Integrated Heating & Refrigeration System

Running a refrigerator dumps waste heat into your home, whether you want it or not:

• The Refrigerator Pump compresses the warm refrigerant so that it heats up, then dumps the heat through a radiator at the back or bottom of the Refrigerator.
• The Electric Motor running the Refrigerator Pump also dumps heat as a byproduct of running
• Yes the Refrigerator dumps some “cold” into the house too, but that is more than balanced by the inefficiencies in the refrigeration process to get the refrigerator cold again.

If you think this is too small to worry about, recall that Refrigeration is 9% of Residential Energy Usage, and 8% of Commercial, and all that energy ends up as heat in your home.

Rather than wasting the heat from the Refrigeration Pump & Electric Motor, can we transfer it directly to a place you need heat, such as Hot Water or Space Heating? Recall that Water Heating is 15% of Residential Energy Usage, and 8% of Commercial, so there is certainly a strong need, and the numbers are comparable. If we could capture even half of the waste heat from Refrigeration, we could reduce Residential and Commercial energy use by about 4% just from this one innovation.

In most homes the Refrigerator isn’t near the Hot Water Heater or Furnace. But we already “pipe” heat away – your air conditioner does just that: hold one of the pipes with foam insulation coming out of your air conditioner and you will see it is hot. 

We can even use Autonomous Vehicles to move heat and cold around. J In addition, this opportunity will influence the building design ideas we’ll be considering later.

How can we transfer this energy? If you mix a hot liquid and a cold liquid you get a combination that is the “average” temperature.

Another approach is using incremental heat transfer to optimize the efficiency of heat transfer. Let the liquids flow past each other:

• The hottest waste heat liquid is warming the warmest liquid to be warmed, starting at the left in the diagram below,
• The next hottest waste heat liquid is warming the next warmest liquid to be warmed, and
• Continue that process to the outlet of the liquid to be cooled and the inlet of the liquid to be warmed, ending at the right in the diagram below.

You can transfer the heat even if the flows are uneven.

Refrigerators and Hot Water Heaters don’t run that much of the time, so we can use a Heat Transfer Container with the process described above. Autonomous Vehicles will bring the liquids to the Heat Transfer Container and then deliver the heated and cooled liquids to their respective destinations, thus the two appliances don’t have to be collocated.

Next we’ll consider another innovation – Layered Heating & Cooling – for more efficient insulation of hot and cold storage devices, and more efficiency in moving things in and out of temperature-controlled storage.