I am hearing about this as a low carbon method to heat or cool buildings but I can’t find a good article or video to see how it works. The closest I can figure is like a fridge in reverse… the pump or refrigerant gets hot and you use that heat. Cold climate systems supposedly extract heat down to -25c. How?
In: Physics
Put water in a freezer and it will freeze. Freezing water requires removing quite a lot of heat from the water.
Where’d the heat go? It’s clearly not in the freezer, because it’s cold in there. Heat cannot ever disappear due to the laws of thermodynamics. This means it must have ended up in the room the freezer is in.
Now take these blocks of ice you just stole a lot of heat from and put them outdoors so that they melt. Now put that water in the freezer again and presto, you’re heatpump heating your house by taking heat from outside.
This example of course only works if the temperature outside is above the melting point of ice, so 0°c.
A heat pump is going to use something better suited for the job, maybe something that melts at -25°c? And instead of using the liquid-solid phase transition it’ll use the gaseous-liquid transition, mostly because transporting a liquid and a gas can both be easily done in tubes, while a solid complicates things quite a bit.
Latest Answers