Thread: Non electric , non combustion engine powered mechanical ceiling fans.

I came across the below post about mechanical ceiling in New Orleans that are not powered by electricity , steam or some other combustion source. According to the poster a person yanks on a chain every half hour or so to keep the fans running.
Anyone know more about this, have some pics etc...?
Non-electric Ceiling Fan??? - Green Home Improvement - DIY Chatroom - DIY Home Improvement Forum

i am thinking that when you pull the chain down a weight is sent back up to the top, as the it turns the wheight works it way back down.
not a lot to it, would need to get the gearing right and maybe need a speed control


Jake.

Some old buildings and stores used a "water motor" to drive ceiling fans. This was a small impulse turbine, and drove multiple ceiling fans via round leather "sewing machine" belting. In cities where there was a steady supply of water from the mains, the "water motor" drive was used. If you have a spring at your cabin that runs continually and has a high enough head, you could use a "water motor". These were commonplace for driving light loads in cities or country home with high-head spring water that ran continually. Look up "Backus Water Motor".

Now we get to the first law of engineering, as I explain it to non-technical people: "There is no free lunch". Meaning: if you think you can get something for nothing, it ain't gonna happen. Free lunches in the tavern meant you bought their beer. If you have a human powered fan, you are going to have to wind up a weight every so often. If you need a ceiling fan, chances are it is hot or muggy. Winding up a weight in a relatively short time is going to get you even hotter, so your kicking back to enjoy the breeze off the fan is just temporary as you will be playing it again with winding up the weight. And, the energy you put into winding up the weight will not all be converted to turning the fan. A lot will be lost as friction through the gearing driving the fan.

The "human powered device that works by "yanking on a chain" is probably nothing more than a weight with some sort of escapement to slow its descent. Review your basic physics (if you took physics in HS) and you get into potential energy. Raise a heavy weight a short distance in a short time, and you are storing potential energy. Let that weight descend VERY slowly and control its descent rate with gearing, and you are using a portion of the potential energy you stored when you raised the weight. If a 50 lb weight were raised 7 ft (ceiling height ?) you have stored 350 ft-lbs. How fast you raised the weight, measured in seconds, and you have the basis for converting your sweat into horsepower. Now, if you were wrap the chain or rope you raised the weight with around a drum (such as a winch drum), and let the weight drop, the shaft on the drum would spin wildly and the weight would hit the floor in the blink of an eye. If you applied a set of speed increasing gearing to the winch shaft, and then drove a series of fan blades, you'd have a means of slowing the descent of the weight and getting some of your "stored energy" reapplied by turning the fan blades. The fan blades would also act as a kind of "air brake" to slow the descent of the weight. You would need a fairly high gear ratio in the gear train to put enough drag on the winch shaft to slow the descent of the weight to something like 6 or 7 ft in an hour, and fairly steep pitches on the fan blades to add some braking effect. You would also need some sort of over-running clutch (sprag clutch or ratchets) to allow you to wind up the weight without dragging all the gearing and the fans along for the ride. If you had to do that, you'd really raise a sweat.

BTW: If you look at music box movements and old clock movements from medieval times, both use a form of "air brake" to govern their operating speed. Modern spring wound music box movements have used a simple paddle type fan to govern the speed at which the movement operates (and to keep the music in proper tempo). Medieval falling-weight clocks sometimes used a similar turning paddle type of fan to act as a governor on the escapement. These were the extreme, the fans were not pitched to move any air, but to churn it for the sole purpose of providing resistance to hold a mechanism at a certain speed. What you are doing is reinventing something like a lighthouse drive, or tower clock mechanism, which worked with a falling weight. In tower clock and lighthouse drives, a falling weight was raised to a high height and allowed to descend on a chain or cable. The center of a stairwell (or spiral stair in a light house) was used as the "well" into which the weight descended. A lighthouse drive or tower clock usually had to be cranked up once per day. Light house drives ran at least 8-10 hours on one winding up of the falling weight. However, the lighthouse keeper had to ascend all the spiral stairs to get to the top of the light house to wind up the weight, then make his way back down again. While the lighthouse drive then ran 8-10 hours, if one calculated the HP the drive produced vs the energy the keeper expended going up the lighthouse stair, winding the weight up, and going back down again, the inefficiency is high. If you have ever visited a lighthouse and walked up the stairs to the top, you can appreciate what the keepers had to do daily.

My own opinion: get a deep cycle battery, inverter and some solar panels. Use a conventional electric ceiling fan. You take the hit at the cash register, but you have electricity available for other light loads and you are not experimenting with gear trains and weights.

A Punkahwallah perhaps?

Originally Posted by Joe Michaels

Some old buildings and stores used a "water motor" to drive ceiling fans. This was a small impulse turbine, and drove multiple ceiling fans via round leather "sewing machine" belting. In cities where there was a steady supply of water from the mains, the "water motor" drive was used. If you have a spring at your cabin that runs continually and has a high enough head, you could use a "water motor". These were commonplace for driving light loads in cities or country home with high-head spring water that ran continually. Look up "Backus Water Motor".

Here's a photo and description of one of the water wheels over at the Henry Ford Museum;




Talk about trying to get a free lunch, of course if you are only paying flat rate for your water bill then why not use it to power the whole darn building? On the other hand if you are looking at it from an efficiency standpoint it is the worst way to go! No doubt that most of these buildings were probably putting all that water into the sewer system (if one existed) or into the local river water. Probably even further wasting the valuable drinkable water in the city at the time.

The funny thing is how quickly we forget the lesson of this water wheel. I recall the town I grew up in for years had free trash pickup included in your taxes. Well we had this guy down the street who owned a landscape company. Every Tuesday morning he had 20 garbage pails full of what for the most part were all biodegradabale (ie. shouldn't have been in the trash). This was typical around town, also I think recycling is almost free for the town to dispose of, but trash costs a factor of about 20X to get rid of. Well when trash cost the same to get rid of for recycling for the resident, many people skipped recycling.

Anyhow one day this all changed. The town started charging $5/bag of trash. Overnight recycling rates in town doubled, trash volumes were down across the board and the major abusers of the system were all putting dumpsters on their property. I don't know for sure but I also bet that the landscaper wasn't putting his organic waste in the landfill either when he was paying for it. At the end of the day I believe the savings from this program were in the millions of dollars for the town and for the ones who weren't abusing the system it really didn't cost them that much more either.

Joe,

You forgot to mention the second law of engineering. In my favorite formulation, the first law reads: You can't get something for nothing. The second reads: You can't even break even.

In this case, as the weight fall and turns the fan, the fan is doing work on the air and raising its temperature of the air.

Now, if you were to do away with the ceiling fan and move to a fan pulling cooler outside air into the room, you would provide useful cooling. I am in the process of cooling the house with a window mounted fan which I will leave running till the the outside and inside temperatures are equal. Then I will close the windows thru the heat of the day, keeping the interior temperature well below the maximum outside temperature.

Stu

I'm with Aussie td40, probably a weight drive. This is New Orleans. There's plenty of water, but NO elevation to create head pressure.

"In this case, as the weight fall and turns the fan, the fan is doing work on the air and raising its temperature of the air."

However, as that air moves faster, it gives up energy, which cools it ever so slightly. Additionally, if you have never been to New Orleans, even night time temps in the summer can be in the upper 80s at 80% humidity or more. Being in a bowl, there is NO wind at all. The slightest movement of air causes a little evaporation of perspiration (which is bountiful) and feels wonderful. Being a lot of buildings in the old parts of New Orleans have no AC, many of them do have a huge fan pulling air out, but it only does so much.

I have a big attic fan in my house, but this time of year in the South, it is useless. The low temp tonight will be 71 degrees F. Nice, eh? It's going to be there for about an hour from 4:30am until 5:30, when the sun comes up, and then it'll be up to the upper 80s by 10:00am. It won't cool below 80 until probably 10-11:00pm. During that brief part of the early morning when temps get down to reasonable, humidity goes to near 100%. Try running the attic fan and everything in the house will be soaking wet.

Regarding the fans, you know those old B&W jungle movies we used to watch as kids, where some colonial hoity-toity guy had an Indian native pulling on a rope for a huge fan over his desk? The title for the Indian servant was "Punkah Wallah". If you do a search for "punkah wallah ceiling fan" you can get quite a few hits. Do a search for the term and also a search for images.

Here is one patent for a mechanical fan motor:

File:Patent, Mechanical Fan, 1830.png -

Anyway, you can get quite a few ideas doing a search.

We buy produce, groceries and plants from a local store that is off-grid. For a couple years, they had ceiling fans in the store that were run by piston type air motors that looked like little steam engines. The motors were machined from white plastic and the air supply lines were nylon tubing like truck air brakes use. They probably had a diesel power air compressor in an outbuilding. Anyway, the fans are gone. They now have a pretty big wind generator and probably still use a diesel generator to run electric lights and refrigeration plants and charge the cell phone.

Larry

I was told the third law is "but you got to keep playing"

Here is something I found about Backus Brother’s & Co. mentioned by Joe Michaels and Adam above
The industrial interests of Newark, N. J., containing an historical sketch of the city, also a complete summary of the origin, growth and present condition of Newark's industries. Including the location and description of all the manufacturing establ
Regards,
Jim

A home can be air conditioned using a pressurized water system before the water goes out to irrigate a vineyard or other crops. You build a condensate pan with a water coil above that and a fan blower connected to a digital thermostat. This is almost a free lunch because all you are doing is rerouting the water before it goes out to irrigate your crop. I have worked on these systems for years and they work very well. The temperature indoors can be 75 degrees when the outside ambient temperatures are 110 degrees.