Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Welcome to Charter Local Edition. I'm Brad Pomerance. We are joined by professor
Kawai Tam and Etinosa Agbonwaneten from UC Riverside. I said
it correctly! And we are celebrating remarkable achievements of the engineering
professor and five of her students with Eti representing those five students.
Congratulations! You just got back from Washington DC! Big victory. We won't
say what happened yet. I just want you to tell me about the solar thermal closet.
(Etinosa) So, the solar thermal closet. What we're doing is using solar thermal energy to
heat attic air
and use that for drying applications as well as supplement space heating. (Brad) Okay so
let's be as specific as possible. We will not need a dryer anymore. (Etinosa) No. (Brad) Like a washer
and dryer
get rid of the dryer. (Etinosa) Exactly. (Brad) Explain professor.
(Kawai) Well what you're doing is taking all this energy from the sun
harnessing it,
putting it into an air that you pull from the attic, heating it up to a hundred
thirty seven degrees fahrenheit--which is about the temperature of the dryer--or
it could be a little higher. You take that air, run it through a piping with an inline fan,
blow it up through the bottom of the solar thermal closet, which we've created.
From the outside it's good that going to look faux chimney, so nobody's gonna
know that you have it, but on the inside it's actually a closet that you open up
wash your clothes, hang it up to dry, close the closet door
and then you don't need to use any energy for drying (Brad) And you're going to hang them anyway. (Kawai) Exactly.
(Brad)You might as well hang them before they're dry. (Kawai)Yes. And just to add on, that
heated air is going to be humidified by the clothes getting dry,
so you have the added bonus of space heating your home and humidifying your home in such an arid area.
(Brad) When my daughter was incredibly congested and I put her in our bathroom
and I closed all the doors, and I thought to myself, "shoot, I wish I had that solar closet
that the UCR students developed!"
Talk to us about the cost, and how it amortizes really quickly.
(Kawai) Right. So a conventional dryer is about nine hundred dollars and with our unit right
now it's
twenty three hundred,
but we did the equivalent annual costs over the
time of--
(Brad) The life of the closet? (Etinosa) Right. Over a twenty year period, and we found
that our system is actually four times cheaper on
annually you'll be spending about two hundred eighty dollars on our unit versus about
eleven hundred on the--(Brad) And here's the key: it amortizes out within five years-- meaning, you ever recouped in five years. (Etinosa) Exactly.
(Brad) When you think about solar panels on your home to heat the
entire home
that amortizes in fifteen or twenty years. (Etinosa)Right. (Brad) That's a bit of an expense. But five
years?
I'd do it. But here's the good news is
you received an initial fifteen thousand dollar grant from the EPA
to research this project, you've recently went to Washington DC,
you competed against forty-five universities,
fifteen got selected,
for something you're going to tell me about, and tell me if UCR
was one of them.
(Etinosa and Kawai) Yes! Yes we are.
(Brad) And what did you get?
(Etinosa) We received ninety thousand dollars to continue. (Brad) Ninety? (Etinosa) Yeah. (Brad) Ninety
thousand dollars!
Over a span of two years to retrofit four homes and test the air quality.
With this fifteen thousand dollars, we were only able to test two of the coldest
months in Moreno Valley,
but now we get to get the data for an entire year so we know exactly what's going to
happen.
So you're going to put these solar closets, solar thermal closets, in four homes
in the Inland Empire, which gets a lot of sun, you know that,
and see what happens. (Kawai) Absolutely. (Brad) Now, you mentioned air quality to me.
I mean, intuitively it would seem like it would be fine, but I guess, you're the scientists,
you still gotta check it out? (Etinosa) Well, we're trying to implement this in new and
existing homes, and since we're pulling air from the attic, we want to make sure that
the air quality is, in terms of that is--
(Brad)Yeah, that makes sense. (Etinosa) --good for the living environment. Exactly.
(Brad) When is this coming to market? I know it will.
(Kawai) Hopefully within two years, right? After we finish our testing. (Brad) And please tell me that you get
royalties.
(Etinosa) We're still working on that. (Brad) They are Etinosa Agbonwaneten and Kawai Tam from UC Riverside
Congratulations ladies, I'm very excited for you. (Kawai and Etinosa) Thank you. (Brad) I'm Brad Pomerance, thank you for
joining us at Charter Local Edition. Back to HLN.
Great News!
Beginning May 28th, Charter Local Edition is moving from headline news
to Charter's original programming channel 101, under the new title
Charter California Edition.
Tune in at the following times for longer, more in-depth interviews, with our elected
officials, educators, and community leaders.
More content. Better information. Learn more about our community, our state and our future.
Charter California Edition with Brad Pomerance.
Stay current, California!