Redneck Express Magnetic Heater

Redneck Express Magnetic Heater Experiment

Everybody seems to be an environmentalist  these days.  That's cool, but I hate being trendy.  I'm not your typical environmentalist.  I'm a redneck with capitalist tendencies.  But, whatever your proclivities you've got agree something is amiss in the world today.  While I haven't much concern with global warming, my latest interest is in more efficient sources of energy: hydrogen, wind, magnatism, sonoluminescence.  To heck with renewable. I'm looking for cheap.

I started surfing the web looking for alternate sources of heat.  My interest is purely selfish.  Propane just costs too damn much.  While I don't have any wonderful over unity insights, I do believe I can come up with something better than burning prehistoric vegetable matter or whatever propane is. 

This is actually my second experiment. I also made a Brown's gas generator.  I cut the plates out with a set of tin snips.  The edges are so rough I'm a little afraid to actually use it, but it pumps out a bunch of HHO when hooked to a battery charger.  Let's say it's still in the development phase.  I may put it in something I'm not fond of eventually, something I wouldn't really mind blowing the hood off.  That would sure add a little excitement to a small town Saturday night.

Ok back to the Redneck Magnet Heater.  First, I took some magnets, and put them on a board with wire ties.  The magnets alternate poles: north, south, north, etc.  Then I took a chunk of 1/8" aluminum tread plate and cut it roughly round with a side grinder.  My wife helped.  She stood on the tread plate and I ran the grinder.  

We were both wearing shorts and burned the dickens out of out our legs with all the flying grinder particles.  It was wonderful swearing practice.  While giving a good cussing to various inanimate objects, I carved a rough circle of tread plate.  We then drilled a hole in the middle, installed a bolt and put the bolt in an electric drill and spun the disk for 1 minute next to the magnets.  As hot as it was this afternoon,  this simplistic rough experimenting created lots of personal supplemental heat . The spinning aluminum also got hot in the middle and warm around the edges. 

I've purchased 16 wind generator magnets for a serious heater.  These will pick up around 45 lbs each, and are rated to 300 degrees.  They have so much power that if you put them together you cannot get them back apart.  That's the next evolution, but I don't think I'll make that one with a side grinder, wire ties, and tread plate.  We used 2 of them in this experiment, but didn't get any heat until we added the ten little magnets. 

In one alternate energy forum I reviewed, a guy had experimented with a more sophisticated similar setup in a lathe.  He created 220 degree heat in the aluminum at 250 rpm's in one minute with an eight inch disk using ¼ " aluminum and 12 wind generator magnets. Another guy had experimented with a 12 inch disk, and a 2 hp motor. The aluminum plate heated to 654 degrees Fahrenheit when spun at 1750 rpm's for one minute, but was hard to spin. 

This idea as with all good ideas is stolen.  I first found suggestions for magnetic heaters in Free Energy's blog.  Then I ran onto a company in North Dakota called MagTec Energy that builds construction heaters and oil well platform heaters.  I figured if it's good enough for the oil companies, it's good enough for me.  These guys aren't stupid.  What does it say about oil prices when oil companies use magnetic heaters?

These babies pump out 500,000 btu's from a few magnets on a spinning disk next to an aluminum plate, driven by a diesel or electric engine.  A coupla hundred thousand btu's will have me sweating like steam engine mechanic all winter long.  And the good news - no wood smoke, not that I give a hoot about global warming or greenhouse gas emission.  There's nothing wrong with wood heat.  I just don't like my clothes smelling like bacon.

I'll never win a mechanical engineering award for this thing, but the dang thing works without fuel other than what you use to turn it.  Those folks in North Dakota got around 95% efficiency using a diesel engine that's only 35% efficient.  Yep, I had a good day, grinder burns and all.  If It ends up in the discard pile I'm still gonna have some killer refrigerator magnets that I can hang my toaster on..

8/04/2008