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GravityLight: Generate light with gravity

gravitylight.org

21–30 of 132 posts

Re: GravityLight: Generate light with gravity

#21
post #8

There's a lot of reasons why this is cool, but I'm skeptical about it's aims to get rid of kerosene lamps. Kerosene lamps are made with garbage. They can be replaced in minutes if there's a problem. Fuel costs are high, yes, but capital costs and maintenance are low. Those matter. To really make this a long term win, you need to make it indestructible and easy to repair with on-hand parts. I hope they can do that.

I can see that potentially being a problem, especially if dirt or something gets caught in it. However, the most delicate part of it is the most replaceable, that band could be easily made out of cloth or leather, and motors are usually fairly available. It's most certainly a better argument than "it's not much power" etc, but I'm not convinced it matters too much. I doubt just as much as the next guy these things will change the world, but it's a noble idea and a noble purpose.

Re: GravityLight: Generate light with gravity

#23
Its cool our energy problems are being solved in two directions at once. We are (slowly) making better energy storage and generation devices. At the same time many of our energy needs go down by the rapid decrease in energy needed to power the electronics. It would be cool to see a graph of the watts/lumen efficiency of light bulbs over the last 50 years and of the joules/operation of CPUs.

Re: GravityLight: Generate light with gravity

#25
post #9

You need to lift a 10KG weight about 2 kilometres to get a teaspoon of kerosene's energy, so it's not a great replacement on that front, and having 10KG weights dangling around at variable points between ceiling and floor sounds if anything even more of a liability than a lamp with a naked flame, which does at least stay where its put. Sorry to be negative but it's difficult to conceive of a realistic scenario where…

downvoted hard for assuming that most of the energy consumption by kerosene goes to visible light, LOL, come on man

Re: GravityLight: Generate light with gravity

#26
post #4

Here's what people said about it 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4889266

It's amazing the amount of people who immediately cry hoax. Someone raised a good point about taking money from locals and bringing it to Europe/America/China, but clearly this isn't breaking the law of physics.

It's gratifying to see how much more substantive and less dismissive this thread is than that one from 2012. Partly it may be that the project itself has developed, but I'd like to think that HN threads have improved too.

Re: GravityLight: Generate light with gravity

#27
Years ago there was a similar 'potential energy to electricity' buzz and I was initially quite excited. Then I did the math on how much energy is actually available (even at 100% efficiency) from such a scheme. Spoiler - it's minuscule.

E = mass x 9.81 x height

So a 10kg mass at 2 meters can (@ 100% efficiency) provide 196 joules of energy. A modern cell phone battery has about 25000 joules. To charge said phone would require raising that weight well over 127 times.

Re: GravityLight: Generate light with gravity

#28
post #27

Years ago there was a similar 'potential energy to electricity' buzz and I was initially quite excited. Then I did the math on how much energy is actually available (even at 100% efficiency) from such a scheme. Spoiler - it's minuscule. E = mass x 9.81 x height So a 10kg mass at 2 meters can (@ 100% efficiency) provide 196 joules of energy. A modern cell phone battery has about 25000 joules. To charge said phone woul…

But this isn't for charging a phone; it's for having light, right now.

Re: GravityLight: Generate light with gravity

#29
post #27

Years ago there was a similar 'potential energy to electricity' buzz and I was initially quite excited. Then I did the math on how much energy is actually available (even at 100% efficiency) from such a scheme. Spoiler - it's minuscule. E = mass x 9.81 x height So a 10kg mass at 2 meters can (@ 100% efficiency) provide 196 joules of energy. A modern cell phone battery has about 25000 joules. To charge said phone woul…

Hmm, that's actually pretty doable if coupled with pedal power (you'd either charge directly with a dynamo in this case or pump water to a higher elevation to store as potential energy). Back of the envelope math says you could do it quite easily in 15 minutes which isn't bad at all especially given the fact that you can't shove power into the battery anywhere near that fast.

Granted, this works much better with something like a light because LED's use so little power to run.

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