free energy

anyone ever try anything like this
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/915226/free_electricity_from_thin_air/
did it work

iv seen this on mythbusters or somting, i remeber they did get free energy but it was just barily enought to power a watch

There's no such things as free energy also known as perpetual motion machines

this machine isnt free as in input energy = input + energy, but what it did was somting like pick up energy in the air and converts it into energy i think.

It's getting energy from electromagnetic radiation from what's in the air all the time: radio station broadcast, cell phones and cell towers, TV signals, etc. There's a lot of EM radiation in the air, and you can pull energy from it, but not much with something like this. It's not free energy, it's just energy from EM radiation that we can't see. That word "free" gets thrown around a bit too much with regards to energy.

That's not free energy. It's just converting all of the radio/cell phone/tv signals into a very small amount of electricity. I suppose you could put a huge receiver on your roof and get a few watts :

steve001 said:

There's no such things as free energy also known as perpetual motion machines

Click to expand...

i know you can't make something like that.in the link i posted it shows getting radio wave like a penny radio which powers itself.

steve001 said:

There's no such things as free energy also known as perpetual motion machines

Click to expand...

There is a difference between Free Energy and Perpetual Motion Machines...

In a Perpetual Motion Machine... Friction is the Energy Killer... and energy is
required to cancel it out.

Free energy is another animal... look into the sky on a sunny day... does your
face warm up.... That's the #1 form of Free Energy...

Jerry

This is the same method that powers crystal radios. The idea is so 1970.

Hell yeah we nee ZPM's !!! ;D

The point about the energy gathered and reused from collecting wide band RF from various emissions in the air often ignores the fact that more energy was dissipated (through losses in the form of heat, etc) creating these radio waves via radio, cell towers, etc....than you can ever collect.  The net loss is always greater in a system than the gain.  Such as in a transformer or SMPS...you can't never get more energy out than you put it, in fact you can't even break even (in which case you would have a lossless system).  You can try to come close and closer (to breaking even) but entropy always wins.  It's the way the universe works....it tends towards disorder.

Perpetual Motion and Free Energy == Usually considered and attempted by people who don't fully understand Physics.  I'm not an expert either, but I understand how much testing the laws of thermodynamics have undergone during the course of the history of science.

*edit* - Of course, I realize that the Op of this particular thread was just asking if anyone had performed this particular fun experiment in RF, not engaging in the usual pseudoscientific drivel you see on some forums. I have done the experiment too, and it was a lot of fun...there was an article in Nuts and Volts Magazine which featured a circuit which used rectified voltage from the antenna to light an LED array, which would light up to varying degrees depending on the intensity of the RF field you were receiving. A lot of what you pick up comes from your unshielded A.C. house wiring. Your body works as a pretty good antenna for that. I can touch the tip of my oscilloscope probe and get an approximate 60 hz (US house current) sine wave on my scope.

-Brett

...ZPM's are fun for sci-fi, like in Half-Life II, or Star Trek..where you have things like the "inertial dampeners" or the "Heisenburg Compensators"...  ;D

This is not free, this is stealing. ;D

There are forms of "free energy", wind & solar and such, what about being born? Oh yeah, that's not free at all, it comes with a life time of work. ;D

Brett Miller said:

The point about the energy gathered and reused from collecting wide band RF from various emissions in the air often ignores the fact that more energy was dissipated (through losses in the form of heat, etc) creating these radio waves via radio, cell towers, etc....than you can ever collect.  The net loss is always greater in a system than the gain.  Such as in a transformer or SMPS...you can't never get more energy out than you put it, in fact you can't even break even (in which case you would have a lossless system).  You can try to come close and closer (to breaking even) but entropy always wins.  It's the way the universe works....it tends towards disorder.

Perpetual Motion and Free Energy == Usually considered and attempted by people who don't fully understand Physics.  I'm not an expert either, but I understand how much testing the laws of thermodynamics have undergone during the course of the history of science.

-Brett ...ZPM's are fun for sci-fi, like in Half-Life II, or Star Trek..where you have things like the "inertial dampeners" or the "Heisenburg Compensators"...  ;D

Click to expand...

i realize it does not create energy but it is free for me.

Yeah, I realized you meant "free" as in $$$ cash.  I revised my post so as to make sure you didn't think it was an insult.  

-Brett

I just redid (roughly) that scope demonstration I was talking about. It looked like there was a lot of RF noise present in my lab today, which isn't surprising. I have two PC's running with LCD's (one 22" flat panel about a foot away), and more wall adapters, etc. The scope was running cleanly off of 5 AA batteries.

Notice that he never measured available current or power There isn't enough to do poop. Maybe a 1 mile long rhombic antenna could gather a half watt.

Mike

Hemlock Mike said:

Notice that he never measured available current or power    There isn't enough to do poop.  Maybe a 1 mile long rhombic antenna could gather a half watt.

Mike

Click to expand...

Yeah, or even a simple 1 mile diameter loop antenna...If one was close to a cell tower, try a 900Mhz or 1.3Ghz Yagi or better yet a nice dish with a feed point optimized for the cell carrier's frequency to take advantage of the quasi-optical properties RF tends to take on at microwave frequencies. Now we're closer to the topic of lasers, or at least light.

Yeah, actually I did measure voltage (not current)...I don't have a nice Pierson current probe or comparable right now, so there isn't much of a point.  In the first picture I must have pressed HOLD at a weird time in the measurement process and skewed the reading.  I anticipated this interest and took a few additional pictures.  I figured I'd need to post the other picture, but didn't want to double post, or waste anymore unnecessary bandwidth on this tautological non laser related excursion.