Please enjoy this free Monday edition of Brian’s Bullshit-Free Zone. Tuesday and Thursday editions are for paid subscribers, so please consider becoming one if you want the whole shebang!
A TV show we recently discovered at my house, and have been watching a lot of, is Life Below Zero on National Geographic. It follows the lives of half a dozen Alaskans who all live in remote locations — some of the extremely remote. They have varying levels of experience, and the show is at its best when we get to see some of their tremendous expertise at off-grid living, handling such basics as getting food and staying warm.
Last night I watched Season 17, Episode 7, “Fast Food.” Part of this follows a man named Andy Bassich and his girlfriend Denise who live on very remote property. Andy is a former carpenter, so he has a nice cabin and a nice big shop inside a yurt. As there are no services of any kind, they are completely self-reliant for water and power. They do have an emergency generator, but fuel is expensive and it burns a lot of fuel just to go and get it. So they mainly rely on a big solar system and a windmill.
But winter brought them trouble. High winds brought down their windmill, destroying their main water tank; and with the sun at such a low angle, the solar panels are vertical and act like a giant sail in that ferocious wind. Andy and Denise got the windmill repaired and the solar panels secured, but the incident highlighted just how thin a thread their lives can hang on. They needed backup.
And so Andy proposed the following:
One of the things that I’ve been toying around with for many years is, I want to try and take an old wind turbine motor that I have and see if I can somehow make it generate power without the wind. It has a certain output, which I think is going to be greater than the input that it’s going to take to turn it. And so if I can turn it with something that uses less power than it needs, then I can create more power to put back into my battery bank — basically for free.
I watched it back, carefully, just to make sure I wasn’t hearing him wrong, and then watched the entire segment again. Andy was talking about a perpetual motion system, also called an over-unity system. He wanted to use his batteries to power a motor to turn a generator to charge those same batteries. Denise described their setup thus:
OK, so it’s battery to motor, motor to alternator, alternator to controller, controller back to battery. [Controller means charge controller, which takes the power from the alternator (a generator) and puts it into the battery.]
Now it may not be necessary to state, but this is a solid impossibility, according to the laws of thermodynamics. There are always losses in such a system: heat, noise, kinetic movement. If it was 100% perfect and efficient it could return just as much power to the batteries as it took, but could never add more than that. And in reality the system is far, far below 100% efficiency. All this system could hope to do is waste some of their precious power.
I quite enjoy Andy and Denise for their prodigious knowledge of remote living. Whether they are raising and driving sled dogs, moving buildings, hunting and dressing a kill, or anything, it’s a true pleasure to watch and learn. They are not dummies, and — to be honest — few people in the general public are aware that the laws of thermodynamics make perpetual motion impossible; it’s just not something most people think about. Much to Andy’s credit, he characterized the chances of his experiment succeeding like this:
Electricity is something I know just enough about to be dangerous with. I’m not an electrical engineer, there may be something that I don’t know, but when I do the basic math, it seems like it should work. Someone who’s an electrical engineer might be able to come in and say “That’ll never work” before he even looks at it, just looking at my diagram. But this is an idea I’ve had for a long time, and I’m going to see if I can make it work.
It will surprise no one that their experiments were a failure. The battery was rapidly drained, and one of the two motors he tried was unable to produce enough torque to turn the generator, draining the battery even faster.
Unfortunately the show did not let us see the aftermath — what they may have said after the experiment, or whether they planned to try again, or what. However just before they ran it, Andy said this:
I’m hopeful that I can do this, and if it’s a win, it’s a good win; if it’s a loss, then it’s knowledge gained from it.
“I don’t know if this will work, but it doesn’t I will learn from that.” Andy summed up the scientific method in one sentence. I like to think that he did learn from it, and perhaps later that he spoke to some people and found that it’s a dead-end street. He had the right mindset going in, let’s hope for his sake he kept that clearheaded attitude on the way out.
If only we could harness all the energy lost in all the failed attempts to create a perpetual motion device.