I've been thinking about what it would look like to convert my GE fridge into a minisplit (i.e., move the compressor, condensing coil & fan outside).
You can buy R600a on Amazon right now. One $60 can will charge the system ~5 times.
You can buy R600a on Amazon right now. One $60 can will charge the system ~5 times.
Cars already have heat scavenging that can move heat from where it's being created through losses to places where it's valuable, like the cabin or battery pre-heating. Especially in cold climates it feels like homes should be next.
In cars that have unified heat management the refrigerant cycle is handled as a separate element, with a manifold controlling individual coolant loops to each component. I'm picturing something similar for the home, with a coolant moving heat to and from each appliance using standardized communication to the manifold. There would probably need to be heat buffer tanks, but air to water heat pump systems for radiant heat already need this anyway.
For HP clothes dryers, there's no efficiency to steal from somewhere else, because they use both the hot and cold coils - similar to (the same, really) dehumidifiers.
The tradeoff would also be running high-pressure refrigerant lines everywhere. That would require EPA certification (in the US, anyway) to connect/disconnect an appliance, and it would probably be less reliable. These sealed-system units are generally pretty reliable, because the refrigerant is installed at the factory under ideal conditions, and there's no connections that are made later that may be done poorly.
I even ran some naive numbers on the amount of water that would condense in expected conditions, concluding it could be handy but I’d probably still need to source more water.
There were also centralised systems for apartments where one condensing unit supplied many evaporators in the refrigerator in each suite.
Here's a video from someone who managed to salvage some of the components of such a system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1tXIYl20jA