn’t even need those rubber flaps like on a kitchen sink. On a typical modern bathroom sink, there is a drain plug attached to a lever behind the faucet handles. Pulling up on that lever causes the drain plug or cover to move down to cover the drain opening. These covers are now about 1.5 inches in diameter. In my new improved world, these covers get bigger by 2.5 inches. Big deal. There’s more room for the logo of the fixture manufacturer, and perhaps advertising can be sold in this space for commercial sinks.

Under the sink I propose the same trap system we have now, but with the larger pipe. Maybe a more compact U shaped bend can be engineered so the trap doesn’t take up too much space under the sink. But right now space under the sink is used for plungers and bottles of nasty caustic chemical drain cleaners that kids often swallow. Once we get those items out from under the sink, there’s plenty of room for a larger trap.

In most bathrooms, the sink is in the same room with the toilet, so the extra larger diameter pipe needed to shunt the sink drain water to the toilet  drain pipe should be under 10 feet, a negligable expense compared to buying chemicals and paying generations of plumbers hundreds of years into the future to clean absurdly tiny drain pipes in use now.

Of course, the sinks themselves will need to have larger drain holes, but after simple retooling, that means less material consumed since a sink with a bigger hole consumes fewer resources to construct.

The kitchen will cost a bit more to prepare, but I suspect there is almost always a toilet within 50 feet of a kitchen sink. Fifty feet of 4″ diameter drain pipe in quantity costs less than USD $100.00, judging from the fact I can buy a single 10 foot section of 4″ ABS pipe online for USD $29.95 today. This is peanuts compared to plumbers and chemical drain cleaners into infinity. Since it will take more work to install the bigger pipe, perhaps the plumbers won’t lose any billable hours at all if my idea is adopted. The work gets front loaded into building construction.

Having a stuffed up drain is no fun. It’s messy and time consuming to deal with. This hurts productivity across the planet. Think of all the hours away from work that homeowners spend waiting for a plumber to arrive. Think of all the truck trips that plumbers won’t need to take. Think of how many fewer vans will need to be produced to move all those plumbers around. Think of the former plumbers doing more important work to improve the planet. Think of all the drain clearing snake machinery that won’t need to be built. Think of how many fewer children will be poisoned by drinking drain cleaner by accident. Think how many plumbers won’t accidentally drop a glass bottle of strong acid and get splashed with it when the bottle shatters all over the room. Acid is a step up from consumer drain cleaners, and it’s what the pros will sometimes use to clear a really stopped up drain. It has to be sold in glass because plastic can’t contain it — the plastic will be attacked by the acid and fail. There must be hundreds of acid accidents every year, and they’re sometimes horribly disfiguring accidents.

Example of the disfigurement drain cleaner accidents can cause. Photographs from http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/8253292.My_face_melted_when_drain_cleaner_exploded/

Think of how many people would not ruin their good looks by being splashed in the face with drain cleaner, like this grandmother whose face was ‘melted’ by drain cleaner.

Household chemical drain cleaners are dangerous, really nasty and should be made unecessary if only larger pipe were used in place of smaller pipe. This slide deck published by the pediatrics department at the University of Chicago says there were 1.5 million cases of corrosive ingestions by children 1 to 5 years old in the United States in 2002. That should be all the country needs to know to force my suggestion into the national building code.

One and half million children ingesting corrosive household products per year almost a decade ago. I had no idea the problem was so widespread until I began my research for this post tonight.

If saving innocent children doesn’t convince you, consider this. I have a strong suspicion that the waste water treatment industry has to apply more chemicals to counteract the millions of gallons of drain cleaner dumped down the drain by design. If someone knows about this, please contact me. I think it’s likely that for every gallon of drain cleaner made there’s an ounce of some counteracting agent also mixed in at the treatment plant. The company that makes this chemical can switch to making something else, like green household cleaners that are non-toxic, for instance. The waste treatment plant can cut its budget.

I propose that the building codes be modified. These codes will apply to remodeling projects and new construction, not existing structures. So we’ll still be stuck with our current rediculous narrow guage pipes for generations. This will give plumbers decades to adjust to their new, more exciting profession where they are solving higher order problems that call for more thinking. Millions of additional kids are going to ingest drain cleaner over the next half century or so it will take to phase out most of the narrow gauge pipe out there. But it’s far better to start the change today than to wait or even worse, to never make the change. Do we really need to poison hundreds of millions of kids over the next 100 years in just this country? No, we do not. 4″ drain pipe is cheap. Not as cheap as 1.5″ drain pipe, but still extremely cheap in the face of the horror that is happening right this minute. As you read this, there is likely a child drinking drain cleaner that will soon be rushed to the emergency room, never to really be the same again I suspect. Ouch!

Right now my bathroom sink is plugged up because I’ve been rinsing the water dish for my backyard chickens. The chickens manage to get the dish dirty with actual dirt, and the dirt has been accumulating in the trap for a while now. Finally the trap is stopped up. I’ve been thinking about writing this post for months now, but having a currently stopped up drain inspired me to sit down an write this post.

I recognize not all residential walls are thick enough to accomadate 4″ drain pipe, but for them, new oval pipe could be developed, like the gas appliance vent (chimney) industry developed. The area can be the same in an oval pipe, and it should have similar clog resistance. If not, make the oval larger until the unclogability is equal to round 4″ drain pipe. I understand toilet manufactures like Toto and Kohler are expert at using powerful computers to model water flow inside toilets. They had to develop this expertise in response to government demands for low water use toilets. I bet the engineers at those two companies could quickly calculate how large to make oval drain pipe that would be the functional equavalent of round drain pipe, which would allow builders to keep the current standards for wall thickness while achieving nearly uncloggable plumbing for every fixture in the house.

I think the building industry should get behind this project. They can charge slightly more for their new houses, and make the customer want to pay more by boldly demonstrating how superior a home is that has uncloggable plumbing. Think of the persuasive YouTube videos that could be produced where side by side installations are compared, made from transparent plastic pipe so viewers could see how impervious 4″ pipes are to clogging.

I even have the brand name: It should be called ‘DrainYes.’

Compared to what we have now with tiny pipes and lots of ‘DrainNO‘, what’s not to like?

PS – While researching this post I encountered a novel use for even larger drain pipe. I promise this pipe won’t get clogged no matter what you throw at it! Trust me.

Pillow Talk ring (photo from www.littleriot.co.uk)

Here’s a pair of gadgets that will warm your heart.

Romantic partners use Pillow Talk communication rings when they’re apart from each other overnight. The goal is to make the partners feel more tightly connected to each other.

Here’s the description from the inventor’s website:

Pillow Talk is a project aiming to connect long distance lovers. Each person has a pillow for their bed and a ring sensor which they wear to sleep at night. The sensor wirelessly communicates with the other person’s pillow; when one person goes to bed, their lover’s pillow begins to glow softly to indicate their presence. Placing your head on the pillow allows you to hear the real-time heartbeat of your loved one. The result is an intimate interaction between two lovers, regardless of the distance between them.

Reading about this product brought tears to my eyes it’s so simple and sweet. I wish I had thought of this. It’s a genuinely thoughtful use of technology to improve the human condition. Here’s the promotional video. Warning: you may cry when watching this! I did.

I have a big improvement for this pair of devices:

Make the pillows talk. After all, the product is called Pillow Talk, not Pillow Heartbeat.

Since voice consumes so little bandwidth, and Skype-to-Skype calls are free and may be of unlimited duration, I suggest the pillows be outfitted with speakers and microphones that stay on all night, so the other partner can hear the other breath. If the lovebirds want to talk, they can just start talking.

This ‘always on’ connectivity might take some getting used to, but I think such a system would for some become a must have product that they would miss terribly if it were taken away. The pull on the heart strings would be so powerful once a couple got used to ‘sleeping with their sweetie remotely’ that they wouldn’t want to give up the experience.

When I was a teenager, the father of one of my next door neighbors died without warning of a brain annurism. My mother was good friends with the mother whose husband had just died. My mother told me how much her friend told her that she missed hearing her husband snore. That story was so sad to me back then, and it still made me cry as I wrote this piece, years later. I was a teenager when this happened.

There is something so powerful about just sleeping beside your mate. It’s so intimate and irreplaceable and special.

A true pillow talk system with heartbeat, breathing and two way voice could be one Valentines ‘technology gift’ that would be loved by both men and women.

I recommend that such a product be initially built as a USB pillowcase that would plug into a power brick that plugs into the wall. Inside the brick would be a small computer running Linux plus a WiFi transceiver that would connect to the home or hotel’s WiFi connection. This way a computer would not need to be by the bed and batteries would not need to be charged. It would also keep the radio frequency part of the system away from the heads of the sleepers, probably a good thing since some people might use such a system for months or years at a time, particularly when you consider military personnel away from home for long periods of time.

If Apple starts making what I just described, they should call it iSleep! They could make an iPhone charging cord that splits off in two wires: one to the power brick and one to the pillow. An iPhone certainly has all the computing power necessary, and many people already sleep with their phones.

I have too many projects to do in life, so if you like this, build it and pay me the industry mean royalty for similar ideas. Let me know when it launches!

One more joke: This is a true peer to peer system! P2P or ‘pillow to pillow’ lol…

Airbnb, formerly Air Bed and Breakfast, is in the news this week.

According to news reports like this one on TechCrunch.com, a host’s home was ransacked by a paid guest. Apparently this is the first time this has happened, even though Airbnb says their site has arranged over 2 million nights of stays.

If this is the worst that’s happened in 2 million nights, that sounds like a better record than hotels and motels likely have. I suspect that the rate of guests being actually attacked in a hotel is higher than 1 in 2,000,000, though I have no facts to back up that hunch.

There is controversy about what happened, with Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator saying the host may be lying. I don’t know what did or didn’t happen, and I’m not taking sides here.

Here are some more links to stories about the controversy:

The Airbnb Horror Story Continues

On Safety — A Word from Airbnb

Airbnb Responds to User Horror Story

AirBNB graphic from their website

I will share my experience with Airbnb below.

I was an Airbnb host in 2009. I made about USD $800.

I offered the living room in my detached San Francisco house at USD $40.00 per night. I had a lot of takers, and I absolutely loved being a host. It was a highlight of that year. I got to meet so many interesting travelers, including guests from France, Czech Republic, Austria, Japan, Oklahoma and even San Francisco.

I never felt unsafe even though I hosted groups as large as four people.

I increased my feeling of safety by installing an electronic deadbolt. I assigned a new door code for each guest or group of guests, and I deleted the code when they departed. So nobody retained access to my house after their visit.

I also made a copy of the government issued identification documents of each guest, and I locked these copies in a safe and scanned them and emailed them to myself. So even if a guest burned down my house, I would be able to give the authorities copies of the IDs of my guests.

I would guess that the person who allegedly had their apartment ransacked didn’t make a copy of the ID of their guest. I think AirBNB should instruct hosts to do so. After all, hotels and motels in the US are required to ask to see your ID, so guests are trained to not think anything of such a request. I’ve been asked for my passport at all the hotels, motels and youth hostels I’ve stayed at outside of the US, so I suspect there is a law requiring such requests almost worldwide.

I suspect that people are less likely to ransack a place after they’ve had their ID copied by the host.

One of the most interesting guests I had in 2009 was a guy who arrived by motorcycle from his San Francisco apartment. He stayed the night but didn’t shower in the morning. He went home for that, I guess. Why did he stay here, alone?

Airbnb was considering hiring him, and part of the hiring process required that applicants try the service. He was very talkative, and since we were both in the Internet field, we had a lot to talk about. I recall Airbnb had fewer than 10 employees at the time. I could tell Airbnb was a great company on its way up, up, up. What a business model — I recall they collect 20% of the rental price for playing matchmaker and escrow agent.

According to recent news reports, Airbnb recently closed a USD $112 million dollar venture capital investment at a valuation of USD $1,300,000,000 (sic). If that guy that stayed with me for a night got hired, he’s likely now worth millions on paper. I’m happy for him.

Here are some links to articles about Airbnb:

AirBNB Could Have More Rooms than Hilton by 2010

My Ultimate Bachelor Pad on AirBNB

I know two people who used Airbnb to book a multinight stay in an apartment in Paris, France. They got the entire place to themselves. I saw pictures and the home was charming and simply lovely. There was no elevator and there were six flights of spiral stairs to climb, but I bet those stairs made the place particularly memorable for the travelers. I am not criticizing Airbnb or Paris for the stairs. I really believe that charming old buildings help their occupants form strong memories. It was probably a pain to lug suitcases up six flights of stairs. But as those memories fade, I believe the fond memories of the apartment will remain, and that even 50 years from now those travelers will fondly remember their cute Paris apartment, but they won’t remember any of the corporate hotels they stayed at back then, no matter how costly or opulent.

I was inspired to become an Airbnb host by my brother Andrew Warnock. On his honeymoon with his wife, they booked an apartment in Prague, Czech Republic by visiting a booking booth in the Prague central train station. He said the apartment was really great, and that he would repeat the experience.

AirBNB founders (picture from their website)

Now, back to the Airbnb property damage controversy. AirBNB is worth more than a billion dollars now. They are famous. They are targets, and they’ll need to deal with that, sadly.

I can easily see a situation where hosts stage a trashing of their home, hoping to get new housing, courtesy of a rich and well liked startup. I would think that Airbnb will ultimately decide to require hosts to email them the IDs of guests on the day of checkin. This will allow Airbnb to be a central repository of the identification documents, and will help greatly if a host is ever hurt such that they can’t point the authorities to the location of the IDs. Airbnb already stores the credit card details of its guests, so storing their IDs should not raise the eyebrows of well intentioned guests. However, it should greatly alarm poorly intentioned guests.

With the widespread adoption of smart phones with cameras, hosts can photograph and send photos by MMS or email. If it’s decided such systems are not secure enough, Airbnb could write a set of phone apps that would use the camera to take the picture. Then, the apps could encrypt the picture and directly connect to servers at Airbnb. In this way, the sensitive ID documents could be securely transmitted to Airbnb while bypassing the Internet’s open email infrastructure.

Again, I don’t know what happened in the current ugly situation in the news. If the host’s home was ruined by a guest, then perhaps AirBNB should pay the deductable for any insurance the host carries. I do think that AirBNB shouldn’t be fully on the hook for all the damages, because that’s what renters’ or homeowners’ insurance is for. What if a guest accidentally burns down an apartment building by careless use of candles or the stove? Should AirBNB have to spend millions to rebuild an apartment building? I don’t think that’s fair or just. The terms of service should require that hosts carry suitable insurance as a condition of being a host.

I’m sure all these issues will get worked out. I met one of the founders of Airbnb in 2009 when he came to my house with his camera and tripod to take pictures for my profile. When he learned I already had pretty good pictures on my profile, he didn’t take any and we used his time at my house to talk about Airbnb. I had a good feeling about him, and I suspect if his other cofounders are similar, that the company will come though this situation stronger. The founders of Airbnb are Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. I can’t remember which founder came by my house.

I have a website for my house where you can see the pictures I used when I was an AirBNB host.

I continue to be a huge fan of Airbnb and I hope to again be a host. The reason I am not a host right now is I have four young female roommates sharing my house as tenants, and it just doesn’t seem nice to ask them if I can allow random strangers to share their bathroom, as much as I think it’s safe.

Disclosure: I am friends with Sam Angus, a partner at law firm Fenwick & West LLP. Angus represents Airbnb. I haven’t had any contact with Angus about this controversy.

Clothes drying in Sun (photo by Flickr user martinvarsavsky)

July 24, 2011 when I was falling asleep I thought of an idea I love. I plan to try this idea in my bus conversion.

Here’s the idea:

Place a car radiator in the exhaust flow of a clothes dryer. Pump water or another heat exchange liquid through tubing that connects the radiator to a heat storage tank. The fluid in that tank will warm, and that warm water can be piped through hydronic floor heating piping to heat the home.

This heat recovery could be meaningful, especially in households where the dryer gets used a lot.

Alternatively or in addition, the recovered clothes dryer heat could heat the domestic hot water supply, and that water could be used for the clothes washer. In effect the heat from the dryer could make the washer more energy efficient.

Alternatively or in addition, the recovered clothes dryer heat could be used to heat an aquaponics fish tank, which generally makes the fish eat more and gain weight faster. I understand that catfish grow fastest when their water temperature is 84 degrees fahrenheit. It takes a lot of energy to warm hundreds of gallons of water, so recycling heat from a dryer is a good idea.

Car radiators are cheap. I discovered this when buying the parts to build my sound proof engine box for my bus conversion.

My idea is so simple and inexpensive. It’s applicable to gas and electric dryers, and it makes sense for nearly every home in every country I can think of that has a clothes dryer. Why hasn’t such a system already been implemented?

Others have conceived of capturing waste heat from clothes dryers. Inventor Richard A. Brunner patented in the United States a system that from my quick read of the full text of the patent uses a heat exchanger to warm house air with moist air from the dryer vent. I didn’t see anything about heating water or using the hot water to heat the house or the water for a clothes washer, as I have described.

Inside a clothes dryer (photo by Flickr user Gnarls Monkey)

I suspect all the major clothes dryer companies have also considered heat recovery systems. The idea is not far fetched. I believe many industrial factories capture ‘waste’ heat from systems all the time for use elsewhere.

As I understand it, home heating forced air furnaces of high efficiency already recover heat from the first combustion process in a so-called second stage. I have been told these super efficient furnaces are trouble prone, but that they do work. I was advised not to buy one due to their complexity. But these dual stage furnaces apparently work by burning the exhaust, not just capturing heat from it. My dryer heat recovery system would be much simpler and cheaper to construct.

I have read about devices to capture heat from waste drain water, which often contains heated water. I suspect the amount of heat those devices recover is relatively small compared to the available heat that could be cost effectively recovered from a clothes dryer.

When I converted my Kenmore natural gas clothes dryer to propane so I could install it in my bus conversion, I temporarily operated the dryer with the front cover removed. I got to see the flame size, and I would say it’s similar to the size of flame that would be produced by running four stovetop cooking burners at once.

Yes, a lot of the heat is consumed evaporating water, but when I put my hand over the outside vent when my dryer is running, it seems like at least as much heat as a 1,500 watt space heater produces.

I suspect about 2/3rds of that heat could be captured in a hot water tank. A space heater produces about 5,000 btus of heat per hour, so 2/3rds of 5,000 is 3,333 btus. It takes about 1,000 watts of electricity worth say USD $.20 to run 2/3rds of a 1,500 watt space heater. So the captured heat from running a dryer by electricity for an hour is worth about USD $.20.

If the dryer is run for five loads a week, a dollar a week in energy is saved, or $52 a year. A dryer might last for ten years, so $520 worth of energy would be saved over the life of the dryer, or enough money to pay for the entire appliance.

But energy is getting more costly, so over ten years the savings might be 50% higher.

Every little bit helps.

Gas water heaters and furnaces should also have heat exchangers installed in their exhaust stacks. If a house is built with the hydronic piping for these heat exchangers in place, the cost to add these recovery systems should be affordable. However, it would be much better to eliminate the water heater and furnace in most homes, in favor of mandatory solar water heating for water and the air.

I think it is one of mankind’s dumbest moves to ignore the sun for most water and home heating worldwide, in favor of burning fossil fuels which really should be saved for fueling aircraft and spacecraft and making advanced plastics.

Why are we not burning oil at a rate such that it will last for 1,000 years? Or 10,000 years? Some say we’ve used up half the oil on the planet already, in what, 150 years? That’s a snap of the fingers. What will we do in three snaps? Go back to sailing ships? Yes, by then we might figure out cold fusion or oil from algae such that it really substitutes for oil. But what if we don’t?

While I’m carrying on here, I should say that clothes dryers themselves are rather ridiculous when air drying clothes makes them last longer and is free. Garages should have enough clothes lines to dry multiple dryer loads of laundry, and garages should have fans that exhaust to the outside so that drying times can be reduced substantially. Outdoor clothes lines should be allowed everywhere, by law, in the same way that television satellite dishes are allowed everywhere in the United States by law. As I understand it, no contract can take away the right to install your own satellite dish. The exception is if you have free access to a community satellite dish.

Some housing complexes have legally enforceable covenants that forbid outdoor clothes lines, and your house can be foreclosed on and sold if you violate these contractual regulations. Such provisions should be against public policy and automatically be void and unenforceable.

Sadly, wet clothes don’t have the powerful lobby that the satellite television reception industry pays a lot of money to employ.

Natural gas detector (picture from http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/sarsam_2160_6646726)

Technology to connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi networks is small and inexpensive. Mobile phones and even camera memory cards accomplish this task.

I have an idea of how to use this technology to improve safety.

Combine a smoke/carbon monoxide detector with Wi-Fi circuitry so that when the detector activates text messages can be sent to people and entities that should be alerted.

There are already ‘Wi-Fi smoke detectors’ for sale, as a quick search will reveal. But these detectors are not for detecting smoke, but for covert video recording of a room. These products demonstrate that it’s easy to put a Wi-Fi transmitter into a smoke detector case.

The best of all worlds would be to combine an actual smoke/carbon monoxide detector with a video camera so that when the detector activates that a text message can be sent that includes a link so the message recipient can sign in to a webpage to observe the room the detector is located in. In this way, false alarms can potentially be identified from afar.

Current video fake smoke detectors cost a lot, but that’s because they are made in tiny volume. I bet a combination smoke, carbon monoxide, video Wi-Fi detector could sell for under USD $100 if they were required by building codes.

Finally, I think it’s time to add another feature to smoke/carbon monoxide detectors. I think detectors should also sense unburned gas such as natural gas and propane. For reasons I can’t understand, modern gas stoves don’t stop the flow of gas if there is no flame, so it’s possible to fill the house with gas without warning, other than the bad smell. Smell based warnings do no good for sleeping occupants. Gas detectors typically need more than a 9 volt battery to operate, so gas detectors usually are plugged into AC power. I think that’s fine, provided there is a battery backup to carry through power outages.

I would certainly pay USD $200 per detector for a gas/smoke/carbon monoxide/Wi-Fi/Video detector.

Would you?

Sometimes I learn of an idea that shocks me with its brilliance.

Today I will describe such an idea. It’s called the Litre of Light.

Here’s the summary from the project’s website, Isang Litrong Liwanag, which translates to ‘A litre of light’:

“Isang Litrong Liwanag (A Liter of Light), is a sustainable lighting project which aims to bring the eco-friendly Solar Bottle Bulb to disprivileged communities nationwide. Designed and developed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Solar Bottle Bulb is based on the principles of Appropriate Technologies – a concept that provides simple and easily replicable technologies that address basic needs in developing communities.”

A Solar Bottle Bulb is a clear water or soda bottle filled with tap water and a little bleach. This bottle in embedded into the roofs of houses, with part of the bottle outside, and part of it inside. There is sealant around the hole to keep the roof weather proof. When the sun hits the outside part of the bottle, a lot of light reaches the inside part of the bottle. The water inside the bottle makes the light omnidirectional, mimiking an electric light bulb. The bleach keeps the water clear for years. Without the bleach, the water would quickly turn green with algae. Without the water, there would be a bright spot on the floor, surrounded by relative darkness.

Each Solar Bottle Bulb produces about as much light as a 60 watt incandescent light bulb, according to the video transcript linked to in this sentence.

Solar Bulb installed and 'on' (picture from http://tanggera.com/?p=572)

I wish I could take my Canon 5D Mark II into some houses with these bulbs installed and get some really high quality still photographs and video, to help spread the word about this really bright idea. Light bulb entrepreneur and proponent Thomas Edison would be pleased.

On the right, Alfredo Lim, the mayor of Manilla, Philippines, holding a litre of light 'bulb'

The beauty of the Solar Bottle Bulb is that it works and it’s really affordable, at about P150 to P200 (USD $4.66 at today’s exchange rate) per home, installed, according to Alfredo Lim, the mayor of Manilla in the Philippines, pictured above on the right. That 150 to 200 peso cost is per home, not per bulb.

I am going to install these in any eco home I build down the road. I have a big collection of glass bottles to choose from. I’m not sure if glass is as suitable as plastic, but I would prefer to use glass if it can be made to work reliably.

LEDs by Flickr user flakeparadigm

According to this Fox News story New Apple Technology Stops iPhones From Filming Live Events, Apple has filed a patent on technology to make it impossible to capture live video at protected live events.

The Fox News article explains the technology in a way that doesn’t make sense to me. I think what the article should have said is:

“A light emitting (LED) diode on stage at an event can blink in such a way as to alert the iPhone camera that recording is not allowed. The LED can emit invisible infrared radiation, so the audience won’t notice any difference in the event with their eyes.”

I am very suspicious of the Fox News technology explanation that says the iPhone will emit radiation that infrared sensors on stage will capture and react to. I think that’s implausible, because the iPhone would have to have a strong infrared LED in it, and over time that would diminish battery life. Also, it would mean the system would not work at long distances, such as stadium shows where the videographer might be a city block away. I don’t think LED remotes work over that distance. But a powerful infrared LED on stage could signal all the iPhones in the venue, and power usage wouldn’t be an issue because that LED could be plugged into AC power.

However it works, I applaud Apple for thinking their idea up. It’s a good and clever idea. I wish I had thought of it.

I think Apple could and should take this idea a few logical steps forward. Perhaps they have developed these plans but have not yet publicized them. I will detail my plans here, and if Apple should want to use them and they haven’t thought of them already, they can credit me and send me a new iPhone for life, as compensation.

1. Apple should not disable the capture of video. Instead it should offer to sell the user the ability to capture that event for a price, charged right there using Apple’s ‘in app’ purchase mechanism. This fee can be split with the venue and performer(s), using the same 70%/30% split people hate and love, respectively. The artists hate it and Apple loves it, I suspect. The video recorded should contain the serial number of the phone embedded into the video image in a way that is not visible to the eye but can be easily read by software. Then, if the video is posted online publicly, that user can be tracked down and charged more, perhaps even a lot more, to discourage them from doing it again. To make the serial number unremovable, it could float around the image from frame to frame, and change size and font. To take it out would take so much work as to be impractical.

2. Apple should apply this feature to all controlled access events, not just live events. Thus, this technology could be used in movie theatres to make it impossible to bootleg a movie being projected on screen. The phone could display a message offering the user the chance to buy the DVD and have it delivered the day it goes on sale, for example. It could offer the eager potential bootlegger the opportunity to ‘Like’ the movie on Facebook, building on the fan’s just demonstrated enthusiasm for the movie. Apple should resist any temptation to use the video attempt to turn the person over to the police, which it could do by having that phone call the police and use a recorded message to alert them that a Federal crime is in progress. Convicting fans is not good policy. Selling movies and related merchandise to avid fans is good policy.

3. Building on the last point, this technology could be used to prohibit video recording in airports, on nude beaches (with really bright LEDs on posts?), in bathrooms, locker rooms and even in private homes. If Apple’s technology could get incorporated into all video cameras, celebrities might worry a little less about being surreptitiously recorded in a compromising position.

While writing this post, it occurred to me that all audio recorders could incorporate similar technology, with similar benefits, as follows:

The audio feed for an event could contain an inaudible signal that the recorder could decode and act upon. The device could offer to permit recording for a fee, and the serial number of the device could be embedded inaudibly into the stream, to guard against public distribution. Or, for simpler devices like dictation recorders, the device could simply refuse to record.

This is generally how the old MacroVision anti piracy technology for VHS video tapes worked. A signal on the original didn’t disturb the picture when played back. But if you tried to record the signal to another VCR, that VCR would react to the signal and degrade the copy so much it was valueless.

Apple iPad Facetime, from Apple.com website, June 14, 2011

Since Apple iPad tablet computers have forward and rear facing video cameras, and are set up for slick and easy video conferencing, I have a proposal:

Make iPads available for check out in hospitals and nursing homes, so that patients can receive ‘hospital visits’ from their friends and family more frequently.

I bet that if a scientific study were conducted that patients would get well sooner and be happier if they could video chat with their friends and family for free, even if they didn’t own or know how to operated a computer. I suspect the video chatting on the iPad is so easy to use that nurses and doctors could be trained to be trainers in mere minutes.

I suspect there are already robust WiFi networks in care facilities, so the networking is already in place.

While we’re at it, install permanent video cameras at all funeral homes so people can attend even if too far away to travel.

For that matter, install video cameras at churches and other places where weddings take place, so more people can attend weddings.

For an extra dose of ‘being there’ somebody could create a holder for an iPad that would look sort of like a person from the sholders up. Where the face would be, place the iPad. This iPad holder could be clipped to the back of a chair or bench.

This way a church, wedding venue or funeral home might have 10 ‘remote seats’ available, where one iPad equals one seat. When someone is occupying a seat at home, their face is shown full screen on the remote iPad. In this way, the physically present attendees can see the faces of the remote guests, and the relatives will be comforted that more friends and family could attend.

Since all these iPads cost money, I suppose it would be OK for wedding and funeral venues to charge extra for these virtual seats. But I would say just give them away at first, to get people hooked on the concept. It’s such a far out idea I am doubtful people would pay until they had seen it done at another event.

I read once that when the grocery shopping cart was invented and placed in stores that nobody touched them. The proprietor had to hire pretend shoppers to push them around as if they were really shopping. That educated actual shoppers, who began to use the carts themselves for real. I think something similar might be required to get this idea off the ground. It might even be necessary to hire fake guests who do not know the wedding party or the deceased, to virtually attend the wedding or funeral, cry and be present.

I’ve read that in Japan there are businesses that rent actors to attend weddings in person to give the impression the bride and groom have more friends than they really do. So there is a precedent for fakery like this.

I think the idea of virtually attending important life events is a good one. Especially going forward with jet fuel being so expensive and security standards getting stricter. It just isn’t a great idea to fly all over the planet for all these events, and such travel I predict will one day become politically incorrect.

There are so many ways to make my idea more like being there. The iPads could be mounted on motorized tripod mounts the remote user could adjust, so people could look to their sides and say hello to real people. The iPad has a camera on the back already, so people could see who was sitting behind them. Maybe two iPads could be mounted back to back so that people sitting in the back could see who was sitting up front in the virtual seats.

Lots of people miss lots of important events. My idea is much more social than simply installing some anonymous cameras that might be security cameras as far as the attendees are aware. With my idea, people present physically can interact with people present virtually.

I dub my idea FaceSeat.

Of course, this concept is applicable to zillions of events beyond weddings and funerals, but at first I would focus on these big markets — a lot of people marry and die in the world.

With the provocative name FaceSeat I could get sued by Apple and FaceBook at once. Think of the stunning PR that would result – instant mind share. If Oprah [Winfrey] still had a popular daytime television show, I’d be on it within days of the lawsuits being filed.

PS — This is just a wacky idea I’m writing on my blog! I am not jumping into to the videoconferencing industry. If someone has already thought of and published my idea, I’d like to know about it so I can update this post.