by pup55 » Thu 01 Feb 2007, 08:47:17
I think it's brilliant. Both a heat pump and your fridge have hot coils on the outside waiting to be exploited.
Out in Suburbia, where I am, the problem is that the hot water heater is stupidly located in the basement, about 50 feet away from the showers. Every time you turn on the shower, it takes about 45 seconds for warm water from the water heater to reach the shower head, thus wasting that much water while you wait for the shower to warm up. Then after you take your shower, the hot water, which cost you something to heat, sits in the pipes and cools off, I suppose in theory radiating this heat out into the house.
All the idiot designer of this place would have had to do was put the HWH in the attic, five feet away from the showers, which are on the second floor. No problem to put a containment system in (plastic tub drained to the outside somehow) for the once every 20 years that the water heater wears out and starts to leak.
But that would have cost them an extra $50 for the plastic tub, so they did not do it.
There are just a few little things that the designers could have done to make this place much better to heat and cool, plus made it easy to retrofit a passive solar system, or other methods of heating. Example: make a conduit shaft that runs from the basement up through the house somewhere to the attic/ceiling to run circulating pipes.
But they did not, because when they built this place they assumed energy would be cheap and plentiful for the life of the house. Unfortuntely, they might have been right. The house might not last as long as the mortgage anyway.