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Inventor of Low Tech Fridge Wins Award
juju2112 writes "Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria won a Rolex award for his pot-in-pot invention. Here's how it works. You take a smaller pot and put it inside a larger pot. Fill the space in between them with wet sand, and cover the top with a wet cloth. When the water evaporates, it pulls the heat out with it, making the inside cold. It's a natural, cheap, easy-to-make refrigerator."
This is New?
Grab a clean sock, soak in water, wring out, cover teh can of beer and leave on the window sill.. LOL
For some reason, I read "pot-in-pot" as more of a smuggler's invention. Ingenious! I'll hide the _REAL_ pot inside this _FAKE_ pot, so they'll never find it!
~i = an imaginary being~
I think it's great that prizes like this don't always go to fancy hi-tech stuff. Like the article sais, this invention can and have changed peoples lives.
Martin
Give a man a rolex, and he's more or less late for a lifetime. Give a man a stick, and he's on time at least once a day.
--
make install -not war
i'd sure like to know how often you have to change the wet sand, in order to get 2 weeks worth of refrigeration?
...
anyone got any napkin-science calculations that can give us a ballpark of whats needed? i'm sure this is a simple physics equation, only i'm certainly not qualified to work out the formula
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
how many wats?
I ask because a friend of mine.. well who am I kidding, I use watercooling and this kind of thing for keeping the water cooled could be quite cool(I already use mostly open bucket evaporating, helped with 1 big fan at low speed to get rid of the heat).
(and during summer it's expected to go to 30 celsius for fuckin weeks again and no money for AC)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This same man (and invention) won an invention of the year award from time (as seen here) in 2001. I guess it's interesting that he also won this award, but why is Rolex handing out awards years after the fact? Maybe I'm just used to the break neck pace of computer advancement, but this seems a little.. late.
Unfortunately such methods have been used in ancient Egypt 4000 years ago already.
Prior art anyone ?
Does it make much difference what the materials of the pot are? I know they used clay pots, but do they need to be glazed, unglazed etc? Would plastic pots work (it's not just the 3rd would that has a use for battery free fridges).
I was thinking that perhaps it might work best if the external pot was slightly porus, to aid evaporation, but perhaps all the evaporation occurs at the top, so it doesn't make much difference.
Just wait until someone figures out how to attach a cast iron pot to the top of the P4.
Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria won a Rolex award for his pot-in-pot invention
So I expect soon he'll be creating MohamedCo and start selling rotisserie ovens on Nigerian TV?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I heard this guy needs someone to transfer the award money for him.
I can't wait to try this out in a small scale. Could we use this with cans of root beer using small plant pots?
> You take a smaller pot and put it inside a larger pot
;-)?
Then goes the lighter...
Who needs a freakin fridge
..but maybe the difference is in the execution or something? To me, it's less important that someone might have done this before than the fact that doing it now might change peoples life to the better.
Shouldn't that be the focus of inventing new ways for doing things by the way? To improve peoples life?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Where is the Wikipedia article?
Time Magazine invention of the year for 2001
HELLO, I am Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria. I have recently won a large sum of money in a Rolex award for a new, fascinating invention of mine called the common cold. However, the Nigerian Chamber of Spa^H^H^HCommerce will not let me just withdraw the sum and leave the country. They inform me that I must e-mail someone of good repute who will assist me in acquiring the funds for a small part of the award, the sum of $30 million US dollars. I assure you that this transaction is 100% legal and risk-free.
Money for nothing, pix for free
In other news: Man from Nigeria sells Rolex award, buys fridge.
I'm sure some of us geek's will be confused by this "sand" thing they're using in between the pots. This "sand" they talk about is actually just our friend silicon. Just thought I'd throw that out there to avoid some confusion.
But, cut the guy a break. The cool thing here is that he's done it with readily available local materials which is pretty much one of the key features for a real engineer. To paraphrase the old saw:
Anyone can make you an evaporative cooler for $100; this guy's done it for $1.
How about posting the link to the actual award website?
...Journalism at its best...
If this guy got a $100,000 dollar award, then these guys should get a "cool" million.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
patent 454,845,474,734
A liquid, excreted from the skin when hot, whose evaporation helps to maintain an organism within a certain temperature range as well as serving to eliminate certain waste materials from the body.
This process may be, but is not necessecarily, augmented by a seperate device composed of a number of curved blades, fitted to a central hub and rotated at high speeds by an electric motor in order to create artificial air currents. some form of material support apparatus keeps the device elevated above the ground, either by providing a stand or attaching to the ceiling of the room, or by mounting the device inside some form of automotive vehicle. Also, a guard device may be used to keep sundry items from coming in contact with the blades.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Unglazed clay will work better due to water seeping through the pot and evaporating. It's very common to store drinking water in clay pots in India for exactly that reason (nowardays it'll be carried from the well in plastic pots)
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
My people used this to cool water for centuries. I am glad they didn't give Nobel price yet.
I'm willing to bet my close nigerian friends (who are not scammers at all, just the victims of an unfortunate clerical error at the local bank) are gonna be all over this wonderful new, innovative way to make money fast!
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
Its just simple physics. A liquid evaporating takes heat, so wet stuff is cold, and wet stuff in the wind is very cold (as more relatively dry air flows over the wet surface and takes more water.)
Its nice that he's using pots, but to me its too simple and mundane to garner an award, its like giving an award to someone that 'discovers' a cheap water filter
"Just pour the dirty water through this peice of cloth and voila! "
Dear Sir/Madam
We are pleased to inform you of the result of the Lottery for Mohammed Bah Abba's Low Tech Fridge Reward programs held on the 5th of April, 2004. Your e-mail address attached to ticket number 27522465896-6453 with serial number 3772-554 drew lucky numbers 7-14-18-23-31-45 which consequently won in the 2nd category, you have therefore been approved for a lump sum pay out of 2,000,000 (EUROS ) (TWO MILLION EUROS)
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
Please send your bank details, your social security number and a wire transfer of $200 towards clearance fees.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
When I used to leave for work at 6am and the milk arrived at 6:30am, I had "milk cooler" which was like a tall flower pot. I left it by the front door, soaking in a bucket full of water. The milkman would pop it over the bottle he delivered each morning. Neither of us got a Rolex for it, though. Maybe people who make Rolexes don't know about the bleedin' obvious. (And while we're at it, we could wonder who makes their watch movements and, indeed, watch bands. Doesn't leave Rolex with much to do.)
Rolex award laureates year 2000
Using water to avoid food freezing used to be very common in Norway (and doubtless in other countries with similar climates) before the advent of electricity.
Put a few buckets of water in your food storage room, and as long as the water is not frozen, the food in the room will not freeze either. Just before the water freezes, replace the buckets with liquid water. Repeat as necessary, and the food will not freeze.
IT'S nice that you're using one made out of glass and tungsten, to to me IT'S too simple and mundane to garner an award, IT'S like giving an award to someone that (who?) "discovers" antibiotics
"Just scrape the blue mould off this cheese here and voila!"
Thank god this only needs water, and they have an infinity supply of that in 3rd world countries, as we all well know.
That page is located here.
that that is is that that is not is not
I want to see something along the scale of a Solar powered ammonia-cycle ice maker (pdf)
Summary : Ammonia bonded to salt crystals in a closed system is driven off by the heat from a solar reflector, condensed to liquid via a coil of pipe in a drum of water and stored in pressure vessel in an insulated box. Remove the heat, and the ammonia liquid boils off and is recombined with the salt, and can freeze about 10lbs of ice in every 3-4 hour cycle.
This has the advantage over the evaporative system in that it can go to considerably below freezing. Other people are working on something that has a "hot end" that can be heated above a fire, and a "cold end" that can be later inserted into an icebox to produce the same general effect.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
That's what I get for not re-reading things when I post.
that that is is that that is not is not
can it cook my TV dinner?
Psst ... it was April 1 four days ago.
I talk about stuff.
Yada, yada, yada 419-like text here, only coming from the "CEO of Rolex".
Actually this is a bit like some art - some dude publishes a 1000s of years old idea, and is recognised for it. So he's basically being rewarded for publishing the idea, not having it. Sort of like some art - you look at it and think, who on Earth would do that ? And then they sell it for $1000s, and then you think to yourself, "I'm an idiot", I could have done that !
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
The cooling effect has been scientifically studied. Here is this article describing it (Google-translated from Spanish).
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Why the hell don't I frickin' preview for God's sake?
It's common folk lore.
KFG
I'm from South Africa and I remember a visit to a friends farm about 20 years ago, where he showed me this big black metal box (about 6 feet, 180cm high) he had in his back yard which he used for storing spiced and salted dried meats (locally called Biltong, a bit like beef jerky I think). It worked on the same principle in that it was double walled with the space inbetween the wall filled with sand and a large grating on top which needed to be replenished with water every now and again. It was amazingly cool in the African summer heat.
He had replaced the box after the one from his grandfather finally rusted to pieces after just over 75 years of continual use.
Truckers in South Africa also used to also carry a water bag in a wet sand filled canvas bag outside their trucks to provide a constant source of cool water.
I think the principle is probably much older than this, probably going back to the first person realising that the wind chilled him more after taking a dip in a lake that when he was dry.
Basically, the outer clay pot is porous. The water evaporates and escapes through the pores in the clay. This all happens very quickly because the air is so dry. So assuming that 1 kg of water evaporates each hour, this means about 2kJ of energy, and thus heat, is sucked from the pot. So for you non-metric heads, this means that every gallon of water equals 8,000 BTU. For reference, a typical family refigerator might use 7,700,000 BTU/yr, or 900BTU/hr.
You'd be surprised at the massive amount of energy that a liquid-to-vapor phase change can carry away. In fact, six times more energy is needed to turn one molecule of 100C liquid water to one molecule of 100C vapor water than is needed to heat liquid water from 0 to 100C!
Boiling, which is a similar phenomenon, is the most efficient way to transfer heat known to science.
Sig--
1. My girlfriend
2. You
3. ???
4. Profit!
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Latins have been using it from ages literally. At Spain its called "botijo" and keeps water cool even at the most torrid summer days by simply putting it in the shadow and letting the water transpire trough ceramic. Heres the explanation: http://centros5.pntic.mec.es/ies.victoria.kent/Rin con-C/Curiosid/Rc-54/Rc-54.htm
By the way, I have rolled a rag to a broom stick for washing floors without kneeling down. Its really clever. I want my Rolex.
As a nerd I found this to be vital news on stuff that really matters. I'm going to power down my servers now and go and play with pots and wet sand.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
This is no real "invention". My father (75) told me about how they used to do this when he was a soldier.
Maybe if I go over to Nigeria I too might claim a prize for inventing a round spinning thing for enabling the movement of carts...
I remember my folks telling me about when they couldn't afford a fridge and so had to keep the milk in a bucket of water with a tea towel over it. Same principle.
Philip
Signatures are broken
AFAIK this kind of fridge is being used by street vendors in Africa. The outer "pot" is normally a wire basket and instead of sand they use coal, which gives a larger surface.
Read this several years ago.
Mohammed Bah Abba received his Rolex Award For Enterprise on September 27, 2000. Here is the Scientific American write up from November 2000.
Rub 2 sticks together vigorously. Lets look through history books and find more stuff to get awards on.
Thousands of years ago potters allready knew how to make pots sufficiently pourous that they would keep the water cool by sweating.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
This is the same principle as a swamp cooler. Like a swamp cooler, it's only going to be useful in dry-air climates. When the humidity is high, evaporative cooling is reduced and eventually eliminated at 100% humidity. But this is old news isn't it?
Seems obvious that the black community is so hard up for something positive from their homeland that they came up with this "invention." Worse they shamed respected people into recognizing it. Here in the US a bunch of the blacks try to say that everything originated in Africa. Lightbulbs, Phone, Steam engines and so on. When asked about proof they call you a racist. Don't need no stinkin proof!
Maybe next they will "invent" a new way to heat food - fire! Mr. Click snapp snapp burp says "you westerners with your Microwave! We found a way to not use your microwave ovens!"
Man, have you ever gone to Nigeria? They have nice cities there, too.
It's not the jungle! sheeesh, you firstworlders seem to think you are in an island of civilization surrounded by the jungle-sea, Brave-New-World's style.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
is really low for third world hell holes. Stay out of any country where something like this is considered an invention
But I need to take it out to get chilled =?)
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
You'll notice that http://hinterlands.cc/images/pot-in-pot2.jpg isn't linked in the article... ;)
This isn't actually very different to the way an electric fridge or air conditioner works. The main difference is that in a fridge, the refrigerant is contained within a closed cycle; in this simple evaporative scheme it is lost to the surrounding air. Since it's only water, few people are likely to be bothered about that. That's why, if you have a CFC fridge and it's still working, there's no point getting rid of it ..... the CFCs are sealed up nice and tight inside it, till you scrap it {there's not much you can actually do to get rid of unwanted CFCs, except leak them into the atmosphere when nobody's looking; which is almost certainly what will happen to the CFCs in your fridge, even if you don't put a chisel through the evaporator in a defrosting accident} and making a new one uses up more energy and resources than keeping an existing one going.
The idea that an evaporating liquid draws heat from its surroundings is nothing new.
Basically, the difference between a liquid and a gas is how much the molecules are vibrating: if the vibration is weak, the molecules' affinity for each other bonds them loosely together so they follow one another around, assuming the shape of a container but occupying a definite volume. If the vibration is stronger than that attractive force, then they just fly apart, occupying the whole of the container and exerting a pressure on it. Heating, of course, makes the molecules vibrate more strongly, which is why liquids turn into gases when heated.
If you try to force more molecules into a space, eventually they will be forced into colliding with one another often enough to form a liquid. This is what goes on in a cigarette lighter: there are just too many molecules to behave as a perfect gas, so some of them are forced together and behave as a liquid.
Pressure, volume and {absolute -- i.e. in Kelvins, 0C = 273.15K} temperature are related by the equation: P * V = n * R * T, where n = number of moles of gas and R is the Ideal Gas Constant. No gas is truly ideal, because the assumption is that the individual molecules have neither mass nor volume; however, the relationship holds reasonably well in real life, only deviating sharply around the point where liquefaction actually occurs.
A fridge or air conditioner has three main parts: the compressor, the condenser and the evaporator. The refrigerant gas is first compressed. Pressure goes up and volume goes down, so temperature also goes up. It is then pumped around some pipes at the back of the fridge {or in the outdoor part of the air conditioner; portable units don't have an outdoor section, so the condenser is cooled by blowing air over it and out of a window through a length of flexi-flue -- uncouple this and you've got yourself a de-humidifier} to allow it to cool down. Once the refrigerant has cooled to ambient temperature and become a liquid again, it is forced out by its own pressure through a tiny hole into a larger space {the evaporator - usually the outer jacket of the icemaking compartment of a fridge, or the coil of pipe in the indoor part of an air conditioner that gets covered with ice crystals}. Now the pressure is not sufficient to keep the refrigerant molecules together, so it becomes a gas again. Pressure goes down, volume goes up, so to satisfy the laws of physics, temperature must go down.
The compressor's intake draws the low-pressure refrigerant out of the evaporator and the whole thing starts again. {In an air con., the whole process has to be stopped every so often to allow the accumulated ice to melt off the surface of the evaporator. Plumbed-in units have a permanent drain, portable ones have a tank which needs emptying periodically. The meltwater is pure enough to be used anywhere demineralised water is required.}
You can also get a terracotta butter cooler which works on this principle: the inside of the tray and dome are salt-glazed, the outsides are unglazed. You soak the whole thing in water, which then evaporates slowly from the outer surface, keeping the butter usefully cold {not rock solid, but not runny either}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Ha ha! When you roll your mouse over the wireframe pots, peppers fly out! What fun!
A methodology; hardly an "invention". It's basically the principal on which the body cools itself. The link is currently /.'d, so I'm curious (and skeptical) about how much the temperature can be dropped. If it can chill a six-pack of Beck's to 43 degrees in shade on a warm day, I'm sold.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
I can see it now... Mohammed Bah Abba got a great investment opportunity ;)
They've even managed to fool judges in a competition now who really should have known that
this sort of thing has been done for thousands of years!
I second the people posting that its around 4000 year old method.
I'm from India and I first I read about it when I was around 10 year old (I'm 23) in a popular social magazine (called 'Dharmyuga', the most popular magazine of its time). It had schematics identical to those offered by this fellow, and yes, they mentioned it to be "very old technique". My dad still has collection of old issues of this mag and I'm sure I can fish out the article mentioning this 'invention'.
Can't these fellows do at least a google query to verify that whatever they're offering money for is indeed an invention ??
Several docs with feedback
- mritunjai
I'm waiting to buy one of these at Wal-Mart for $18.95.
"Simple words such as 'better' or 'faster' are best used by simpletons. Life [...] is more complicated." - TMC
Evaporative cooling has been use in kitchens for millenia, although it is usually used to keep water cool (unglazed pots). For storage of more than a few hours, a cellar, solid stone building, or cave is less hassle. You easily get guaranteed 70F or below long-term storage in most regions of the world, and if you are architecturally clever, you can actually get lower-than average-long-term temperatures without any maintenance or needing to re-fill water into little jugs.
Because if i put out a pot of DRY sand here in the country, at the end of the day I will have a pot of WET sand (and that's when it didn't rain).
In the city, if you put a pot of sand outside, the pot will disappear (the sand will remain, usually).
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
Well, if he can get an award for "inventing" something that has been around for thousands of years, I think I should get an award for inventing the wheel. My latest version is round!
Free Firefox news reader.
Does it have a built-in Internet connection that orders more food when you're running out? Does it heck.
It doesn't even have a built-in automatic ice-dispenser. What a piece of crap.
In fact, what is this doing on Slashdot anyway? Which would you rather see- a case-modded fridge with transparent sides, cold-cathode lighting and the ability to download new screensavers from goatse.cx, or a simple device that's going to give the poorest people in the world a better chance of feeding themselves?
Yeah. I know what's important. That glow-in-the-dark pump sure looks cool.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
If this is so blindingly obvious maybe you should have invented it and started selling low-cost refridgeration equipment in Africa. If you read up on the effects of this device you would find that young women in families that use the device are now allowed to go to school instead of being sent to the market to sell goods? Why? Because crops last longer so they don't have to sell them as soon as they pick them.
So tell those young girls that it doesn't matter. Tell the same thing to families that have food that lasts weeks instead of days.
Just because something is simple doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I got an email from the this inventor a while back. If I recall he needed the help of an American citizen to help him get the billions of dollars that sub-zero was going to pay him for this process. Haven't heard from the fellow since I gave him my financial information though...
I have a book printed in the 1890s and recently which details this exact setup - the only difference being the "large pot" is a oak barrel and the "small pot" is itself something about the size of a 5 gallon pot. Anyway, not a new invention by any stretch.
Yep, it works the same than the spanish botijo (sorry, link in spanish)
Here is a link to research being done using a similar approach, but more efficient evaproration (not water), and a vacuum, so it can actually produce 2kg of ice a day. (Not in production yet, due to deterioration of the system after a couple of years, but doesn't sound too far off.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
i remember my dad and grandad used to tell me stories from WW2, when their house was burnt down by the Germans (in Greece), they used to bury in the ground ceramic pots to keep the olive oil and food cool and fresh. Not to mention ancient Greeks who did something similar back in 500 b.c. (thats why even nowadays archeologists find ceramic pots filled with wine and olive oil). This is a very old trick, and an effective one indeed, but why should a bloody Nigerian be awarded for something already done ages ago...Not to mention the similar and classic trick that you can produce water by evaporation (bury a ceramic pot in the ground, put a plastic cover, and in a full day there will be enough water in there, evaporated from the ground)...
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria won a Rolex award for his pot-in-pot invention. Here's how it works. You take a smaller pot and put it inside a larger pot. Fill the space in between them with wet sand, and cover the top with a wet cloth. When the water evaporates, it pulls the heat out with it, making the inside cold. It's a natural, cheap, easy-to-make refrigerator.
/. will no doubt popularize the technique and improve the lives of extremely impoverished sub-Sarahan africans. After all, if they weren't spanking on /. all the time, then perhaps they could afford a Frigidaire.
While the story may be (1) old news and (2) well known in many cultures, bringing attention to the idea here on
Dry Season
Wind up springs have potential energy?!
They had them years ago in the UK for milk - milk was delivered daily to the doorstep (still is, where I live) and similar porous pottery things were used to keep it cool till the house-owner picked it up. Last summer I was trying to find a suitable flowerpot & dish arrangement to mimic the old milk coolers. as the milkman delivers about 20 minutes after I've gone to work..
oldie
Grats to this guy for winning the recognition. But from what I understand in his culture the money he receives will just have to be doled out to his family, and his extended family, and their families, etc.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but that's part of the problem with entreprenuership in a lot of African nations. As soon as you start to get somewhere, people start crawling out of the woodwork looking for handouts as part of your family, and it's against traditions to not give the assistance to them. That's why nepotism is such a problem. If you are elected to a position of power you pretty much have to hire your relatives.
I'm assuming this based on the following story: I dated a (great) woman for about two years who lived in Rwanda for 18 months. While there for the state department, she taught a native how to manage his small furniture business and turn a respectable profit. Once he started making enough gains to expand and have a chance at doing more than just surviving off his work (expand his shop, hire more carpenters, open a real store, etc.) she learned that his family threw some serious pressure at him to buck her advice and give the money to them.
So he never was able to make a business to sustain his family because they didn't understand he needed to pay people working for him to bring even more in. Don't spend the seed money.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
A beowulf cluster of these.
You could keep a lot of beer cold.
Make America grate again!
don't look at the heat on the roof as an enemy, it's a free energy source. If you can collect it, you can use it with an ammonia evaporative refrigeration unit. You could also use it (possibly) to generate some useful amounts of electricity.
Another way to get free cooling in the summer is to have a lot of plastic pipe buried down in the yard below the surface effect heating. That's a variable that you'll have to determine, the depth, but should be easy to find out. In northern climes, it's roughly equivalent to the mean average frost depth. The pipes (long enough, some hundreds of feet are needed to cool say around a 1500 - 2000 sq ft structure) have a single entrance to them coming out of the ground at the farthest away, lowest, shadiest/coolest spot you have in the yard. They come into the building and have a vent at the lowest most central point, then are open to the room. Depending on how many stories your building is, you have floor vents that may be opened and closed, all the way to the roof, where another vent is located. Heat rises, you are creating a thermo-siphon effect. Air enters at the outside pipe, travels underground through the pipes and gets cooled. The roof vent, being the highest and hottest point, acts as the draw, the pump if you will, drawing the cooler air upwards and out, cooling as it travels. That's why you need a lot of buried pipe, but once constructed, it's relatively maintenance free, just needs take care on adequate screening at both ends to prevent insects and dirt entering, etc, and to keep rainwater out, relatively easy with normal conical vent caps. It's a chimney effect, low tech, no moving parts, but you can get some decent cooling from it. I don't have a link real handy, but I imagine that googling will find you some drawings and real-world examples of this technique in action.
The water based evaporative coolers are in large scale use around the world. Local to me is a rather large commercial poultry operation, all the buildings there have massive evaporative coolers installed, they work fairly well, and save many thousands in electric costs, in fact, I doubt they could operate the farms at a profit without them. Basically they are just huge screens that have water dripping down them, and the exhaust fans in the building draw the air through them.
Large commercial sized greenhouses mostly all have them as well.
Your insulation efforts are bang on. Nothing beats massive insulation as a heat/cold moderator. It's the most productive and efficient way to spend the energy dollar once any sort of artificial heating/cooling is required. In some places, the technique is called "superinsulation", with a usual targeted goal of R-55 to 60 range, as opposed to (in the US anyway) the normal R-18 or so. I've worked on two of those projects, they work pretty well for dropping costs (increasing effieicney really) for both cooling and heating.
This is about how someone came up with an easily packaged low-tech device that will help millions of people. Sure, it's obvious, but he's doing something that will actually help people.
But presumably there is some engineering (how thick the pots, how wide the space, how fine the sand, how wet the sand) that was optimized to get the most efficient cooling.
That's what's worth detailing. Some of the variables probably don't matter. Some do. Figuring out what's important is true engineering, even if it doesn't involve lasers and five decimal places.
We used to take a hand's width "slice" of straw from the end of a square bale, make it wet and stick in the window - instant air conditioner. The breeze blowing through it (coming INTO the room - you don't want to cool the OUTSIDE) had the heat "removed" with this same process.
I doubt those people have the straw/grass/etc. to waste on A/C, though.
The lore you have is priceless for anthropologists.
Write a detailed book on the techniques and traditions of these people, before it is too late. You too are given a limited time span to do this. You could probably get some grants (nothing impressing but enough to pay the bills) and a nice title(Master's?), if you play your cards well.
Here in Canada, some aboriginal tribes re-learned their traditions and languages by researching the accounts of the european explorers.
Moreover, it will change you from the cool-today, forgotten tomorrow world of Slashdot!
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
I'm using this principle during my next beach party.
Cold beer here I come!
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
again for what it's worth, I can turn you on to a couple of different roofing insulation schemes, again, in use around my locale. One uses a rubberized elastic + insulation spray-on coating in place of paint on metal roofing, but the same can be applied to normal shingled roofing as well. The other is a normal paint that has heat reflective properties. Hmm, I have to check the name, BRB....
Had to go outside and look at a bucket. The paint is called "polar cap", from integratedcoatings.com. The chicken farmer here (16 buildings, that's a lot of cluckers) swears by it, says it will drop his roof temps 10 degrees F in the georgia heat, saving beau coup on the electric.
The roofing insulation stuff I can't remember the name of right now, but it was a spin-off from normal rubberized roofing systems. It added around a one inch thick layer of sprayed on self hardening foam first (I am guessing some sort of poly urethane), then the spray on rubber compound. Allegedly lasted lots longer than normal roofing, and could be directly applied to about any exisiting roofing system wiuthout removing the old shingles or whatever. Hope that's enough info to go googling with.
good luck, stay cool!
How stupid -- Now do thousands of traditional ice-cream (kulfi) sellers in India pay Rolex for patent use?
3. Pimp
$100,000 prize wow. Now thats a true nigerian scammer!
You know I can make a low-tech TV. My invention is everywhere, some people call it windows. I want my money now.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Someone give me a patent for wet sand!
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Wow, this is from 2000.
(now this next one is not proper in any language and it definitely doesn't make sense, so there's nothing to translate, basically. here's my try:
Final-Recipient: RFC822;
mohammedbahabba@gmail.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: DNS; thakralgw.client.securenet
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 550 mohammedbahabba@gmail.com... No such user OR Service
Last-Attempt-Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2004 12:09:34 +0800
I understand the basics of this but wouldn't it be better done using gravel or bigger stones with more water? Surely having more water will make the effect either last longer or go cooler?
Yes, I'm sure that the Europeans, who had sailed halfway around the world, bearing steel tools, mechanical clocks, telescopes, and gunpowder, were dumbstruck by the advanced technology of the local natives.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
"You might be well right when you say that this is an old invention. But I would caution against demeriting it simpy on account of that"
You're being goofy.
Its not being "put down" because its old; hell the wheel is really old, and we seem to agree its a good idea.
No, the problem is that this is similar to someone patenting the obvious. People have known about it for thousands of years, they've used it. Now this guy wins an award because he what.... wrote a paper on it?
Cripes. Is the bar for "new and novel" so low these days that a guy got an award for discovering water evaporates and cools things?
Is that all it takes these days?
When I was living in Arizona, I had to re-shingle part of my roof. It was the weekend before monsoon season, and boy was it hot... Anyway, I took a wet towel and put it around my neck, letting the evaporation from the towel cool me. It was quite a common thing to do there in the land of swamp coolers.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
So how cold can these things make their interiors? The article mentioned being able to keep perishables for three weeks, which seems to be on par with my fridge -- if not better! But what does that translate to in degrees Fahrenheit (or, for the rest of the world, Celsius) with, say, a dry 100-degree F ambient?
For a second there, I thought smaller pot meant 1gram and larger meant 5grams....
but yea...pretty ingenious. Only problem, u need water. If you're stuck in the middle of the Sahara or Gobi desert without water, you're diary products are screwed.
Of course, using evaporating water for cooling isn't a new idea. Nuclear power plants use them, some HVAC systems use them, and it's also used to cool computers. It's just that using it in such a simple implementation for this sort of application (cool/cold storage of perishable food) is pretty original; only necessity would have made it so.
Now, use alcohol and you might get a pot-freezer.
I once encountered a street vendor selling "Relox" watches. The Rolex corporation couldn't do anything because it was a different name, yet most people would not notice the vowels are switched with such tiny letters. And this was before the days of mass spamming letter games. I almost bought one.
Table-ized A.I.
What is new about this is his effort. He maximized his design for over two years to get the maximum affect (prolonging the life of produce) for the least cost. Then he built two factories to produce them and distributed them to rural villagers for free (using his own money). Imagine the changes it made on a culture where food grown would only last 1-2 days once picked if it could now last a month or more!
m 3.html
The real "invention" here is his efforts toward making a positive change in the villager's lifestyle. Obviously if someone is awarding $100,000 dollars there is more to it. You folks should do some more research before you nock it!! He plans to use the $100,000 to distibute the pots more widely and to increase his education efforts!
Learn before you look like a fool:
http://www.varaprasad.htmlplanet.com/custo
Creating fire by striking two rocks together. Cooking your foor by using only wood. Washing your clothes by using only a paddle and a rock. All these secrets and more are available to you for a low price of only $9.99 + S&H Just imagine the savings. An independent study shows that you can save up to $300 a year in matches and electricity costs if you use my techniques. But wait, there is more: If you act now, I'll send you the companion booklets "How to build your own hut out of cow dung" and "Build your house entirely out of snow" These techniques are used by millions of satisfied customers around the world. You too can do away with those pesky mortgage payments. Please send certified cheque or money order for $9.99 plus $29.99 S&H to : Mr. Szostalo 3749 Albion Ottawa Canada Results guaranteed or your money back (less S&H)
Do not look into the laser with remaining eye.
I'm quite surprised that he won this award. After all, there are thousands of di-hydrogen monoxide related deaths each year.
Surely there should be a warning on these devices...
Sounds like the wine cooler we bought several years ago, which is just an unglazed clay container slightly bigger than a wine bottle.
I think what this inventor did is a very clever enhancement to the idea.
Three wars back we called Sauerkraut "liberty cabbage" and we called liberty cabbage "super slaw" and back then a suitcase was known as a "Swedish lunch box." Of course, nobody knew that but me. Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling...
Wow, how the heck did something this old get through as "news."
Back in the '80s Scientific American ran an article describing ancient ice making in the Arab lands. They would build walls running east to west about 6 feet tall, a couple feet apart, with a flat, tiled bottom between them which was flooded with a thin layer of water. The sun never touched the bottom, and during the night it got cold enough to form a thin skin of ice, which workers would scrape off before dawn and store underground.
They took this a step farther and used the ice to cool buildings. On top of the building they would put a tower with a single window that was tangent to the prevailing winds. The wind blowing past the window would suck out air (Bernoulli effect), drawing cool air up from tunnels beneath the building.
The invention is NOT evaporative cooling. That is well established in both tradition and science.
The invention is putting one pot inside the other seperated by wet sand. This way, the inner pot stays DRY while the evaporative cooling happens. In case you don't know, dryness is important for preserving many types of food.
As far as I know this, seemingly obvious, technique has not been applied before. The guy deserves his money.
Cheers
Some people get so impressed with stupid simple tricks. I think the people on that judging committee had ought to all be fired, then stoned, (puns intended). Evaporative cooling has long been known and used for centuries, even millenia. The only new thing here is using wet sand as a media to hold the evaporative fluid. Most people in the southwest US must be laughing their a$$ess off with this article. "look at those idiots swoon of stuff we have used our whole life!". Evaporative coolers are have been and are still used in the US in warm less humid climates to cool everything up to and including entire homes. See the URL for a heads up on good old 'swamp cooling' in the USA. USA Today Q&A on Swamp Coolers
Everyone is missing the most important part of this development. What will this do to the economy of nigeria? What about the farmers who will be able to sell less food because food will last longer? This evil technology should be banned by the nigerian government. Let the proles rise!
Being original isn't the damn point. The award wasn't for innovation, it's an entrepreneurial award for building a company on this idea (and improving people's lives by selling a well-made implementation of the product, what capitalism is actually about - in other words, to put it bluntly, this is an "award for learning to be a good capitalist", probably an unusual concept in (white male) American capitalism, but probably comparable to e.g. 'businesswoman of the year' type awards that still reward female capitalist success stories in developed countries).
Check this link: it's called the "THE ROLEX AWARDS FOR ENTERPRISE". Quote, "He has already sold 12,000".
by the chance, was the inventor's name Darl Mc Bride ?? .....
watch out then!, he could even get a patent for that thechnology. including the wheel, bicycle and the Internet
Any guy could have told you they've seen this work at any Wet T-shirt contest. After they pour the water, evaporation happens right away and the women get very cold. You can tell that the women are getting cold by the visual status check on their n*pple!
I agree, it is brilliant. About as brilliant as growing these vegetables in unclean, unsafe dirt that you wouldn't eat either. Perhaps I missed the part where the vegetables are grown in sterilized hydroponics labs. This is pure speculation, but I would guess that people in Nigeria wash their ingredients before cooking with them.
--
"Extra Anus Kills Four-Legged Chick" -- Headline
As other people have pointed out, this is not new tech. When I worked up the west Canadian coast, we created ice in a carton of milk with this method.
I suspect there are plenty of examples of old tech becoming new again...river-powered pipe system to run cool water through homes, cooling them?
I'm currently looking at building a cordwood masonry house (AKA stackwall AKA stovewood masonry). I see no benefit to modern construction methods that isn't outweighed by lessened total cost of ownership over the life of the structure.
(I really can't belive that nobody else said this, yet!)
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I vaguely remember reading about this in the local edition of Time Magazine a couple of years ago.
:) (No pun intended.)
Then again, it's cool anyway.
Jonathan Ah Kit - Lower Hutt, New Zealand - jonathan@metalab.unc.edu
Perhaps more importantly, when is someone going to use this in a PC watercooling rig!!??
Er, isn't the whole problem with deserts the LACK of water?
A gadget like this will consume a fair bit of water, surely? More in hot, dry weather.
As a matter of interest, my Scottish grandmother used something similar, a pan of water with a [non-porous] milk container, wet cloth on top. The non-porous pan meant the water only evaporated through the cloth, thus slowing water consumption.
Here in Australia, we use canvas water bags hung outside the car - they stay cool all right, especially as you drive along. (Disclaimer, don't try this in a city)
"Cats like plain crisps"
Shouldn't that be the focus of inventing new ways for doing things by the way? To improve peoples life?
Apparently this invention has freed nigerians from having to sell vegetables at the market and now allows them to send scam emails.
AWESOME.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
A huge pile of large, loosely spaced rocks. Evidently, the inside stays very cool, and moisture from air passing through condenses on the rocks and trickles down and eventually out a trough at the bottom. I can't remember where these things have been found, but I think it was somewhere in northern Africa, or possibly the Middle East. Saw it on National Geographic or some such a long time ago. The ingenuity of the human race is astounding.
P.S. you seem to be out of closing italic tags. Here, I'll loan you one of mine. </I>
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
... on the condensation point. I didn't mean for my post to be the total outline, just a gross overview. A partial solution is to provide a few sumps in the pipeline. Incidently, a similar arrangment has been developed PRECISELY as a water harvesting tool in water-poor areas. I believe that too was covered in a slashdot article last year or the year before, perhaps inside the peruvian airdams article IIRC.
Another good idea for the backyard geothermal cooling idea would be to place an air cleaner device such as an aranizer (brand name) in the input air stream. Indoor air should be scrubbed/charcoal filtered/ treated with ozone whatever anyway, IMO. Most buildings have too many toxins in them. You want to have efficient heating and cooling, but ya want clean fresh air, too. With the super insulation techniques, you are forced to consider air ingress and egress, because the resulting structure is (as close as possible) fairly air tight. In fact, a super insulated structure has to have direct air feed for gas burning devices (dryer, stove, hot water heater, furnace, etc) or woodstoves for instance.
Incorporating adequate air intake and filtration is a must have-in those structures.
That Legionnaires outbreak was in Phily I believe.
We are always going to have cootieth in our environments, the best bet is to keep joe immune system in top notch shape. One less jolt and one more apple juice in other words, and so on and so forth.. And definetly part of that is to keep your local micro environment, your home and indoor office worspace, clean in all manners.
I think the potential problems associated with a passive thermosiphon/geothermal rig can be addressed adequately. After all, it really is only outside air as the initial source, not a lot different from opening the window to the screens. a little foreplanning and some sumps, and a way to periodically flush and clean the sytem using the hose and some detergent solution should be adequate. Thanks for bringing up that aspect of this. Energy and using it more efficiently is of prime importance to this changing whirrled, something I was reminded of the other day when I went to the gas pump. Ouch!
heh, I have an antique moped (around a 78 I believe)I need new piston rings and other 2 stroke whatnot for, I think I'll work on it this summer sometime. When it was running it got like 40-50 miles to the quart! Something nuts like that anyway, way non-thirsty. Couldn't hurt if (when) this oil business gets even more expensive! A HORSE might be nice, too! heh heh heh heh
It is so easy to assume the availability of 2 pots, sand, and water for most of us. Here in the US desert southwest it is a (fading) tradition to use evaporative cooling for homes, cars, personal cooling and beer.
Evaporative cooling requires both water and low humidity. Doesn't work in the rain forest, you know. As a result, one would find this an ideal solution in desert climates. But then you have to consider the precious commodity that is recklessly consumed to cool the contents of the pot.
Another clever person will have to find a ready source of abundant water to make this invention work for the people who most need it. That is probably the fly in the ointment. Until then the poor and destitute will probably drink the little water available or use it in other unclever ways.
...omphaloskepsis often...
You just need an english speaker. He's speaking fake mock english, like I would be if I said "Yo iso el espeakero de spanisho de la vida loca! Si havo el sexo witho el My Littlo Ponyo!!"
Most of us at least have a fridge freezer...yes? If you don't then personal cooling is probably the least of your problems.
;)
I lived in North Queensland Australia, where its fairly hot and very humid so evaporative cooling is pretty much useless. We used to freeze icecream buckets of water in the freezer, smash them up and put them in a big metal tray. Take the tray into the room to be cooled and blow a little pedestal fan over it. It cools you for long enough to get to sleep at least. Doubles as an infuriating spray of icy water on your crotch when you step on it going to the can at 3am
-- Howto: Get +5 (1) Whine about M$ (2) Namedrop Gentoo (3) Casually Abuse Mods (4) Namedrop Early Computer Model
Of the DICK!
I am from Kathmandu, NEPAL. I have fridge but still use earthen pot for storing drinking water cauz it has a unique taste! There is a farmer beside my home has dug a big hole in the ground...
........... SOIL.........
xxxxxxxx........xxxxxxxxxx
_Soil___()000000() ___soil___
()000000() '()' represents clay
()000000() bricks. It contains
sand in-between...
_SAND sand SAND sand SAND_
This is where he temporarily stores vegetables before selling. WHAT'S THE BIG INVENTION in that??? we have been using it for generations! n' still such techniques are hygenic and healthy. We still use copper jars for storing water [scientifically its bacteria resistanc +good for health] instead of using a plastic bottle. as most of you do!
hUNT3R