Morus Zero - Ultra-fast countertop tumble dryer for any home

[EEVblog]

Oh boy, here we go...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/morus/morus-zero-ultra-fast-countertop-tumble-dryer-for

[ogden]

Oh boy, here we go...

What 

This one could be plausible indeed. After all they did show working prototype @CES. Only question: is it really more efficient than common heat pump tumble dryer (as they say?). Industry (chem/food/medical) widely uses vacuum drying. Industrial equipment manufacturers even say that it is most energy efficient drying tech.

P.s. I can save few bucks for Dave to buy/review/measure_efficiency/debunk that thing. Supposedly many can. You could consider some PayPal donation piggybank for such kind of performances

[PlainName]

Industry (chem/food/medical) widely uses vacuum drying.

Cuppasoup, for instance, is vacuum dried. Wouldn't want my t-shirts to look like that though!

 

[ogden]

Cuppasoup, for instance, is vacuum dried. Wouldn't want my t-shirts to look like that though!

LOL You need ShirtButler then:

[thm_w]

So they show water boiling at 102 F (39 C) in the image. That means pressure is being dropped from 1,000 hPa to 78hPa or so. Is this doable with a cheap vacuum pump?
Maybe that is why they went with the small chamber, easier to pull a vacuum.

Would be nice to see improved tech in this area, some people refuse to hang their clothes and dryers use quite a bit of power ($1-3 per load!).

The water has a lower boiling point at low pressure. Morus Zero uses a compact high-performance vacuum pump to allow water to boil at lower to 100 °F. The water in the boiling state has a very high evaporation rate, and Morus Zero uses this principle to accelerate the drying speed.   

https://www.omnicalculator.com/chemistry/Boliling-point

[Mr. Scram]

I tried drying with a vacuum for a project once. That turned out to be a massive disappointment. Increasing the surface area and letting physics do its thing turned out to be much faster, which is exactly what people have been doing for ages by hanging their clothes on clotheslines.

[Marco]

So they show water boiling at 102 F (39 C) in the image. That means pressure is being dropped from 1,000 hPa to 78hPa or so. Is this doable with a cheap vacuum pump?

Low cost food vacuum sealers claim to have 0.9 Bar relative pressure diaphragm pumps, so probably.

[EEVblog]

Let's see if they start deleting comments

[EEVblog]

Thunderf00t video is pretty comprehensive, I don't think I can add anything to that?

[EEVblog]

Full flight SuperBacker defense mode!

[EEVblog]

Morus replied

[Dundarave]

So by their own admission, there is no significant vacuum, which simply makes it a not-particularly-efficient version of a regular clothes dryer.

I.e. a counter-top tea-towel dryer for those who only have one tea towel and can’t wait for it to dry draped across the oven handle...

[PlainName]

Thunderf00t video is pretty comprehensive, I don't think I can add anything to that?

Who is that guy? His specialty seems to be stitching together video from various sources.

Anyway, he lost me and I was on his side to start with. Far too technical without an obvious point, and by the time you do get to what he's on about you've figured he's bullshitting anyway. An example is the business of vapour pressure and how a vacuum isn't going to make the water boil (paraphrased), and yet we've seen it happen so often that we've sceptical of what he's saying rather than what he's debunking.

Later, when he's looking at how much energy is needed to evaporate 1kg of water and he's showing the promo video of this thing next to competition, he goes on about these huge numbers of joules and kg of water but the video is clearly showing that we're talking perhaps 100g or less, and he's even saying that looks like a single item of clothing!

So, what could you add? You could debunk it in a convincing way. It''s fine to wibble on about numbers and stuff to a scientific audience, but it's the credulous that need telling, not the already-convinced. There is also the suspicion that a lot of clever stuff happens not because they prove the calculations were wrong but because someone invented a clever workaround that kept the numbers right but not applicable.

[Mr. Scram]

Thunderf00t video is pretty comprehensive, I don't think I can add anything to that?

Who is that guy? His specialty seems to be stitching together video from various sources.

Anyway, he lost me and I was on his side to start with. Far too technical without an obvious point, and by the time you do get to what he's on about you've figured he's bullshitting anyway. An example is the business of vapour pressure and how a vacuum isn't going to make the water boil (paraphrased), and yet we've seen it happen so often that we've sceptical of what he's saying rather than what he's debunking.

Later, when he's looking at how much energy is needed to evaporate 1kg of water and he's showing the promo video of this thing next to competition, he goes on about these huge numbers of joules and kg of water but the video is clearly showing that we're talking perhaps 100g or less, and he's even saying that looks like a single item of clothing!

So, what could you add? You could debunk it in a convincing way. It''s fine to wibble on about numbers and stuff to a scientific audience, but it's the credulous that need telling, not the already-convinced. There is also the suspicion that a lot of clever stuff happens not because they prove the calculations were wrong but because someone invented a clever workaround that kept the numbers right but not applicable.

Thunderf00t is a Youtube channel which depends on shouty clickbait videos and thumbnails. There doesn't seem to be a lot of own orginal content, it's mostly creating controversy. It's pretty much what the worst programs on television do.

[PlainName]

Ah, thanks for the heads-up - a pretty accurate description from what I saw 

[ogden]

Thunderf00t video is pretty comprehensive, I don't think I can add anything to that?

Who is that guy?

He is cherrypicking data to suit his debunking agenda. Example: in particular video he first explains how much energy needed to evaporate 1Kg of water which is roughly 2000000 J. Then he conveniently takes same 1Kg to prove that 900W device cannot evaporate such amount of water in 15 minutes, 2KW power needed instead. Seemingly job is done, lies of manufacturer debunked, right? Well... specification says max load = 1.5Kg. In specification there's no mention 1L or 1Kg of water, just BS assumption of 10-30% water contents after spin drying. Anyway if 1.5Kg of damp clothes contains 1Kg of water then it is dripping wet sponge, not clothes out of the modern >= 1200 RPM spinner.

[edit] Example#2: while talking about evaporative cooling, he conveniently forgets that device have IR heating.

[PlainName]

He is cherrypicking data to suit his debunking agenda

Strikes me that if I were running a dodgy Kickstarter project, he's the one I'd want to debunk it

[Dubbie]

Yeah this was the worst debunking I have seen. There are plenty of proper scams out there without splitting hairs about actual functional technology.

[Algu607]

Not saying this gadget isn't stupid but there are several problems with his video. Vapor pressure of water or any liquid is the pressure at which an equal amount of water molecules  enter from the gas the liquid and vice versa.
So going with the pressure below the vapor pressure will effectively remove water molecules. He does all his calculations at 20°C without mentioning that the vapor pressure increases exponentially with temperature. At 60°C the vapor pressure of water goes up from 23 mBar at 20°C to already 200 mBar.
Normal dryers work at atmospheric pressure and supply the energy to the clothes by blowing hot air at it. If you could supply the same amount of energy while at lower pressure your clothes will dry faster. Morus claims that to do that with IR, if they get the same energy into the clothes at a lower pressure it will indeed be faster. Btw, why don't they use microwave radiation, seems ideal?

And what's up with his arrogance? I don't know at which university he works but at the one i am 9/10 Professors will tell you the correct answer why water boils earlier at lower pressure. Boiling is the point where the temperature dependent vapor pressure exceeds that of the surrounding atmosphere.

[Marco]

I don't think you want a microwave arcing with the inevitable belt buckles.

[EEVblog]

Thunderf00t video is pretty comprehensive, I don't think I can add anything to that?

Who is that guy? His specialty seems to be stitching together video from various sources.

Thundf00t is an experimental physicist/chemist and does debunking videos among other topics.
He makes most of his own content, often taken from his previous videos.

Anyway, he lost me and I was on his side to start with. Far too technical without an obvious point, and by the time you do get to what he's on about you've figured he's bullshitting anyway.

The video could have done with some better editing in terms of bunking flow. But this is Thunderf00t's "style" so to speak.

So, what could you add? You could debunk it in a convincing way. It''s fine to wibble on about numbers and stuff to a scientific audience, but it's the credulous that need telling, not the already-convinced. There is also the suspicion that a lot of clever stuff happens not because they prove the calculations were wrong but because someone invented a clever workaround that kept the numbers right but not applicable.

I was thinking of a short debunking video that simply uses their own numbers, and actually ignoring the vapour thing entirely. Thunderf00t did this too, but it's kinda swamped in the other physics explanations.

[EEVblog]

Thunderf00t is a Youtube channel which depends on shouty clickbait videos and thumbnails. There doesn't seem to be a lot of own orginal content

Not true, he creates most of his own animations and often takes footage from his previous videos.

[maginnovision]

He has had a couple if real meh videos lately but generally they're pretty interesting. That was my least favorite behind his fake Kickstarter and fake Kickstarter debunking videos.

[m12lrpv]

The only problem with thunderf00t's video is that the topic itself is very hard to understand and subsequently very hard to explain and demonstrate in what appears to be a rushed video.

The guy himself knows his stuff in this area and i'm hoping he does another video with an experiment that shows the problem a bit more clearly.

[tszaboo]

The only problem with thunderf00t's video is that the topic itself is very hard to understand and subsequently very hard to explain and demonstrate in what appears to be a rushed video.

The guy himself knows his stuff in this area and i'm hoping he does another video with an experiment that shows the problem a bit more clearly.

The problem is that you need to invest significant amount of time into his content. He does debunking videos. So you need to:
1) See the original idea / kickstarter page
2) Watch the videos there
3) Maybe invest time into reading the company's communication on the page
4) See what others news outlets are writing
5) Think about the topic
6) Go watch his video
7) See the fallout and aftermath

You know, having a full time job and hobbies, following some tv series, I dont nearly have enough time to do all this, to have a chuckle, that some idiots try to tumble dry with vacuum, and some people believe it is. The problems with un-scientific prepositions, is that the burden of proof is on the debunker.
Most people know, that water boils at lower temperature at lower pressure.
Most people dont know, how this really works, and what is the temperature and what pressure.
And they dont know how difficult it is to make a vacuum chamber.