When I was a kid, our family dog would drag his blanket to our fridge and spend the night bundled up in front of it (where the exhaust heat was)
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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startup idea: fridge with warm little nook for dog
I have a better idea
One system that is both an Air conditioning system that uses waste heat to heat water. And uses waste "cold" from heating water to cool house.
I can get you half way there with a heat pump water heater.
Thats the point, they both use the inverter based heat pumps, they even use the same refrigerant. By no-one builds one that shares the same unit, so they both dump waste temperature differential into the outside air.
A lot of newer water heaters use essentially an air conditioner type system to heat the water and blow cold/cool air away from it. Obviously only useful if you have your water heater in an area that can make use of said a/c, but I did and it was glorious.
Theoretically you could use a heat pump to heat water that would generate "waste cold", but heat pumps typically don't get nearly hot enough to heat water as much as a gas water heater does. I suppose one could be made but it would be very difficult, I think. It would need to use the ambient air in your house and suck enough heat out of it to heat your water, and if your house is about 72°F / 22°C and you want water at 130°F / 54°C (which is pretty typical) that seems like a challenge, especially since water is so much denser and has a higher heat capacity. I have a portable A/C with a heat pump and it starts to struggle to heat my apartment once it gets down to 45-50F outside and it struggles to cool once it gets above 95F.
Check if you can get some shade on your exterior unit. Also check that the area is well ventilated.
And as always, insulation is king.
I'm renting, I'm doing the best I can with what I've got. The entire unit is inside and I have a huge tube going to a panel in my window. It works surprisingly well.
Yeah, those units have their limits. Better than nothing though.
Its all just about the relative compression ratio of the refrigerant. They make heat pump based water heaters that have external units that operate identically to air conditioners running in a heating mode.
GE currently sells a heat pump water heater on the market, I'm not sure if it uses resistive heating to supplement the heat pump
I have a portable A/C with a heat pump and it starts to struggle to heat my apartment once it gets down to 45-50F outside and it struggles to cool once it gets above 95F.
Your AC may be undersized if it doesn't perform well in hot weather, also unfortunately many heat pumps aren't optimized for extreme cold weather performance. Some are, it's definitely not a failure of heat pumps in general, but you'll only find those as permanent install units and they're usually only sold up north.
Mine is general purpose, I suppose. I'm gauging its performance based on the temp of the air coming out of the unit, I think the room I'm using in is within range of it's cooling/heating capabilities. Didn't realize GE was making water heat pumps, nice.
No joke, I think thermal networking will one day be common in homes.
It exists to some extent already in large commercial building design if only because the business sense of the added efficiency is easy to illustrate at that scale.
i want that too. lots of houses already have hot and cold water lines so it shouldn't be too hard. problem is getting appliances to adopt a standard on how to connect to this network
especially in areas with district heating, it's a massive resource we're just throwing away currently.
Yeah but now you've got to find a place to store or how to discard all the little arrows, and the orange light probably is too bright at night
This is why I don't think fridges should have their own cut out. It blocks the air flow
They literally do that already. Heat doesn’t vanish from your food. It’s moved from the inside of the box to the outside of the box.
It’s an air conditioner built into a cooler.
that's the joke. i tried to imply it in the title but i didn't realize that in english you call it 2nd law of thermodynamics rather than 2nd rule
Yea I guess that should have been obvious to me. Sorry.
It also won't put out much more heat than is already in the room. It evacuates heat from it's interior, heat that was already present in the room. If the room was colder than the inside of the fridge, it wouldn't produce any heat at all. the thermostat would cut off after the temperature equalized and it wouldn't run at all.
When it does run it produces maybe a few dozen watts of waste heat. Definitely not useful to heat a space with.
That's... Kind of what it already does though. It's just that it's not cooling the inside enough to heat very much of your house.
Why did I have to scroll to the bottom to find this? Like, where did you think the removed heat was going otherwise???
The heat is moved outside the environment
Heat is stored in the microwave.
Wow, I wooshed myself even harder than they to whomst I was replying. Good job me.
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Fridges have always been doing that for ages. I'd rather not let them dump heat indoors and instead move the heat directly outdoors to keep my air conditioner from running too hard.
Okay, but hear me out. If you reverse it, you'll have a heat pump oven that also cools your house. 🤓
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Can anyone explain why almost everyone operates a fridge inside a heated house in winter while there is "a fridge outside". Would the fridge not need less power to cool down the insides when it's already cold outside?
Am I really the only one in this world with a fridge outside?
In Paris a lot of apartments had a cellar opening on the outside.
Like this one:
Unfortunately a lot of them have been removed since it's much easier to have everything in the fridge at constant temperature and energy used to be cheap.
Fridge is expensive, only have one.
Fridge is large and heavy, not worth trouble of moving outside.
Waste heat from fridge go to heating house anyway with efficiency above typical resistive heater can manage before even consider double benefit of also cooling food.
Maybe someone will do the math.
This was originally what cellars and basements were for. Ground temperature was stable relative to outside temperatures, so it was warmer than freezing during winter but colder than outside during summer. Thus it could help preserve food.
Some old farm houses still have that around here. But it is outside below a small hill or a slope. Some call it Kartoffel Keller. And some still use it for long time storage.
Sometimes they’re called a “root cellar” in the US, as they were often used for storing root vegetables; carrots, turnips and potatoes. So common etymology there.
- Stability. Temperature outside fluctuates, food could freeze or get too warm.
- Containment. The fridge prevents critters from getting to your food.
- Location. The fridge is conveniently located in the kitchen.
In winter I do tend to keep drinks outside if the temps are alright, they cool down faster outside than in a fridge anyway.
I am using a fridge outside: It is like a small balcony first floor with a roof and cool most of the year. So #1 and #2 are checked. For #3 I have a small Japanese compressor fridge in the kitchen, only for the very important daily things like milk. The mustard stays in the outside fridge. The kitchen fridge never uses more than 30W for cooling. But only IF it runs. So that checks #3.
if you're already heating your home, then what does it hurt to have the fridge do a bit more of that?
in fact, the fridge is a tiny heat pump using your food as the reservoir. so unless your house is heat pump equipped, it is beneficial energy wise to keep the fridge inside.
if your house is heat pump equipped, then it depends on how the efficiency compare. if you put lots of hot food into your fridge then you should ~~definitely~~ probably keep it inside.
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weird kitchen, if i am cooking on the stove and i want an ingredient from the fridge, i have to walk around that wall, and we know that's something we do multiple times
I mean, it's AI generated, so it isn't going to make sense lol
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