Inventions Patents and Marketing

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How To Patent An Invention – Free Help for Inventors

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:09:00 +0000

A friend of mine told me he wants to know how to patent an invention and where he could get a boiler plate form to protect an invention.

Well… I really don’t recommend a do-it-yourself patent to protect an invention.

In theory it’s certainly possible to file your own patent application; I’m sure the forms are available on the USPTO website.

However, if your idea is worth getting a patent for then the last thing you want to do is to file your own patent application.

A good patent can be worth many millions of dollars, Look at Lego. They had a rock solid patent, and as soon as it expired the market was inundated with similar products, but it was too late… Lego had built up a successful business and brand and will do just fine.

On the other hand a patent can be a waste of money. Take a look at hot water demand system patents. There is the Metlund system which is patented, the RedyTemp which can be run in demand mode, and the Chilieppper, all of which do the exact same thing.

The Chilipepper is the only one that isn’t patented, and yet it does not infringe the Metlund or RedyTemp patents. They are very weak patents, and there wasn’t anything new and different about the Chilipepper to patent.

It doesn’t seem to have made a difference. But then there were already demand systems on the market. It’s when you have no competition or your product has some significant improvement over your competition that a patent becomes important.

Very few patents ever result in a product in the marketplace. There are plenty of reasons for this including poor marketing, the inability to manufacture at a reasonable cost, and as if often the case, lack of demand for the product.

So let’s assume that your great new idea is worth getting a patent. If you are going to go through the process of obtaining a patent you might as well do it right. Unless you are a patent attorney I don’t think you can.

Let’s begin with the patent search.

When you apply for a patent to the USPTO they will do a world-wide patent search. If you search only the US patent database there is a very good chance your patent will be denied due to a patent filed in a foreign country. It has happened to me.

But even searching the US database is a daunting task. Professional patent examiners use what the patent office calls a classification system. If you don’t pick the right class for your search you might as well not do the search because you will not uncover those critical patents.

I don’t fully understand the classification system, and I have no desire to become as proficient at doing patent searches as a professional searcher, but I do want good results. Nowadays a patent search done by your patent attorney, whom he subs out to a professional searcher, will cost around $500. Its money well spent.

Not only do the patent search results alert you to existing patents that can be in the way of your obtaining a patent, it can also suggest interesting new ways for you to look at your idea and improve it.

In the United States it’s not the first one to file a patent that counts, it’s the first person to think of an idea. That means that even if someone else gets a patent, if you can prove you thought of the idea first and can document that you followed the other conditions that apply, the other persons patent will be deemed invalid you will get awarded the patent.

One of the first things you should do is document your idea in a way that it could be used as good solid evidence in a court of law if it should ever come to that. One good way is to write down your idea as clearly as possible and with diagrams if needed, and then have it signed and dated by several witnesses.

Doing a patent search is another effective method, although it will be a later date than when you thought of the idea unless you live next door to a patent attorney.

If you go for a year without doing anything about your idea the patent office will consider the idea abandoned and you loose your thought of date. So again, have evidence that would hold up in a courtroom showing that you never let an entire year pass by without working on your new invention. Keep receipts and notes and whatever you need to clearly show that you never abandoned your invention.

If your idea is relatively new and un-tested, you might want to do some prototyping and developing before deciding if it is worth pursuing a patent. Quite often one discovers more patentable features once one begins developing and prototyping his new invention.

This was or is the case with my most recent invention for hot water demand systems. We know it will work, but cash flow doesn’t really allow us to develop it fully quite yet. As soon as I came up with the idea, we had our patent attorneys a patent search establishing the rough date that it was thought of.

We then filed for a “provisional patent”, which allows you to make changes to the patent language after you do some development work. This typically leads to a much better patent since so much unexpected stuff often shows up after the development process begins. That’s the upside to a provisional patent, the down side being the patent as with all patents only lasts 20 years. If you wait until after the development to file a patent application your 20 years will last longer.

That would only worry me if I thought the development time would be a number of years, which I suppose is often the case with some of the high-tech inventions being developed by big companies.

So my advice is to first figure out if you really need a patent, then do a patent search, and finally file for a provisional patent. And most importantly get a good patent attorney. These days I think a utility patent for a fairly simple idea runs around $4,000 - $5,000 but can be much more for complex high-tech invention ideas.

In my experience it generally takes 2 or 3 years to get a patent with a few battles with the patent examiners. This spreads the cost of the patent out over the several years, depending on the arrangements you make with your patent attorney.

A previous invention article – Simple Machine Inventions

A Nifty New Invention - Reverse Osmosis Water Purification That Doesn’t Waste Water!

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:02:00 +0000

A reverse osmosis system that doesn't waste water?

Traditionally reverse osmosis water purification systems waste a tremendous amount of water during the purification process, typically 3 to 25 gallons of waste water for every gallon of clean water produced.

Obviously this is not very good for water conservation. But Watts has invented a way of recycling the contaminated waste water, eliminating the water normally wasted. They just pump it into the water heater.

Watts Premier "Zero Waste" ZRO-4 Reverse Osmosis System

The Watts website claims their patented ZRO-4 Reverse Osmosis System is the first ever that does not waste water. Instead of running the contaminated waste water down the drain like other RO systems, the zero waste system pumps the contaminated water into the water heater. Typically one doesn't drink hot water, and bathing washing and cleaning with it should be fine.

The instruction manual states that the ZRO-4 RO system needs to be located at least 25 feet from the water heater. I wonder why. What would happen if the RO system is closer to the water heater than 25 feet? If anyone knows why this is a requirement please let me know! What about tankless water heaters?

To me this is a brilliant idea for an invention. It's simple, inexpensive and saves a ton of water. Probably has a very solid patent that would be difficult to get around, although I haven't really studied the patents. They are easy enough to find on Google's patent search.

The level of contamination of the waste water isn't very high, and should not pose a problem unless you regularly consume hot water, something that is fairly easy to avoid.

The Watts ZRO-4 reverse osmosis system reduces Arsenic (V), Cysts, Cyrptosporidium, Giardia, Entamoeba and/or Toxoplasm, Barium, Hexavalent, Chromium, Trivalent Chromium, Copper, Lead, Fluoride, Cadmium, Radium 226/228, Selenium, TDS, and Turbidity. It also has filters since RO systems can't get every nasty out of the water.

There are some potential problems with operating the system with hot water demand systems and some hot water recirculating systems. Since the RO system connects to both the hot and cold water lines, any other equipment that also connects to both the hot and cold water lines present opportunities for problems.

Hot water circulating and hot water demand systems that pump water from the water heater to purge the cooled off hot water in the pipes, or that circulate warm water for instant hot water purposes can cause water to flow through the RO unit just as though the RO pump is running.

The flow of water though the RO system resulting from the operation of the recirc pump may increase the delivery time for hot water to reach the fixtures. With the warm water circulating systems and with the hot water demand type systems the cold water piping can end up full of contaminated waste water.

Watts also has a retrofit version of it's zero waste system which allows you to convert your existing system to a no waste system. The retro-fit system includes a solenoid valve in series with the pump used for pumping the contaminated water into the water heater.

I don’t know if a demand pump would cause water to flow through the solenoid valve backwards or not because I haven't had an opportunity to test one, but it might be a viable solution for using both the ZRO-4 and a hot water circulating or demand system...but someone needs to test it to be sure.

Overall, a great new invention at least in my opinion for what its worth.

Inventors Notes – Switching Electronic Air Pressure Regulation

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:36:00 +0000

My Asparagus harvester invention utilizes pneumatic cylinders to cut the individual spears, and the stroke length has to right on the money every time. If the pressure goes up the stroke length becomes longer, and if the pressure goes down the stroke length shortens.

Too much pressure and the piston rod will bottom out against the front cylinder head, and not enough pressure will reduce the stroke length an cause the blade to not cut all the way through the spear or even not reaching the spear at all. Allowing the piston to bottom out against the front head will eventually damage the cylinder.

The asparagus harvester has 14 air cylinders mounted on the header arranged across the asparagus bed. Each piston rod is equipped with a sharp blade with a slight bit of overlap with the blades next to it. The cylinders are angled down toward the ground and when they extend the blade severs the spear slightly below ground level requiring a stroke length of about 20 inches. Typically the extension stroke takes around 35 to 40 milliseconds.

An optical detection system locates the spears and sends a signal to open the air valve for the cylinder corresponding to the co-ordinates of the spear to be cut. The harvester is moving forward at between 20 and 30 inches per second, and so the blades must cut the spear and get back up out of the way of any spears that are not quite tall enough to harvest.

Asparagus spears emerge from the bed in a random pattern with random heights. At any moment during harvesting there may be as many as 5 or 6 cylinders operating at the same time, or none at all. You might have 10 feet with nary a spear, and 18 spears in the next 24 inches.

Because these cylinders are very fast acting they require high flow rates at a constant stable air pressure. While stroking, the cylinder will be consuming around 165 cubic feet per minute of air. Six cylinders operating at once would require a whopping 990 cubic feet per minute.

With such large swings in flow and rapidly varying air consumption the mechanical air regulator will have a significant variation in the pressure drop, which will have a detrimental affect on the stroke length of the cylinders.

We can, however, use another approach to regulating the air pressure. We can use a switching electronic air pressure regulation scheme. With this approach we replace the mechanical pressure regulator with an on or off electric air valve with a high flow rate.

We can then use an accurate analog pressure transducer to open the valve whenever the pressure drops below the set point, and shut off when the pressure is at or above the set point.

The valve has a very low pressure drop unlike the mechanical regulator. The valve can handle the flow required by multiple cylinders without the air pressure drooping that the mechanical regulators end up with.

There will be small pressure spikes or what is known in electronics as a ripple in the pressure. By properly sizing the manifold I can filter out the small pressure ripples.

For more details about electronic switching air pressure regluation for the asparagus harvester

Inventing a Selective Asparagus Harvester

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:22:00 +0000

For the last week or so I have been trying to do some life cycle testing on the pneumatic cylinders that we are going to use for the next asparagus harvesting machine we build. The cylinders should be able to do about a million strokes before the need to be replaced.

The machine has a row of pneumatic cylinders, or often referred to as air cylinders, arrayed across the asparagus bed. As the machine moves forward a sensing system locates the spears and tells the air cylinder lined up with the spear when to cut.

The cut signal causes the piston rod to extend from the cylinder at high speed with about 18 inches of stroke. It takes less than a tenth of a second for the cylinder to extend to full stroke. On the end of the piston rod is mounted a blade that cuts the spear.

I set up a fixture out in my garage for testing the cylinder. I’ve got it mounted to a frame similar to how it will be mounted on the asparagus harvester, pointed down at the ground at around 45 degrees.

I filled an asparagus crate or lug box, lined with plastic, full of dirt from the back yard. I placed the crate of dirt so that when the cylinder is extended the blade goes about two inches deep into the soil.

I actually went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of asparagus to test the cutting ability of my blades. I wanted to see if I could detect a difference between a blade with a V notch in it, a slanted edge like a guillotine, and an arrowhead type blade.

I tamped the soil down till it was nice and firm, and then used a dowel to make a hole just big enough to get an asparagus spear into. Then I pushed a spear into the hole and tamped the dirt down around it. I lined up three spears so the blade would contact the first spear while in mid-air, the second spear right at ground level, and the third spear would have the cut line about an inch below ground.

I tried this with all three blade types, and I could find no difference at all in the cutting ability or anything else. The blades sliced through all three spears like they were made of butter. There was no deflection or twisting of the blade, so my new secret method of preventing blade rotation seems to work well.

Since revealing details about an invention online would compromise my patent rights I can’t go into details about the new method I am using to prevent the blades from rotating out of position.

I would like to do the life testing at 150 psi, but my compressor only goes between 120 psi and 135psi as it cycles. So I set the air pressure for the testing at 120 psi.

I’m interested in the life of the seals, and whether the piston rod ends up breaking due to metal fatigue. The load placed on the end of the piston rod by the blade and guiding assembly is offset from the center of the piston rod.

On the down stroke the pneumatic valve reverses the direction of the air to the cylinder before the cylinder reaches the physical end of its stroke to prevent damaging the cylinder. On the return stroke the piston hits the rod end of a smaller cylinder screwed into the rear head of the cutting cylinder to act as a spring and absorb the shock loads.

My compressor can just barely keep up with the cylinder if I fire the cylinder every 20 seconds. It’s going to take a long time to get anywhere near a million strokes. I need a much bigger compressor.

To cycle the cylinder I used a 12f675 micro controller chip, an 8 pin chip with a microprocessor, memory, and various interface modules like analog to digital converters, comparators, and counters all included. Even an accurate clock is built in. Learning to program and use these microcontroller chips should be in every inventor’s toolbox.

I programmed the chip using a basic language. I used a breadboard, a couple of pots and a voltage regulator etc along with the chip to create an automatic cycling controller. It has two pots. One pot controls the time between firings and the other determines the length of the pulse sent to the air valve. The longer the pulse the longer the stroke produced by the air cylinder.

I’ve tested a whole lot of air cylinders with this method and I’ve yet to find one that would even go 10,000 cycles without developing a problem. I think this time I’ve got an air cylinder that will hold up for that million strokes I need.

These new cylinders I’m using have a 1” diameter bore. The cylinders I’ve used previous had a 1-1/2 inch bore. There is a big difference. The smaller surface area of the piston means the force is much smaller. The acceleration is determined by the force, and the new cylinder is much more sensitive to variations in pressure. That is something that the asparagus harvester invention will have to address.

In a future article I will describe in some detail the pressure problems and the special electronic air pressure regulation system I intend to use for the machine.

To learn more about my selective asparagus harvester invention visit: Selective Asparagus Harvester

Future Million Dollar Inventions and Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:07:00 +0000

Want to invent that million dollar invention or idea and be set for life? It’s not terribly likely that you can do such a thing, but it’s not out of the question either.

History is full of individuals who achieved great wealth with a new invention or a new idea. Ray Crock who franchised Mc Donald’s, Steve Jobs and Apple computer, Bill Gates and his operating system, snugglies, spanks, and someone is even making a fortune because he came up with the idea of slip on cardboard coffee cup holders so you don’t burn your fingers while holding that paper cup latte.

Here are the areas where I think the small individual inventor or innovator has the best chance of coming up with that revolutionary device or idea that will make him or her independently wealthy.

Harvesting Machines for Fruits and Vegetables

Very few fruits and vegetables are harvested by machine. There are tomato harvesters and potato harvesters but not much else for fruits and vegetables. If someone can com up with a harvester for apples or oranges or similar fruit the will make a huge killing. It will truly be a million dollar invention.

Other crops that are exclusively hand harvested are asparagus, all kinds of citrus, squash, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, and man others. I’ve almost got an asparagus harvester working, you can see my latest version at my asparagus harvester website.

Energy Production

Obviously energy is always going to be needed and with oil eventually running out there are many new competing technologies for generating electricity. Opportunities abound with areas such as wind power, ocean wave power, solar cells, biofuels, and more. Figure out a way to generate electricity that costs less than generating electricity with oil or gas and you have a winner.

A Better Razor

Just image how much money you can make selling razors. Nearly every man and woman in the US and many other parts of the world shaves. How about a new kind of razor that you could use to get a comfortable and close shave with just plain water? Even better would be a razor like the above that needs a new blade every week. You could have millions and millions of customers purchasing replacement blades weekly or monthly.

The Internet

First there was America Online, soon there was ebay, craigs list, facebook, twitter, and god knows how many other social networking and other online methods of making money. All of the previous mentioned items started out as an idea. You can have ideas too. Come up with a great online game that everyone wants to play. My wife is currently addicted to a farming game on facebook I think. Find some new way of helping the masses communicate with each other is another idea, and one will probably emerge this year in my opinion. Flex your creativity and come up with the next big thing on the internet.

Geriatric Products

Anything that helps older people get along as they grow old should be big. Soon the baby boomers will all be old, so find a way to make life easier for them. This could involve the internet and some sort of social media thing too. Interesting areas for new devices include things that make bathing easier, taking medications and keeping track of medications, exercise equipment, sleeping aids, and all sorts of other convenience items.

Cooking and Food Preparation

Everybody eats and they eat every day. Come up with some food preparation or cooking device that makes preparing or cooking food easier and then sell it on those infomercials. There is a lot of money in it, just come up with something simple and clever that makes a kitchen chore easier or quicker.

Water and Energy Conservation

As previously mentioned, energy is big. Find a good inexpensive method of saving energy. Saving water is just as important and will only get more important. Find a new way to desalinate water, or purify water, or a way to save large amounts of water.

These are just a few suggestions, there are countless others awaiting your discovery. Go forth and Invent and Innovate! Be the next one to come up with that million dollar invention or idea!

Simple Machine Inventions - New Invention Idea Needed

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 03:49:00 +0000

Simple machine inventions are quite gratifying to come up with. Simple is so much better than complicated, at least in my opinion. I’ve come up with a few simple ones, my paper burster, hydrothermal stabilizer, quick-shot foam dispensing nozzle, and even my asparagus harvester could be considered simple machines.

There is however, a new invention idea that needs to be invented. A cat toy that will keep my cats occupied for a few hours a day so they stop pestering me to play with them. I’ve made a bunch of different things for the cats to play with, but nothing high tech.

One of my better cat toys consisted of a large piece of brown wrapping paper about 2 feet square. I taped a long piece of rubber band to the center of the paper with duct tape, and attached the other end of the rubber band to a small plastic ball. Then I place the paper with the ball side down on the floor.

The cats loved it. They would pounce on the lump under the paper and push it and pull it and finally they would end up tearing the paper and capturing the ball. But as with all of the other toys they get used to it and get bored.

It seems to me that a cat toy has to be interactive with the cat in order to keep it interested. With all the available electronics that should not be too difficult. A microcontroller, a couple of sensors, maybe a motor or two or a solenoid and a little creativity and the cats will have there interactivity.

I’ve written more about possible ways of using simple machine inventions for cat toys in this article: New Invention Idea – Toys for Cats. I go into more detail about my ideas for these simple machine inventions for use as interactive toys for cats.

Think small things that move quickly and try to hide. At least that’s what my cats like the best. Little hunters they are.

So please, if you can come up with a great interactive toy for cats please let me know when they go on sale… I’ll be the first one to buy one. Unless of course I come up with something first.

Invention Needed! Someone Needs To Invent A Better Tankless Water Heater!

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:30:00 +0000

Someone needs to invent a better tankless water heater! Tankless water heaters are very popular these days due to the popularity of “going green”. They save energy since they don’t have standby losses like storage type water heaters. Another big incentive are the tax rebates being offered when you install one.

On the positive side tankless water heaters offer endless amounts of hot water and high efficiency, are relatively small so they can save some space, and they can last longer than tank type units that have a tank that can rust and leak.

However, there are some problems. I like to use a small flow of hot water for various things, and to do this you simply adjust the hot and cold water faucets until you get the flow and temperature that you want. This works fine for storage type water heaters, but with tankless heaters it’s a bit more difficult.

Because a tankless water heater needs a minimum flow of water to turn on and to stay on, you must run that amount of hot water no mater what… otherwise the heater just turns off. Most tankless hot water heaters require ½ gallon per minute with smaller models and as much as ¾ gallons per minute for the larger models designed for whole-house applications.

That minimum flow is at the full outlet temperature of the water heater. So if you want a lower temperature you need to mix cold water with that hot water at the faucet. Let’s assume for a moment that to obtain the desired temperature you need to mix the cold and hot water in equal amounts. Now you have to run one gallon per minute from your fixture to obtain that warm water. This can be a big waster of water.

Another problem is that it takes a tankless water heater time to heat water, and thus it takes longer to deliver hot water to the fixture and hence more water gets run down the drain while you wait.

Some one needs to invent a tankless water heater that solves either or both of these problems. If the turn on flow required was only say 0.1 gallons per minute that would put the tankless unit pretty much on par with a tank type water heater when low flows of warm water are desired.

Tankless water heaters are more energy efficient than tank type units due to the large amount of heat loss from a large tank of hot water. But if you insulated the heat exchanger in a tankless heater which holds only about a quart or two of water, why couldn’t you keep it hot and ready to eliminate the delay tankless units have when they start up? With standby energy losses related to the surface area of the tank, one would think a tank or heat exchanger holding less than a gallon of water would lose far less energy than a tank that holds 40 or 50 gallons.

Something to think about anyway.

So all you would-be inventors out there put your thinking caps on and figure out how to invent the perfect tankless water heater!

Outsourcing To China – Problems Crop Up Continued…

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 07:49:00 +0000

We outsourced our pump manufacturing to China, due to our inability to find a manufacture in the US that could provide us the pumps at a price we could make a profit with. It’s not such an easy process. Good communications are critical, and so if you have to deal with a very small Chinese manufacturer you need a good go-between person who is fluent in both English and Chinese.

We were having a problem with a seal, well not us, the Chinese manufacturer. We were life testing the seals for the pump, as was the manufacturer. His seals consistently failed after a short time. Using the same parts and test procedures, (we thought), our tests were working out just fine.

I finally after weeks of going back and forth trying to find out the details I asked him to send me one of the “failed” seals.

It turns out that the manufacturer meant “leaked” when he said the seal “failed”. We wasted over a month trying to figure out what was making the seal fail before we found out it wasn’t a seal failure after all. It was another part that was failing and causing the leak, not the seal. It turned out they were testing with a slightly higher pressure than we were, which caused a plastic part to fail.

Good translation is obviously important when you are dealing with a manufacturer on the other side of the globe.

Injection Mold Tooling Problems

We have found the tooling for our plastic injection molded parts are somewhat sloppy. The parting lines are all obvious and slightly out of place, the ejector pins don’t all land on the surface they are intended to, everything is done kind of half-assed if you ask me.

Keep in mind, this was a very low budget, and with our limited funds we didn’t really have a lot of choices. The tooling works and produces parts that work, but they aren’t very pretty.

Getting code approvals in China

Working with ETL testing labs in China was just as difficult. I had to argue constantly with the Chinese engineers who worked at the ETL facility in China. Thank god for the Internet! I always won the arguments, but it took a lot of work researching and supplying documentation to the Chinese engineers.

I remember one disturbing argument; the Chinese engineer was telling me the fuse I was using for the motor was too small and needed to be bigger.

What? Bigger? How is a bigger fuse safer? It was a very surreal experience. Fuses take time to burn out. If a fuse is rated for 2.5 amps, and you run 2.6 amps through it, it may take several hours to blow. If you run 3 amps through it, it may take 30 minutes to blow. If you run 10 amps through it, it will blow in a second or two etc.

Our fuse was to protect against “locked rotor” conditions in the motor. Locked rotor is where the motor shaft is held and not allowed to rotate. Our locked rotor current would blow the fuse we were using in about 2 seconds, well before anything got hot enough to cause a fire. The fuse they were specifying would have taken several minutes to blow and danger of fire would be very real.

They finally relented and allowed us to use a fuse smaller than what they wanted but still larger than we would have liked. The one we use blows in less than 10 seconds at locked rotor conditions, but I would rather it blow in less than a second.

I’ll have more Chinese outsourcing stories in the future… some good, some bad, and some just plain funny.

More about our outsourcing experience

Manufacturing Our Product in China – Unusual and Odd Problems Crop Up

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:12:00 +0000

We manufacture a pump in China. The reason we have it done in China is to provide an actual profit margin. We started manufacturing it in the US, but it reached the point where it just cost too much, it was either fold up the company or outsource to China.

We opted for outsourcing the pumps to China.

We’ve been having the strangest problem concerning the lip seal we use to seal our pump motor shaft. It is a standard 1/8 inch cross section x ¼ inch ID x ½ inch OD lip seal. After we started manufacturing the pumps in china we began having substantially more warranty returns due to leaky pumps.

It took a long time, but we finally realized that occasionally the seal would spin inside the plastic gland it is contained within. It turned out that for 10 years we had been using the wrong cross-section type of seal, which was symmetrical. Now the factory is telling us we shouldn’t use that type of seal for a rotary shaft application. It would have been nice if they had mentioned it 10 years ago when they helped us choose a seal.

And it worked so well for 10 years! Thinking back on it, we now know why we had some mysterious leaks even back then. There were a whole host of changes we made when we switched to the Chinese manufacturing, but we still used the same motor shaft sealing technique and seal.

To solve the spinning problem the Chinese manufacturer had some custom seals molded, but when he did the life-testing, the seals were only lasting from a couple of minutes to an hour or so. Wee need a 500 hour life or better.

We spent weeks trying to figure out why the seals only seemed to last for a few minutes to a few hours when the Chinese manufacturer did life testing on them. Our life testing of the US seals we had been using was getting life expectancies of about 500 hours, unless they spun of course.

We could not figure out why the Chinese tests were so poor… let’s say catastrophic, Same motor and pump, same stainless steel shaft, same plastic pump housing, same water pressure and temperature. We decided it had to be the material the Chinese were using.

We found a compounder here in the US who would custom make us the rubber material, Nitrile, with the properties we needed for our pump. The minimum order cost us about $1,000 but we got enough material to make about 80,000 pumps. The seals are pretty small after all.

It took about a month to get the compounder to furnish us the batch of nitrile and we shipped a small portion off to China for them to mold into lip seals.

Again the Chinese life testing resulted in seals only lasting minutes. We investigated the curing times and molding method the Chinese factory was using and tried changing those parameters. Same result.

I was getting quite frustrated. The Chinese were blaming “abrasion” for the problem. I told them to send me some samples of the new seal including one of the “failed” seals. When the seals arrived and I found the “failed” seal I was a bit puzzled. I could not tell the difference between the new seals and the failed seal. It looked brand new.

I installed the failed seal in a new pump and began life testing the pump. After about 200 hours of running I took the pump apart and checked the seal. It showed significant wear as would be expected, but inner lip still had more than half the original thickness. There were no leaks.

To be continued…

Tankless Waterheaters – Comparison with Tank Type Water Heaters

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 06:53:00 +0000

Tankless waterheaters can provide you with reduced energy usage and a limitless supply of hot water. There are a few significant differences in the way tankless water heaters work and how standard storage water heaters work.

A gas water heater may need a new thermocouple because the pilot light won’t stay lit, or the high limit switch may need replacement in an electric water heater, other than that and similar minor problems they are pretty darned reliable appliances. You set the temperature dial to warm hot or hottest and forget about it (or the upper thermostat on electric units).

With tankless waterheaters there are some important differences you should be aware of. Tankless units have both a minimum flow rate and a maximum flow rate to be able to maintain a constant outlet temperature. If the water flows too slowly through the heater, the heat exchanger can overheat and become damaged.

Tankless water heaters use a flow sensor to turn on the water heater only if the minimum flow rate is reached. Tankless heaters require ½ to ¾ gallons of water per minute to initiate operation depending on the brand and model. This means you can’t use “just a trickle” of hot water, you need to run at least a half to three quarter gallons per minute to keep the waterheater operating.

Since you will need to mix hot and cold water at the fixture to get a usable water temperature from the faucet, and you must maintain the hot water part to at least ½ gallon per minute or ¾ gallons per minute for larger models, then you could end up needing to use at least a gallon per minute for the right temperature water.

Tankless water heaters also have a maximum flow rate for which they can heat water to the temperature that has been set for the output. Higher flow rates will cause the outlet water temperature to drop.

Some tankless models require periodic maintenance like de-scaling the heat exchanger in hard water areas. Scale buildup from hard water can be a serious problem. The owner’s manual will describe how to clean the scale out if it is needed.

The installation of a tankless waterheater should not be done by someone not trained in installing the brand that is purchased. Improper installation can lead to things like carbon monoxide poisoning, a fire hazard, or unstable water heater operation.

Tankless water heaters take time to heat water to full temperature, so they take a little longer to deliver hot water to the fixtures, typically 10 to 20 seconds longer. That means more water being run down the drain while you wait for hot water.

If you have a need for large volumes of hot water tankless waterheaters are the way to go. Just make sure you size it correctly and have it installed correctly. And if applicable add a hot water demand system as well.

Derived from my article: Tankless Waterheaters

Getting a New Patent - A New Hot Water Demand System Patent – In Real Time.

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:32:00 +0000

We recently filed a provisional patent application for our new hot water demand system. A year prior to that we had done what our patent attorney called a “document dump”. As I understand it, that gave us a year’s worth of protections in so far as establishing a date of invention. Once the year expired we decided to pursue a provisional patent.

Provisional Patent

A provisional patent allows you to establish a filing date for your patent, but you can still modify the patent later. However, making later modifications does not extend the protection period… which lasts 20 years.

We filed the new patent application a couple of weeks ago. I just received a letter from our patent attorney.

The letter informs us that our patent has been filed and the USPTO has assigned us a U.S. patent application with our application number and further tells us our official filing date is November 18, 2009.

She also enclosed a copy of a “Notice To File Missing Parts of Application” received from the USPTO. She enclosed a copy of the missing document, the “inventor’s declaration, which she asked me to sign and return. It has to be received by the patent office on or before Feb. 4th.

Another interesting item in the letter is this quote:
“We want to remind you that there is a strict and continuing duty to disclose to the USPTO prior art and other information that is material to the patentability of your invention. There is no obligation to perform a prior art search, but if you already know or become aware of any material information while the application is pending, it must be submitted to the USPTO. We will file an Information Disclosure Statement with the USPTO for the search that was done prior to filing of this application.
If you or anyone associated with the prosecution of this application knows or becomes aware of any information that may be material to the patentability of the invention, please contact me so that I may arrange to have the information submitted to the USPTO. If I do not hear from you, I will assume that there is no additional information to submit at this time. “
So in other words, if I surf the internet tomorrow, and I stumble across something that might impact my patent application, I am obligated to inform the patent office.
The letter also states that the USPTO typically publishes an application at about 18 months from the original priority date.
One more quote that could interest some viewers:
“The American Inventors Protection Act of 1999 makes available to patent applicants extensions of the patent term where the USPTO causes delays during examination. The USPTO defines the types of delays giving rise to such extensions of time. However, any potential term extensions caused by USPTO delay are offset or reduced by any delays caused by an applicants' "failure to engage in reasonable efforts to conclude prosecution." Consequently, filing any papers (Information Disclosure Statements, Responses to USPTO Office Actions, etc.) is best done promptly
The next step, if my memory serves me, is that we will receive something from the patent examiner telling disallowing some of or all of our claims. I’ve never had a patent application that was just simply accepted by the patent examiner. It’s like they have to put up some kind of objection. So I expect that to happen this time as well.

We will argue and usually we will loose a claim or two but keep most of the claims intact or only slightly modified. At least that is my hope.

When I get a reply from the patent office or something from my patent attorney I will be publishing it. Patent reporting in real time... still a snails pace though.

Inventions and Inventors – More Asparagus Harvester Problems

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:49:00 +0000

Inventions and Inventors – More Asparagus Harvester Problems

Continuing my asparagus harvester invention story…

One of the significant problems we had while trying to develop our prototype asparagus harvester was gaining access to asparagus fields for testing.

There is really no substitute for an asparagus field to test our prototypes on. We’ve devised a number of substitutes over the years, but all suffer from problems. We at times have used blocks of clay with all sorts of stuff stuck into the clay to substitute for spears… plastic tubing, sticks, rubber hose, tulles, and even asparagus spears from the grocery store. We rigged up conveyor belts under the machine with rubber studs sticking up. We even dragged it out to my farm and put tulles into the ground to simulate spears.

But in the end, is just extremely difficult to simulate simultaneously the delicate nature of the spears, the clumping and randomness of the spears, the leaning, the loads presented to the blades by the soil consistency, penetrability of the soil, the ability of blades to cut through spears, variations in bed height etc.

So for about six to eight weeks a year we have the opportunity to run the prototype asparagus harvester on a real asparagus field… if we could find one. It seems that asparagus growers have a couple of problems with testing machines on their fields. First, they earn their money from the asparagus crop, so if your machine doesn’t work well the farmer looses money, and second, it used to upset the crews that picked the asparagus.

There were a few years that worked out, when we would find a farmer that would allow us to cut a couple of rows on the edge of his field. One year a farmer told us we could have an acre well in advance of the season. One week after we got the harvester into his field he changed his mind and tossed us out. Not much testing done that year.

Another time the president of the asparagus growers association told us he would provide us with several acres the next season. When the season arrived he kept putting us off and finally told us he couldn’t find us any acreage. Great.

Part of the problem was that the asparagus growers did not really want to see mechanization come to the asparagus industry. I remember one grower who told me that he hoped that it would be a very expensive machine. The growers were making great money and were afraid mechanization would attract more growers and the increase volume would lower prices.

Now days it’s different. The much lower production costs of our foreign competitors has nearly wiped out the asparagus industry, and if mechanization doesn’t come along soon there will be nothing left. We will get all of our asparagus from Peru and Mexico.

After we hooked up with Washington State University things were different. The University paid farmers for the seasons crop, and any crop we harvested we turned over to the farmer every day anyway. The grower made out like a bandit.

The farmers are also much more interested in mechanical harvesting. The need to find a way to compete with the cheap imports and mechanization is really their only hope. So now they are rooting for us… and if we pay them enough they will let us experiment with our selective mechanical asparagus harvester on their farm.

To be continued…

The Asparagus Harvester Invention – Trouble with cutting.

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 23:49:00 +0000

The Asparagus Harvester Invention – Trouble with cutting.

The harvester invention has been quite a challenge, and here are some more of the difficulties we had to overcome in the development of the machine.

Now that I’ve described some of the problems with sensing the spears and locating their positions on the bed, I’ll move on to the problems we had with actually cutting the spears.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with how asparagus grows, here is a little background. Asparagus is a fern, and the spears we eat are shoots that come up out of the ground and each of the little triangular shaped “brachs” at the tip of the spear will eventually become fern branches, unless you eat the spear first.

Once planted, the asparagus plant will stay in the ground and produce spears for about 15 years or so. Each spring you harvest the spears, and then let the plant become a fern. In the next spring you chop down all the fern, and once the weather gets warm enough the plants start sending up the shoots or spears.

If you cut the spears down before they can become a fern, the root mass or “crown” as it is called, which is about 6 inches below the top of the soil sends up more shoots. As long as you keep cutting the spears, the crown will continue to send up new ones. However, the root mass uses stored carbohydrates to supply the spears with food, and so you don’t want to cut the spears for too long or the crown will run out of food and become damaged.

A bed of asparagus ready for harvest looks like a forest of spears coming up randomly over the bed. The spears are all different heights and can grow more than 6 inches a day which requires you to harvest the field every day when its warm and growth is high.

Often spears are quite close together, and at substantially different heights.

The asparagus harvester can not stop to cut a spear, it must cut the spears as it travels through the field. Speed is critical because unlike most crops that you harvest once and move on to the next field, with asparagus you have to harvest the same field every day.

To avoid damaging spears that are not yet tall enough to harvest and close to a harvestable spear the blades must move very rapidly. Our harvester has blades mounted on the end of the piston rod of an air cylinder with a stroke of about 20 inches. Our cylinders can do the entire 20 inch stroke out and all the way back in less than 2 tenths of a second. It takes less than a tenth of a second to complete the extension part of the stroke.

Even so, since the asparagus harvester will be moving forward at 20 or 30 inches per second, in a tenth of a second the machine will have moved forward 3 inches. The faster the cylinder the less likely it will be to damage a spear that isn’t tall enough to harvest.
Making an air cylinder travel very fast is easy enough in theory, but just try getting an air cylinder manufacturer to build you one. The speed of the cylinders is determined by two main factors, the mass that has to be accelerated, and the maximum flow through the air piping, valve orifices, and cylinder ports.

To accelerate a piston rod assembly you simply need a lot of force. The more force the higher the acceleration. Since acceleration is force divided by mass, ideally we want a light weight piston and rod assembly with a large piston area. The large piston area converts the air pressure into a large force.

It turns out accelerating the piston rod assembly occurs in the first inch or so of stroke, and then you’ve reached terminal velocity. The terminal velocity is limited by the flow rate of the air. We used high CV (flow factor) valves with ½ inch ports, ½” air hoses, to make sure we had the highest flow rate we could achieve. The limiting factor was the size of the ports in the air cylinders.

The first problem we encountered was the inability to find air cylinders with large enough ports. Trying to build our own cylinders was prohibitively expensive due to the low quantity involved and not having the specialized equipment that would help lower the cost. For a long time we used 1-1/2 inch bore cylinders with ¼” cylinder ports. Now we have found a company that will build us our custom designed cylinder for a reasonable price. The latest cylinder is a 1 inch bore cylinder with ½” ports.

Since the spears need to be cut at or below ground level the blade must inter the ground to a depth of several inches to be sure and cut through the spear. But since the machine is traveling forward at 20 to 30 inches per second it’s not difficult to put the piston rod into a bind, and then the cylinder does not retract. This drags the blade through the bed damaging spears and after a few feet bends the piston rod.

At first we tried folding blades on clevis mounts, and spring mounted blades, but those ideas did not work out. We finally put the air cylinders on pivot mounts so if they did not retract quickly enough they would not bind which solved that particular problem.

Another huge problem was keeping the air cylinder from self-destructing. We could reverse the air valve to stop the extend stroke before it bottomed out against the front head, but on the return stroke the piston would hit the rear cylinder head at about 250 inches per second. The result was stretched or broken tie rods. We tried all kinds of springs on the rear of the cylinder and on the front of the cylinder under the blade mount. Springs don’t hold up. Less than a days harvesting would break any spring, metal or rubber that we tried.

We tried hydraulic shock absorbers but they don’t respond quickly enough to handle a cylinder that can fire 5 times in one second. They are way too slow.

We finally found success by mounting an air cylinder in the rear head of the main cylinder to act as a gas spring. Even then the cylinders would still disassemble

Inventing an Asparagus Harvester – 30 Years of Prototypes

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:43:00 +0000

I first decided to invent a selective asparagus harvester in about 1972. I asked my dad one day if he knew of something that needed inventing… I was bored. He was a farmer and an asparagus grower. He told me they needed a mechanical asparagus harvester that would just harvest the ripe spears; a selective asparagus harvester.

Not knowing any better I decided I would build one. At the time I was about 21 years old, fresh out of the army, and pretty good with electronics. I had a ham radio license when I was about 13 years old, built my own transmitters and receivers, and could fix anything from a car radio to a color TV.

I had read about a new kind of imaging device, I think it was one of the first CCD chips. I don’t remember all of the details, but the camera had basically 16 rows and 16 columns of light sensitive elements, and I decided to use that to detect the height and location of the spears on the bed, and I would use blades attached to air cylinders aimed toward the ground at about a 45 degree angle. I used eight cylinders arranged in a row across the bed, and when the camera spotted a spear tall enough to cut, it would activate the valve and fire the air cylinder that was lined up with the same column as the spear.

A friend of mine and I built a little demonstration prototype that had a little gas powered air compressor built out of channel and angle iron and 4 motorcycle tires that we pushed by hand. It had the camera, air compressor, 4 cutting cylinders and a crude pickup device that would grip the spears as they were cut.

That first prototype was enough to interest a local machine shop that decided to take risk of developing a selective asparagus harvester. They hired me for $2000 a month to oversee the development and took a 50 percent share of the rights to the machine. We spent the next ten years working on it, coming up with a new prototype each year.

The camera turned out to be unsuitable for the task, and during those years I tried just about everything you could think of to detect those stubborn spears of asparagus. I tried little wire bales that hung down from above, beam-breaking photo electric sensors, retro-reflective optical sensors, magnetic switches with plastic paddles, and even a Reticon line scan CCD camera, but all had serious drawbacks.

I really wanted to try a laser for illuminating the spears due to the precise position information I could get by using a laser shooting across the bed. It would be able to give me much more accurate information about where the spear was located on the bed and it’s height. But at the time lasers were several thousand dollars, and not nearly rugged enough to mount on an asparagus harvester.

Asparagus spears can be very delicate, and on cold mornings it is very easy to break a spear by just nudging it a bit. So you really don’t want to use something that has to contact the spear to detect it. Using through-beam sensors required mounting the emitter and receiver at the height of the spear you wanted to harvest. If you wanted to cut nine inch spears you mounted the beams nine inches above the bed. Harvestable spears would range from nine inches to about 16 inches on hot days. The longer spears fortunately are harder to break.

We used extremely thin sensors to avoid touching the spears, but you could still see the occasional spear break as it made contact with the sensor itself.
Another problem with sensing the spears was the fact that asparagus spears can lean in any direction, and significantly throw off the targeting of the spear. At the point where the spear reaches the nine inches off of the bed, it can be several inches to one side or to the front or back of where the spear actually emerges from the ground. That makes it a whole lot harder to cut the spear. Especially if the blades are narrow.

In 1984 we gave up the project due to lack of interest on the part of the asparagus growers. The machine was a self-propelled 3 row selective asparagus harvester. It wasn’t perfect yet but it did harvest asparagus.

At that time we used beam-breaking for sensing the spears; I think they were 4-1/2 inch wide channels the spears had to pass through.

The sensing of the spears and locating them were not the only problems we had in developing a selective asparagus harvester.

My next blog entry will discuss the difficulties we had with the air cylinders. And some of the inventive ways we found to address the problems… and why most of them did not work.

The Old Inventor Guy

A New Patent - How to get a Patent or Patent Protection

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:20:00 +0000

Getting a patent for a new hot water system

I filed for a new patent a few days ago. The patent is for an improved hot water delivery system for residential and commercial buildings.

The new hot water delivery system is capable of providing faster than normal hot water delivery to any fixture in a home or building, and only to that fixture where the hot water is needed.

The basic idea is to place a pump at the water heater which when running will create a pressure difference between the hot and cold water lines with the hot water lines having the larger pressure.

At each fixture a cross-over valve connects the hot and cold water lines. The valve has a controller which has a temperature sensor in contact with the water in the valve. Each valve controller also has a communications link with the pump.

When you want hot water at any particular fixture you activate the valve by pressing a button that is either hard wired to the valve or uses a radio frequency transmitter to activate the valve. The valves can get their power from either the house current or batteries. Batteries would be great for retro-fit installations. We estimate the battery life to be a minimum of two years using four AA cells per valve.

When you press the button activating the valve, it checks the temperature of the water at the fixture, and if the water is not already hot, the valve controller sends a signal to the pump to begin pumping. The valve controller also at the same time opens the valve between the hot and cold water lines. Thus hot water begins flowing from the water heater with the cooled off hot water in the hot water piping being sent back towards the water heater through the cold water line which hooks to the inlet of the water heater somewhere.

So basically that is the new invention. Let’s examine the steps I’ve taken for protection so far. In a future blog I will cover how the patent attorney and I worked out the details of the patent, especially the patent claims.

After my partner and I decided we had a good idea for a new product we knew we needed to get patent protection. My partner found a patent attorney through a relative, a lawyer working for a very large and expensive firm. But what the heck, hopefully we would be able to obtain a good solid patent that could be enforced in the market place.

Foreign patent protection is complex and expensive. Very expensive. We decided to stick to just he US and Canada. Canada adds about $1,500 to the cost of filing.

I don’ remember all of the costs at this point, I did not sign the checks, the company did. I will be looking them up and reporting on all the details as far as expenditures go in the near future.

Our patent lawyer explained to us that the least expensive way to get some form of patent protection on our new idea was to do what she called a “document dump”. We gave her documents that explained the invention in detail, and she did the “document dump” which serves as proof in a court of law of when we first thought of the idea. Of course we could have thought of it 10 years before that, but this is absolute proof that you had thought of if by at least the day of the dump.

The reason we went with that was we had no money to pursue a patent, and this was the least expensive way to obtain some protection.

More about patenting the new hot water system in a future blog.

Bill the old inventor guy.

First Invention Blog - Testing the Waters

noreply@blogger.com (Hot Water Guy) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:20:00 +0000

Ok all you wantabe inventors, I'm starting this blog to help you out. I have been inventing my whole life, beginning in the early 70s. I have over a dozen patents and I just filed for another patents a few days ago.

In this blog I plan to discuss all kinds of things relating to inventions. I'll relate things I've learned over the years, and new insights when I get them. Many of my patents are related to water heaters and hot water circulating systems with some other gadgets and gizmos thrown in.

Online marketing is another subject I will be delving into. I've done pretty well with SEO for some of my web sites, and we are selling one of my inventons online successfully.

One of my inventions is being made in China, and that will also provide fertile ground for blog posts. Lot's of nifty headache stories... LOL

I'll begin all of this with my next blog. For the time being I need to go finish setting up all the details for this new blog. Ugh!