Hi all,

Fact:

• Standard household heating takes all the required energy from the power supply and converts it to heat.

Alternative form of heating proposed:

• Use an air conditioner that doesn't refresh the air but keeps the air outside separate from the air inside the room.

• Install the air conditioner in reverse, as if it's trying to cool the big outdoors, and the exhaust heat goes into the room.

• As far as possible, design the system so that the heat derived from the power supply will leave the system into the room, not into the outdoors. (Is this possible?)

Theory:

• While some of the energy from the power supply will be lost as kinetic energy in the outside, most of it will be converted to heat.

• Necessarily, the heat entering the room will come partly from the power supply and partly from the outdoors.

• Because some of the required heat is coming from the outdoors, you need less energy from the power supply in order to achieve the required level of heating.

• The outdoors is big, so the extra cold out there will disperse, hopefully meaning that the extra heat loss through the room's walls will be negligible.

Conclusion:

• This form of heating should be more efficient in terms of benefit per unit of power supply consumed.

Someone at work who's studied engineering didn't seem to agree with me. He was talking about some of the energy being lost as torque (presumably that means kinetic energy in the air outside), some being lost as chemical energy (what?), and all sorts of other losses I couldn't get him to enumerate. He's a very smart guy, but I don't think he's great at explaining what he means. In retrospect, I wonder if he was challenging conservation of energy. He gave me an example of compressing a spring (potential energy) and then dissolving it in acid, and asked me where that energy went. At the time, I couldn't understand what point he was trying to make. He also kept accidentally talking about "creating energy" and such, when he should have been talking about "converting energy".

So I'm curious as to what you guys think. Discuss.

It doesn't fail. The proposed new system takes some of its heat from the outdoors, so I'm hoping it is actually MORE than 100% efficient (if you measure 'heat entering room' against 'power supply consumed').

I'd say that a air-sourced heat pump is more efficient yes. But simply reversing an AC would probably not work very well.

AFAIK my Air-conditioner does this, I am pretty sure that's exactly what a reverse cycle AC does. (I have a kelvinator)