Reuse of air from heatpumps?

I was doing some work outside this morning when I realized that a tremendous amount of energy is just going to waste from my heat pumps. The fans on them seem to blow about 85% of the time during the summer and I started wondering about potential uses for the massive amount of air being blown through them as well as the additional heat.

Has anyone thought of creative uses for these before? I thought perhaps about rerouting them to our sealed attic to keep the temperature down during the summer up there. I am sure there could be many other potentially beneficial uses for these as well vs just blowing into void and wasting all energy.

You could blow it through a rock bed or pre-heat water. But your money is better spent avoiding running it in the first place.

What would be the use of the rock bed? Water is a good idea.

Of course it would be nice to eliminate, but I have a lot of electronic equipment that must have active cooling from AC and so that's unfortunately not an option.

Rock bed is just a storage medium. But you would need to have a reason to use the heat before it dissipated to the environment. Maybe a big sauna. Maybe aquaponics.

What you want to do works well if you need heat somewhere at the same time you need cooling. Dairies and grocery stores use the spare heat from the coolers to heat people space.

It is hard to think of something at a personal level that needs that heat in the summer. Unless you make a lot of yogurt or other ferments at those temps.

Want to raise some tilapia?? They hate the cold.

Yeah, preheat your domestic hot water would be another good use.

Stabilize a greenhouse at a nice warm temperature to grow figs?


What temperature is the air coming off the condenser?




troy

The high volume air flow thru the heat pump condenser and evaporator is just the normal way those units work...reduce the air flow characteristics and your unit by putting it in a shed, or plumbing ductwork to it...could become less efficient at cooling the house. I would rather improve ventilating the attic with turbines, additional soffet vents, or perhaps a separate exhaust fan for the attic only, than sending/plumbing cold air conditioning to cool the attic.

You might try dehydrating food, roots, leaves, perhaps even firewood using the excessive air flow from the outdoor unit...just don't degrade the air flow thru the heat pump unit. For example: if your firewood was air stacked (for high air flow) and some sort of pole barn were surrounding the firewood (to keep the rain off of it & somewhat direct the excess heat pump air thru the firewood), you might be able to air dry said firewood even during the rainy season...could become a potential fire hazard if located closer than 50' to the house.

Same example for food, roots, leaves, various wire racks within a shed (heat pump within the shed) and blow all the moisture off of those items, especially on rainy days it should work better than normal air drying. You would just have to be careful about the actual temperature of food...generally 110F is about the max. for drying roots & bark, higher temps will discolor the product. Sometimes when I collect fresh produce, the normal weather (excessive rain like this year) is just too damp to air dry for 3-5 days...if I had a heat pump, I could see how that could dry the produce much faster, maybe before it rains again.

This is just a funny suggestion...I've never tried it.

james beam

http://www.hotspotenergy.com/residential-heat-recovery-water-heaters/

They already exist.

I was thinking the same thing,have you gotten any ideas on how to reuse that wasted air. From anyone.