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.
**Interestingly the only reason to even plug a refrigerator into the thing it to demo for people, the math is done we've hit the temperature targets it'll work the moment its connected. The hot water tanks are a necessity. In order to test the performance of the system you have to have a load to run it against and the tanks do that perfectly. We also have a pretty good approximation of the time we need to get that water from whatever point we want to start to whatever point we need to end while testing different strategies (like over/under clocking/volting) to performance test the system. We can also draw heat off that load without thermally shocking the system - it acts a a buffer. As you can imagine they system dosent like to go from 180 to ambient in one shot.
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.
** your obviously smarter than this...
You've really proven nothing new, especially none of the key concepts you're suggesting are practical.
**All the key concepts are practical, the only thing we've proven is we're not particularly good at explaining them... thanks for cluing us in, when you do this every day it all seems pretty obvious.
It's just like how solar roadways has "proven" you can recover electricity from solar panels on a road but in reality it makes absolutely no sense economically.
**I personally donated to solar roadways, not because it was practical but because it sends a message to manufacturers, developers and governments that this is the kind of change I want to see. Whether you think it was a scam or not he made a trip to the White House (Bill Nye evidently likes him?) and is building the things at a scale previously not possible. Interesting thing is he has already taken orders for several of the first systems proving we either don't understand the economic model or that he doesn't need one to sell the product.
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 raising funds without a clear business model?
**How can Solar Roadways sell their systems or raise grant money from the DOT without a clear economic model? Saying you don't understand his model likely points to his inability to explain it well or our inability to understand it - it obviously says little about the product's viability since he is actually building and selling it!
Or is fleecing kickstarter tards the plan?
**We have a business model, it'll eventually be on the website and (like I said) we're not going to outline it on this forum. Before we do that we'll obviously have to get a lot better at explaining how this thing works to people... although the business model is slightly easier. Just because its easy to explain to engineers or people already working in the energy industry doesn't mean we can ignore everyone else. I want to thank you for pointing that out, we'll use this good information to get our act together a little more before we do the kickstarter - I'll fully expect you to be there to debunk us!