2
"Bah, I myself have one of these disposable fridges," said the repairman. "And it also worked four years and that's it. Like by a clockwork. So do you know what I did?"
"No, I don't know what you did," said the editor with a hint of irony in his voice.
"Well... First I determined if the leak was on the high or the low side... Thank god, at least this is still possible to do in the sense of repair. It happened to be on the high one..."
Noticing not understanding in the editor's eyes, the repairman explained:
"I mean, on the high pressure side, in the condenser. The standard leakage into the plastic foam. So I took a length of copper pipe and soldered it here and here," the repairman got up from his chair and pointed. "In other words I made a new condenser. And then I took a forty-liter plastic barrel like one used for pickling cucumbers and put it right on the refrigerator (he made gesture with both hands). Then I inserted (smooth movement) part of that pipe there inside. And poured water. As a result, I have now plenty of free hot water in the kitchen."
"So simple?"
"Yep."
"Is it hot?"
"Forty five degrees Celsius, average."
"Is it hot?"
"Hot enough to wash dishes or hands. Have you ever measured the temperature of the hot water you habitually use? But the temperature isn't the point, speaking broadly. Everything depends on what coolant is used. There are coolants that can heat the water to nearly boiling state. Isobutane of all the popular coolants gives the lowest temperature of the condenser and, consequently, of the water. And it is still hot enough. And if it isn't enough, you can get the remaining degrees from a common resistive heater integrated in the same water tank or in the flow heater after it. It wouldn't make the enterprise any less economically viable. The point is I don't plug in the kitchen boiler anymore and don't have to pay the respective money for electricity. If I had made this installation before, I wouldn't have bought the boiler at all. What effect can be more direct and obvious? Now imagine: what if all the refrigerators in the world were made like that? Voila, the global warming problem is solved."
The repairman finished gesticulating and sank back on his chair with a smug expression on his face.
The editor smiled.
"At my job I often have to deal with fantastic stories, but... (he nodded towards the bottle with the remnants of mineral water) how much heat can be in this to wash plates and incidentally stop the global warming?"
"A very common misconception," the repairman raised his finger instructively. "Granted, in the food as such there is little heat. But even if the refrigerator is actively used, that is, if you often put warm things in and take cold things out, not more than five percent of electricity consumed by your fridge is spent on cooling food. How do you like this efficiency?"
"Well, so it can't be any better. Or what do you mean?"
"I mean that if you, for example, go to bed at night and come into the kitchen in the morning... Or even better: if you go for a week's trip and then return home, you will hear that your refrigerator keeps turning on and off, on and off, the same way as always. But everything you put in it got cold a week ago, right? Why does it work, then? What is it cooling? Well, the air around it. And simultaneously it is warming this same air by this very grate, right here, in the immediate vicinity. Can this be called a rational of reasonable use of electricity? It's like ladling water with a sieve. Think now that a quarter of all electricity produced in the world is used for refrigerating and air conditioning. What if we utilize all this heat and stop spending clean and nice electricity for heating water or just the air outside the window, as it is the case with air conditioners making global warming in the most immediate way? But even that is not the gist yet. The most piquant detail is that for every unit of electric power the fridge takes from the outlet it can produce three to four times more heat than it is done by the plain resistive element used in common boilers. That's where the main potential is hidden."
"Hmm... The potential is one thing, the realization is another," said the seemingly bored editor.
"To shorten the argumentation regarding the technological feasibility and the economic aspect..."
"Excuse my interruption. Have you always repaired refrigerators?"
"In these hard times many people having lost their professions resort to crafts," the repairman answered evasively. "So, in order not to argue whether it is possible and profitable I can only say that the idea is realized already in a dozen million heat pumps sold every year worldwide exactly for the purpose of heating water by air. The refrigerator is not less a heat pump as any thermal machine theoretically and practically known well before electricity. The only difference is that in heat pumps called heat pumps they strive to provide the supply of environmental heat to the evaporators, and in heat pumps called refrigerators they strive to prevent this, but as we see in the instance of the overnight fridge not too successfully. And another big difference: there are millions of heat pumps, but billions of refrigerators. Not to mention the trifle fact that the heat pump still needs to be bought, and the money for the refrigerator has been paid already."
"How do you know there are billions of them?"
"Looked up the statistics. Not that you can get the direct answer to this question, but it is possible to obtain a commercial information on the number of units sold in a certain country in a certain year. So if you divide the population of this country by this number multiplied by the expectant longevity of the unit, and make a correlation for the average number of family members in some most populated and poorest counties, you can come to the conclusion that there is one household refrigerator for every three people in the world. On the other hand, I could easily spare myself those investigations and calculations and come to that same figure in the intuitive way. Really, how many people can keep their food in the same refrigerator? That's it. And if there are eight billion people on Earth, as they say, then there are two point seven billion household refrigerators working every single day on the planet. And if we throw in all the world's home air conditioners... Wow."
"What exactly are we talking about? How much energy can be taken from one refrigerator?"
"It's simple. See this sticker? The energy efficiency class of your refrigerator is quite high, 'A' plus. The manufacturer - and let me mention that manufacturers wouldn't exaggerate this figure - writes here that it consumes 333 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. We multiply this figure by at least three, and see that a thousand kilowatt-hours of thermal energy can be approximately obtained from one refrigerator each year. If we multiply it by four, it's one thousand three hundred. Now remember that it is 365 days in a year and that one fridge is used by three persons. So it is quite realistic to say that every human on the planet can get one kilowatt-hour of free or saved electricity every day. Impressive? That's a game changer, man!"
"But not everyone heats water with electricity," objected the editor. "At my house, for instance, hot water just flows from a tap. How can I save electricity and reduce my bills on heating water, if I don't use electricity for that purpose at all?"
"Still your hot water is not for free, is it? That is, it's not at the price of a cold water, right? Then maybe there is still sense to use heat from you fridge? In the final count, your not turning on your hot water tap is the same as my not switching on my electric boiler. But it's not just about money, far from it. For you to have hot water in your plumbing there must be burned gas or coal. If we even imagine that it can be done with a hundred percent efficiency, you'd have to add burning fuel for the extraction and delivery the fuel to your house or the communal boiler room, add heat losses on the way to your apartment, and all this means emissions into the atmosphere. But if you heat water with your refrigerator - no pun intended - then there are no new or additional emissions, pollutions and expenses."
"But your installation also costs something?"
"Well, let's calculate. With your permission I won't include the cost of the copper pipe. Why should I if I have already bought it and it is already there in my fridge. So what remains? A plastic barrel, five meters of plastic pipe? Personally I don't have to pay for the barrel too, as I have bought the boiler already and the only thing I lack in that boiler is a piece of metal tube going through the water inside there. But even if I had to buy all that, then with the current price for electricity it will pay off in a single month, two at the most. After that you will save money for decades. What other kind of your so called sustainable energy can boast of such cost efficiency?"
"Even so, it is a narrow-minded approach", opined the editor. "You said yourself that refrigerators are probably the most used and sold household appliance in the world. So how can you leave out the point of view of the consumer? And not only his or her, but of the producer as well, who wants to satisfy the buyer the best possible and better than the rival manufacturer way? Fridge is fridge. It does exactly what I bought it for. Or I want, for example, to buy it as a gift and not as a problem for somebody. Not to mention that I want it compact and allowing me to easily transport and move it and put it here, there and everywhere without dragging a barrel of water together with it."
The repairman flared up, started to blush and even stammer a little: "Then... then why shedding crocodile tears about global warming and so on? If all the ecological future of the planet together with all its species including humans is nothing in comparison with a consumer's hypothetical convenience to move the fridge around the kitchen. What is it, a chair, anyway? For God's sake!"
"But your plastic barrel for pickling cucumbers atop the fridge - it's ridiculous, don't you understand it?" said the editor, who flared up a little in his turn. "What? Am I supposed to fill it with a bucket and took the water with a cup?"
"No need for that. Naturally, I made everything automatic, which isn't such a big problem at all. For some while I contemplated filling the barrel with cold water the same way as it is done in toilet tanks with buoying valve and draining hot water through a hose with a buoy too, but then I stumble upon a better idea. You see, after my experiment proved a brilliant success, it was clear that I needed a much bigger tank, and to put it on the fridge wouldn't have been the best thing, if possible at all. So this time I bought 80-liter barrel and mounted everything into its lid (the repairman started gesticulating again), namely inlet and outlet of the pipe with coolant, which in this case, of course, is not a coolant but a heater, and inlet and outlet of water pipes. And screwed it tightly on the barrel.
"But how did you screw the lid with those pipes in it connected to fridge and sink or whatever it is?" asked the editor wily.
"You have a good spatial imagination," the repairman made a compliment to his client.
"Thanks, but It's not me. It is your explaining everything so well with your hands... So?"
"Actually, I screwed the barrel into the lid, when it was empty, of course," laughed the repairman.
"Oh, I see. And...
"And I have an additional tube in the lid especially for drainage."
"So where did you put the barrel, if not on the fridge?"
"On the floor. When I turn on the hot faucet, I actually turn on cold water filling the barrel at its bottom, and the cold water displaces hot water out of the upper part of the barrel, through the pipe going to the sink. The coolant, or course, heats water in the opposite direction, from the top to the bottom. That way hot water and cold water are two distinct and not mixing layers. Only their relative thicknesses are changing. And I didn't thermo-insulate the barrel's bottom. Together with the open return length of the coolant pipe it gives me full guarantee against coolant overheating. So due to all these simple tricks I can put the barrel in any suitable place not needing to look for a high place. It works under very slight water pressure, not more than twentieth part of that in the standard plumbing, but quite enough for any shower and at the same time it is so negligent that it doesn't demand strong walls of the tank or very good sealing. Besides, it is additionally safe, because even this slight excess pressure is created only while you actually use the water; it doesn't remain in the barrel. I don't know why they don't use this scheme in standard electric boilers. Too simple? Too cheap?"
The repairman shrugged his shoulders and looked at the manometer.
"So, the maximum that can be obtained from one fridge is four kilowatt-hours a day?" the editor asked. "Let me imagine... What is the power of this kettle?
The repairman went to the table where the teapot stood, picked it up and looked at its bottom.
"Two kilowatts."
"So it is as much as a two-kilowatt kettle can heat in two hours..." said the editor, looking at something on the ceiling.
"And it wouldn't be boiling water, but about fifty degrees," the repairman help the editor's imagination.
"Yes, it's not that little," said the editor. "But not that much either. For one person it would be probably enough if, say, it's a shower, not a bath. But for a family of three, if they, as you say, have one refrigerator between themselves, it's unlikely.
"Here I take you at your word," the repairman raised his finger again. "After all, until now we were talking about free hot water. Or free heating water, to be exact. But the compressor usually works only about twenty minutes out of an hour. Nothing prevents us, if necessary, make it work for forty minutes, or even all sixty. In the common fridge that depends on the flow of heat to the evaporator, either by warm food we want to cool or freeze, or just by the quality of thermal insulation of the fridge box. So this can be regulated quite simply, for instance, by something like a window that opens part of the insulation in the wall or in the door of the refrigerator, or opening some vent there, or maybe by just a half-open door. And then in addition to free water for one family member, there will be two same amounts for the other two. Not for free this time, but heated with the efficiency of a heat pump, that is, three or four times cheaper than in case it were heated by an electric boiler. Well, in extreme cases, as I said, you can additionally heat the water with a conventional heater, like in this kettle. And we should not be afraid of wasting the compressor resource: as we found out before, this is one of the most reliable parts of the refrigerator. So, the benefit is obvious and the environmental effect too, even for that not entirely free heating. Quite possibly, in the big picture this is even better than heating water in boiler rooms. Here I need to think about it... Yes, it's no worse than the efficiency of thermal power plants!.. Listen, it's a cool thing. Lossless energy transfer through the air, just like Tesla's great secret discovery. Transmission through the air in the form of the air itself," the repairman laughed. "That is, at the power plant we heat the air, and here we cool it."
"Wait, I remembered..." the editor smiled, "What did you say? To leave the refrigerator open? My wife wouldn't like it. She scolds me when I choose something too long in the open fridge. And now I'd have something to tell her back. There is definitely something in your idea."
"Of course. Appreciate the indirect benefits. Psychological as well as economical. After all, the refrigerators themselves could be made cheaper. If there are no losses, if all of them turn into gain, then the walls of the refrigerator can be made thinner, and the compressor can be used the simplest one. The rubber sealing on the door is not tight enough? - don't care. To that extent don't care that... you know what would be the simplest and most convenient way to utilize the heat not only from the condenser, but from the compressor's casing, and at the same time to give it good working conditions? Paradoxically, it would be to put the compressor inside the fridge. Not outside, like it is here, but inside. Next to the food we want to cool! And it turns out that in terms of energy the class of any shoddy refrigerator will be the same, the highest. And this itself is a contribution to the environment."
"By the way, what can be the contribution to the environment?" asked the editor.
"If we take into account the efficiency and the share of thermal power plants, as well as shares of different sources of heating, it turns out that one such heat exchanger allows not to extract and burn an equivalent of one kilogram of coal a day, give or take. Over a year this would accumulate a rather large heap, roughly a thousand pounds, or between three and four hundred kilos. At present all the refrigerators in the world make burn - but in the nearest future can save - about seven to eight hundred million tons a year. That means two and a half billion tons of carbon dioxide, which can be removed from the atmospheric balance every year, one ton per refrigerator. And this, according to various estimations, constitutes ten to fifteen percent of everything that humanity burns in every form, starting from barbeque fires to turbojet engines. And we are speaking just about home refrigerators, not even home air conditioners, the heat of which can be as easily harvested by the same water barrel. Should I mention industrial cold, commercial cold? I think not. But the picture there is as deplorable, far from painted in green. All told, humanity has produced and accumulated a huge potential of clean and ready to be used energy, but stubbornly turns a blind eye to it. And if this madness had not continued all our lives, then no problems with the environment would have arisen at all. At least not in the present catastrophic proportions. Home refrigerators alone can save more electricity than is generated by all the nuclear power plants in the world, and perhaps we can throw in all the windmills and solar panels as well. Just this wild number of refrigerators and air conditioners allows us to talk about them as a global undiscovered source of energy. Like new oil or something..."
"Well, that's great," said the editor. "You almost convinced me. But may I still be allowed to have a fridge without a water barrel? Judge for yourself, what would I do with it here? I don't take a bath in the office."
"No problem. In fact, fridge and heat exchanger, they even have to be made separate units, if only for the reason of so different longevity of each device. Remember we talked about strength equality?"
The editor chuckled: "And I will need to call a man like you every time I need to connect or disconnect them? You seem providing work for yourself for the years to come, no?"
"But people do that already," retorted the repairman, "to connect and disconnect inner and outer blocks of air conditioners, don't they? And nobody makes a fuss about that. Neither it poses an unsurmountable technical problem, as you can see. By the by, those costly and ungainly outer blocks, we can get rid of them altogether and just don't buy them along with the costly service of mounting and maintaining them outside the building. If you are not interested in heating by the conditioner in winter time, that is. Yes, I know it is possible, but it isn't a reason not to utilize the heat in its cooling mode, for which it was bought in the first place. With fridges all these works would be even simpler, because both units remains inside the house, first, and, second, there would be actually no need to connect coolant pipes at all. The transmission of the heat from fridge to boiler can be made by a dry contact, the same way it is done in cooling computer processors. So, in the final count I seem cutting myself from the work, not ensuring it.
"The only thing really needed is for the manufacturers of home refrigerators to change the design of their condensers so they could be used in aggregation with home electric boilers. And for the manufacturers of electric boilers - who are usually the same companies - to change the design of those boilers so that they could receive the heat from those condensers. Both changes would cost next to nothing and I would made it mandatory by the international law. Why not? They did make it when forbidding coolants harmful for the ozone layer and nobody is worse for it, even if some manufacturers were at first. As for you... your right to buy a fridge without heat utilization remains sacred. The question is who violated your and my right to buy a fridge with the heat utilization. And made it so that we even can't guess that them are violated. You can say that there is no consumer demand for such product, but how on earth can this demand appear, if no one offers such product at all? Do you think it's accidental?"
"And you think it's a conspiracy?"
The repairman winced.
"I think that since there is no supply from above, then demand could be created from below. By such home-made modifications and by showing the result."
"Well, do that. If everything is so nice and profitable, make these installations for your customers. You are in a perfect position for that. They need repairs, take advantage of the moment. Did you offer?
"I did."
"And?"
"They say 'Do as it was'."
"So you see, nobody wants your barrel."
"I see nothing of the kind. I only see that if I was called to repair a fridge with the barrel, the client would have also asked me to do as it was."
Silence fell. The editor pondered.
"I am still sure you're missing something," he said at last. "I just hadn't much time to think what it is. However, there is no need to look for complex explanations if there are simple ones. The Occam's razor, you know? Most likely, if appliance manufacturers make unreliable things, it is not because they have conspired to work for the landfill, but because they are subject to the objective laws of competition, which force them to cut expenses and produce cheaper goods and change models faster in the run for the buyer's money..."
"How do you explain plastic bearings?"
"The same. And if no one makes refrigerators heating water, then there is no point in this. You just made a mistake somewhere. I even seem to know where. Look: the refrigerator stands in some room, in the kitchen. But it's a closed system. If it does not heat the air, then where from will it get heat for water? And if it warms the air, then there will be no heat left for the water. That is, you have invented a perpetual motion machine supposed to take the excess energy from nowhere."
The editor's face was shining with pleasure.
"Well, if your kitchen is put in a dewar vessel, you are absolutely right," retorted the repairman. "But in reality you would only cool a little the air flowing out anyway through the ventilation or the window. Besides, you are going to use the hot water inside your house, inside the same dewar, if you want, so in fact it isn't that easy to get rid of this heat. The sewage makes a tiniest fraction in the heat balance of the building. The biggest are walls, windows, doors, roofs - all them are even worse from the point of heat leakage outside or inside than the walls of a refrigerator that keeps working whether you open it or not. So much for 'the closed system'. And so much for the 'energy efficiency', by the way. Because when they advertise and nudge you to pay additional money for a fabulously efficient fridge with a smart inverter compressor and electronic drive, those clowns won't tell you that it's a complete bullshit. All the energy efficiency of the fridge in its current design depends exclusively on the thickness of the fridge's walls. And the price of this efficiency is the price of plastic foam. How come that no science and technology improvements in such technologically charged product mean a dime in comparison to five millimeter layer of plastic? Don't you smell something fishy in the whole situation? And you didn't see yet the regulations by which they calculate the energy efficiency index for household refrigerators..."
"Wait a minute," said the editor. "I am not ready to concede you this point. Since you are still changing the heat balance of the house with your... idea. It's okay with the sewage, but you are cutting out a part of incoming heat in the form of hot water or electricity for its heating."
"So much the better. Isn't it our aim to reduce energy - especially electric energy - consumption? You don't protest against LED lamps instead of good old incandescent ones, do you? But they also change the heat balance of the house. If you are so worried about heat balance, let me point out that the kitchen is a room least needing heating, with all those stoves, and the most needing ventilation. Especially in tropical countries, which hold the majority of the world's population and hence refrigerators. No, the real question is: are we letting the energy moving in a short and useless circle, or will we at last come to our senses and divert it to make something useful on its way. Sometimes I wish there were magic glasses, through which people could see things the way I see them. Like this standard fridge here, I see it as someone's stupid joke, one of those caricatures of senseless machines."
"Don't offend my fridge" sad the editor jokingly.
"I appreciate your attitude. Really, I don't know why we are talking about closed system at all in this sultry weather. I understood already that I won't sell you my heat exchanger, but I think even you wouldn't refuse to cool this room by three or four kilowatt-hours a day. It's strange that you haven't got an air conditioner here."
"They dry the air. It's harmful."
"Aaa... Good thing as well that you haven't it. They are crying about global warming, but look at those buildings of various kinds dotted with air conditioner's blocks, each one gorging heat into already overheated atmosphere. In every such block I see the evidence of ecological crime..."
"Through your magic glasses?" inserted the editor.
"...And at the same time they heat the atmosphere once again by burning coal and other fuel and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere just to heat water in the same buildings, from which they just threw out the heat away. Instead of just take what is going into their hands. Can you understand anything? Let's suppose that in reality - as it follows from their deeds - they want to make that global warming, but why then to cry about it? Why not doing it silently?"
"Maybe they lie about global warming?" proposed the editor.
"Meaning it isn't real? I don't think so... Too many evidence. And isn't it obvious? If we warm the atmosphere, it gets warmer. But even if the global warming is bullshit, that doesn't explain the sheer stupidity of this management."
"What is stupidity to one, the same is strict logic to another," said the editor mockingly.