I just had a crazy idea for a green HW heater, but would it even work?

Red Squirrel

Imagine hooking up the water to a tesla turbine, and using it to generate electricity to run a small tankless heater. Think the energy produced would be enough for a couple 100w of heat? I would not expect it to create scalding hot water, but enough to make the main HW heater work less hard.

Crazy idea?

Scuba_Dave

So use the water coming into your house to spin a turbine ?
Not enough constant flow I'd imagine

Look for some used old style solar hot water panels
I've picked up 6 so far
2 are heating one hot tub
2 will heat a 2nd hot tub & the pool
3rd set will heat water for the house

DownRiverGuy

The flow would be enough.... pressure would be a heck no.

Also.... if you're stealing a few watts of power from the water coming in... think about what that will do to the overall water pressure of the home. Could cause little to no flow in some spots of the house etc.

And electric waterheaters require ALOT of power to operate. To put it into persepective most Insta-Hot systems require 120amps of capacity to function properly!

Go with what Scuba said. Solar hot water systems have some of the fastest payback on renewable energy systems!

Red Squirrel

Yeah true you'd lose lot of pressure.

Also instead of electric was thinking of using magnetic induction. Not sure exactly how it works, but think it has to do with a magnet moving next to metal, it makes it heat up. So rather then go to electric then heat, go straight to heat. I don't know if it would warm the water significantly though, but if yes, would maybe be nice for filling the pool and stuff.

Found the link to what I am talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F8vhx8DU1c

I'm not sure exactly how this works, but it seems if you move magnets near copper it heats it up. Though I forgot about the drag this causes on the magnets, this would make the tesla turbine harder to spin, thus greatly reduce pressure. One of these days I still want to try this as an attachment I put on a hose just for an experiment but I imagine the water probably does not even get noticeably warmer. In that vid it's the same water sitting there for a long enough period of time.