Waste heat

During the summer, you have a air conditioner cooling your home. That air-conditioner dumps heat outside, and blows chilled air in. Inside your house you have a refrigerator. That refrigerator has a very similar system that dumps excess heat into your home. It dumps its waste heat into the space your air conditioner is trying to cool. Say you also have a clothes dryer; it has a pipe to expel its excess heat outside, and that is a good thing in the summer, but in the winter you may want to harness that heat. Modern homes are rife with such conflicts. Just dump waste heat outside. It's becoming a problem.

The waste heat generated by car engines, power plants, home furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning machinery plays an unappreciated role in influencing regional climates, new computer simulations suggest. By altering atmospheric circulation, human-made heat may raise temperatures by as much as 1 degree Celsius during winter in the northernmost parts of the world. Full article

This is a problem within our means to address--at least to some extent. How hard is it to build an energy efficient home? Governments are already touting insulation, and energy-efficient appliances. How hard would it be to build a home with a central heat pump? All the appliances could expel waste to the heat pump, and draw from it when needed. Some heat is still wasted, but a home designed from the ground up with the understanding that our homes need a holistic way of dealing with all our gadgets could minimize that waste. Some people are already doing it. Suppose that we married all the of underground home efficiency to a centrally managed heat pump and added personal wind or solar power production? We have the technology ...