reddig33@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s too bad that there’s no way to recapture the waste heat from an oven/range in the summertime. Like to heat our water when the bread has finished cooking. Maybe future homes could run a recirculating water pipe behind the oven you could switch on and off?
what you’re describing is an oven with a heat pump. industrial-grade ovens like this exist, but they don’t really exist in the home appliance market as the amount of energy recaptured at that scale would be negligable. it’s easiere (and cheaper) to make ovens more energy efficient in other ways.
there are a number of other home appliances (washers, dryers, and dishwashers), however, which use inverter heat pumps to recapture/recycle heat, thus increasing energy efficiency by quite a lot.
Not as fancy as heat pumps but our kettle boils one cup at a time and the boiling chamber is under the water tank. Some of the wasted energy goes to warm up the water in the tank meaning less energy is needed for the next cup. It’s probably not that efficient but it’s better than nothing.
Considering that heat rises, I’d be pretty surprised if the heating element for an electric kettle was anywhere but beneath the tank. It wouldn’t work very well otherwise, unless you used a much more expensive method of heating it all around., But even then, there would still be heating elements underneath.
A good way to improve efficiency there, would be to insulate the tank to reduce heat dissipation in the first place.
I don’t think I explained very well. It has two tanks. Storage water tank and a boiling tank which is under the storage tank. It draws water into the boiling tank which is 1 cup size. Once it’s hot it shoots the water out of the spout into the cup. Water from the storage tank fills the boiling tank.
I like your idea, but I think a tankless water heater would save more energy, and in that case you don’t need hot water just sitting around.
I don’t want to have to possibly call a plumber and electrician to fix my oven though.
l_isqof@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You’re reusing the heat to warm the house normally. Obv, you don’t always want that, so you may opt to limit using the oven in summer for example, as it is the one which runs the longest.