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August 28, 2005
In Home Thermal Systems are the future.
I was catching up on my surfing this morning and over on Treehugger.com they had an interesting new refrigerator. Basically it attempted to solve the problem of waste heat given off by your refrigerator while it's in the process of cooling. For those of you that aren't aware the heat from inside your refrigerator is actually being taken and vented out the back of the refrigerator into your home. In the winter time it sort of helps you, but in the summer time you basically end up cooling the same air twice. Once inside your refrigerator and a second time inside your house. It's a tragic loop, but that's how things tend to be. So a creative soul from Seoul decided to move the heat out of part of the refrigerator to the top of the unit so you could use it as a heating pad. Nice idea. Much better than having someone turn on a toaster oven or worse a real oven to heat something up. For me it's time for us to start working on a home thermal system instead. Of course you'd have a hot and cold system running some sort of efficient temperature carrying fluid through it. Of course these should be wrapped in insulation, actually most of our hot water pipes should probably be wrapped in insulation, but that's an entirely different rant about efficiency. I think Aerogels are going to be the key to making a system like this effective. They are moving along quite nicely right now. Very light and uber effective at containing temperature. You can actually already by them for wrapping pipes. Of course in a perfect world you could use them in your walls and in all your appliances. I mean a refrigerator's size will either decrease or available space inside will increase by a respectable amount since the insulation capacity per inch of Aerogel makes the stuff that they are using now look like a joke. Probably giving you about an inch or so more space everywhere you see a heavily insulated surface in your refrigerator today. We waste a lot of energy in our homes because we end up doing the same work twice. For example when you turn on your oven the oven uses electricity to heat up, which makes your heat pump work harder to keep your house cool, when the reality of the situation should be that the heat pump's excess heat should be going straight into your oven. And when your done with your oven there should be a way to move that heat to something like your dryer or your hot water heater to have it used again without having it dumped into your house for your heat pump to transfer it out again. So I say the future is that you will have a communication network, water network, sewage network, thermal network, heat and cooling network and an electric network in your home of the future.
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Posted by ManDrake at August 28, 2005 6:43 AM
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