How about little turbines in your drain to generate electricity?

To be honest I was just thinking about how the most hygienic bathroom door is self-opening but obviously that takes electricity. So I was thinking if you had a sprung floor to generate kinetic energy and little turbines running off your piss falling through the urinals then that could pump into a battery, offsetting some of the mains charge.

oh man the amount of people who say to me “why don’t they just put solar panels on all new houses/public car parks/garden sheds/every roof in London” as if it was the most straightforward and obviously logical thing in the world. also it’s always they. who the fuck are they talking about?

as above, cost outweighs benefit, almost certainly. plus it wouldn’t work for a number of technical reasons people have outlined already.

Sure but the flooring thing. I recall Sainsbury’s were looking into using such a system on their carparks in big supermarkets as a way to regain energy from the cars coming in. Obviously, the cars will all do more work driving over such a thing so there will be a cost to the drivers but individually it should be negligible but over the entire car park I presumed they reckoned they could harvest power to run the lights on it, or at least contribute to it.

Anyway, for a plant delivery man you sure are very knowledgeable about renewable energy resources so I’m glad to have your input.

Don’t even begin to imagine that you could grasp the sheer breadth of my knowledge and experience in career and life Theo, you mono-code cunt.

I don’t know anything about this Sainsburys thing. Sounds like a press release or something that someone thought about briefly and was immediately told it wasn’t viable.

Having said that I get equally frustrated by people working in renewables who say “nah never going to work” to everything as if they don’t realise people were saying that about wind and PV 30, 20 or even 10 years ago.

A lot of the costs of manufacture of these things are, I’d imagine, about the fact they aren’t used everywhere. New things are always more expensive. I mean if Concorde hadn’t been blocked by the US then there’d have been planes everywhere and the price would have been a lot cheaper (I realise it wasn’t remotely environmentally friendly but that’s not the parallel I am drawing).

On top of that part of the point of this kind of idea is to explore how you could make things better, ideas about how to get the most out of situations. Solar panels on all houses is going to be expensive but equally if you went around doing that you are also creating a lot of work plus you are encouraging the public to think about how energy can be maintained and how it shouldn’t be wasted. Alongside that, you may not get a great deal of power out of these things but LED lights are a very low-powered bright source, something I guess we never had 20 years ago. That means the power needed to light something at night is now significantly less than it would have been, meaning power generating options that weren’t previously significant now are.

that

little thing in the front of your fridge that makes ice. it’s already cold!

yep.

i agree with your first para to some extent theo, but that doesn’t mean that every one of your hair brained schemes is feasible and scalable. as someone else alluded to there are much bigger fish to fry with less effort for bigger gains so if you’re talking about developing the capacity and efficiency of the sector then focusing it on little piddly things like this that might be bullshit is a bad idea.

your second para isn’t really the point, they’re not really the reasons putting PV on all houses isn’t a good idea, or even if they are WHO ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. WHO IS SUPPOSED TO BE DOING THIS

Was meaning more on publically owned buildings. Also, it’s obviously never going to be much a worthwhile idea in this country but probably would be better used in others. It would therefore be tax payers who would foot that bill.

's lovely?

sorry theo i know you mean well but you are too wrong about too many things on this and I haven’t got time to explain it to you any more

Boring answer alert! They’re illegal…

Apparently (according to my old Physics teacher) you used to be able to buy little dynamo things that would run off a tap left running all day but they were made illegal (fairly sensibly if you think about it) as they led to huge water wastage.