[ag56]

Wouldn't it be great if your fridge could integrate directly with the heat pump, rather than indirectly via the air in an enclosed space?

In summmer, our (California) home frequently has the air-conditioning running mid afternoon, at the same time as a gas boiler is heating the pool. It would seem to make sense to use the pool as a giant heatsink for the home AC... but that doesn't exist apparently, and any plumber I talk to looks at me like I'm crazy. "They are separate systems."

[energ8]

From my reading of heat pumps, mismatches in energy sources and sinks can make linking things together more complicated (aka more expensive) than is commonly available.

For the pool <-> A/C case, This Old House did a segment on linking the systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7fB8ul9dZw

Edit: chris_va has more details about why linking systems is hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23001888

[diggernet]

It does exist, and those plumbers are wrong. The biggest challenge is finding a heat exchanger (to replace the one in your AC condenser) which is designed to survive highly corrosive hot swimming pool water.

The UCDavis Western Cooling Efficiency Center [1] has done extensive research on this, sponsored by the California Energy Commission.

In a nutshell, they found that using your swimming pool as a heat sink for your air conditioner can reduce cooling energy consumption by 30% or more (not including the reduction in pool heating energy consumption). The two main caveats:

1. Many pools are too small relative to the house to be an effective heat sink without overheating the pool.

2. Increased pool temperature causes increased evaporation, resulting in increased water consumption (also a problem in CA).

They also found that adding a fountain for evaporative cooling of the pool can mitigate #1, at the expense of worsening #2.

[1]https://wcec.ucdavis.edu/

[matheusmoreira]

Would be great if everything was integrated. Computers for example generate a lot of heat. Would be great if we could easily move that heat to places where it is actually useful instead of just wasting it. Looks like this is a thing in data centers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_chaining

> It would seem to make sense to use the pool as a giant heatsink for the home AC... but that doesn't exist apparently, and any plumber I talk to looks at me like I'm crazy.

You are not crazy. IBM did that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_data_center#Reusing_wast...

> The IBM Reusing Data Center in Switzerland, where the heat warms a local swimming pool

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_furnace