I think part of the disconnect in this discussion is that in this theoretical stage, we are at the limit if answering a lot of the harder questions (and really great ones I might add) because we have hit the limit of the R&D we can do at the level we want. That's the point of the crowdfunding campaign - so we can address and discover more appropriate ways / places where this concept would be a best fit.
Have you really run out of experimenting funds in the theoretical stage?
Seems like a group of people with access to a national lab and fancy simulation software should have no problem buying an old used refrigerator and hooking it up to a water cooling loop to prove your theory.
I'd even be willing to bet you could have bought a used refrigerator or AC for less money than you wasted on those two hot water tanks.
We've proven a few key (and major) concepts but we need to prove more and as my colleague mentioned, we have a national lab here in the US who is onboard to help us do that.
You've demonstrated that you can keep hot water in an insulated tank and heat the water using a computer but literally nobody thought that was impossible or hard to do.
You've really proven nothing new, especially none of the key concepts you're suggesting are practical.
It's just like how solar roadways has "proven" you can recover electricty from solar panels on a road but in reality it makes absolutely no sense economocally.
Once we start knocking out the things we can and can't do, the business model that we commit to will become more clear.
How can you possibly begin rasing funds without a clear business model?
Or is fleecing kickstarter tards the plan?
Time, as you know, is money. We need money to pay (more) people for their time (and what they are worth) and for wet lab space, which even at incubators isn't cheap (+/- 22k a year). We've done a lot with a little, but self financing is not an option. Research isn't cheap, and when it is cheap, it often turns out to be bad research.
No one was saying that anything here was impossible to do or that no one couldn't do it. We did it. We want to do more.
While it may seem silly to not have a business model hammered out, 10s of billions of dollars are raised each year for concepts that don't plug into pre-determined business models. I mean.....most medical research dollars are essentially sunk costs funded most often with grants from non profit or government entities. Interestingly, the problems they are often trying to solve end up having commercial applications unrelated to the original target application. We are acutely aware that this could happen to us.
Here's just a few examples:
http://www.businesspundit.com/10-accidental-discoveries-that-generated-great-wealth/