Indigestion - The HydroMaid Experience

All experiments teach us, the negative outcomes often more than most. A few years ago, my garbage disposal failed. We are told that replacement gives us a unique opportunity for green living - for at these times we don't need to engage in murky calculations over whether it would be better to replace aging but functional stuff (with all it's embodied energy of production, transportation, etc) with newer, more efficient stuff. When it's broke, we get a free pass. Well, nearly free, since we then shoulder the responsibility thoroughly to research the field to ensure we have selected the most efficient and eco-friendly alternative available.

So I was quite pleased when I came across the HydroMaid. Besides the retro name, and the fact that it looked like a low-budget sci-fi spaceship or a cartoon stomach from a 1950's Pepto Bismol commercial, it promised an ingenious technology I could not resist: using only regular water pressure as it's power source. Internally, it reminded me of an orrery, with gears turning counter-gears and the like. Whatever doubts I had about new, unproven technology were assuaged by the reassuring press releases: they had raised venture capital, had a manufacturing plant in Hong Kong; Bob Vila demoed it on TV!

While you have already guessed that the HydroMaid was a stinking pile of crap - I'm afraid it took me a fair while to make the discovery. After paying a large premium to buy it ($325 if I recall, vs $80-$100 for a good conventional one), the plumber charged another $100 to install it. Which is nearly what he charged again to replace the 'O-rings' when it failed in a few months (wasn't that the space shuttle problem?), and again when he removed it after the second failure (in July, I think, when the undigested garbage had begun to ripen).

But you would be completely wrong in supposing the take-away is the importance of being conservative in such decisions. On the contrary, I believe that we as consumers must accelerate the pace of adoption of energy-saving devices, which includes unproven technology. The real story is about how we can socially pool and therefore mitigate the risk inherent in these experiments. Had a site like this been published, I and others could have saved ourselves a lot of aggravation and expense. We still don't appreciate how simple and pervasive communication technology like the web can make our group experiments fail-fast.

I think there is a bright future indeed for products that harvest their energy in the form they need it - here mechanical energy for pushing a piston - rather than relying on the extremely dirty and lossy trip from coal seam to electrical outlet. But this is the subject of a future post.