Company Develops Microwave-powered Water Heater

dponce80 writes "Pulsar Advanced Technologies has announced that, starting next week, they will launch the MK4, a microwave-powered on-demand water heater. Why is this cool? Well, until now, you had two options: electric heaters that keep a large amount of water hot at all times, or natural gas heaters that heat up water on-demand. The first is very costly and wasteful, and the second is not available to everyone, especially those in rural areas. You can't heat water up quickly enough with conventional resistance-based electric elements, as it would require huge amount of electricity. Not so with microwaves. The Vulcanus MK4 can heat water from 35 degrees Fahrenheit to 140 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds and can source multiple applications at once: showers, dishwasher, sink usages and more. The Globe and Mail has an article with a little more information."

Comments

No, another example of cut and paste...

[Constantin]

This "article" is a press release being marketed as news by the Globe and Mail. Here is my letter to the editor.

Reprinting press releases and announcing them as news in your publication is a pretty sad state of affairs. Your "article" fails to analyze the technology even in a rudimentary fashion. For example, if the reporter had turned on a crticial thinking cell, perhaps he/she would have inquired how a micro-wave based tankless water heater was going to be more efficient than a resistance-based one?

You cannot get around the Physics that it takes 1 BTU to heat a pound of water by 1 degree Farenheit. Tankless electric water heaters have existed for years and are 99.9% efficient at turning electrical energy into heat... just like this microwave technology. So no efficiency gain there, and never mind answering the question where the electrical power comes from in the first place and the conversion efficiency at that end.

How about comparing the efficiency and energy consumption of a tankless electric water heater (of any kind) to a tank-based water heater that uses a heat pump, a desuperator from a geothermal heating system, or perhaps even an indirect water heater fired with a condensing gas boiler? That probably never occured to your reporter because he/she was under orders to secure advertising from Pulsar Advanced Technologies.

Yet, heat pump water heaters have been shown to consume a lot less net energy than their electric competition because they harvest "free" energy from the basement or the ground, even if you account for standby losses. Every kWh put into such a heater produces several kWh of heat. See this press release at ORNL for more information.

And, lest we forget, even regular gas fired water heaters achieve a higher thermal gain per net unit energy put in at the front end than any electric unit... as a typical energy plant is 35% efficient. Most of the energy going into that process escapes as waste heat, and I'm not sure that being dependent on the electrical utilities is any more beneficial than relying on the gas utilities.

Please do better than this in the future.