On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 11:54 AM, Bruce  Johnson
<xxxxxx@pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:
>
> On Jun 13, 2017, at 9:08 PM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey All,
>
> My retirement dream/plan consists of building a small apartment building
> using Insulated Concrete Form (ICF) construction. I've been considering
> several different ways to make this building as self-sustaining as possible,
> including installation of a biogas plant (the idea of putting a veritable
> mountain of poop to useful work sounds awesome!). As part of this
> self-sustaining quest, I ran across the no-moving-parts (and thus nothing
> much to break down) refrigerator patented by Einstein and Szilard. Since it
> would be possible to incorporate the required piping into the cast concrete
> (and well-insulated) walls of my planned building fairly easily, it occurs
> to me that equipping each apartment with such a device - or even cooling the
> entire building this way - might be doable.
>
> What concerns me is that even if I can figure out a good design, the
> original patented design is supposed to "yield only 5% efficiency." Is that
> too low to be functional? How does it compare to a standard refrigerator [or
> air-conditioning system]?
>
>
> As Tim said, it’s far too low to be cost effective. That said, if you’re
> looking at putting piping of some sort into the concrete, consider a
> geothermal heat pump system.
>
> <https://energy.gov/energysaver/geothermal-heat-pumps>
>
> (Capture those pages quickly before the DOE replaces every article on their
> website with ‘drill baby drill burn more coal’. )
>
>

Next door neighbor's a geologist, had a talk with him a few months ago
about geothermal.
The end result from a Floridian perspective of "what I'd do if
building a house from scratch with no rules" would be to have a small
spring or artesian well uphill from where the house is built, and run
the year round 72 degree water through pipes in the walls to work as a
heat exchanger, then let the outflow go to the garden.
Minor issue with condensation on the walls part of the year... well,
it being Florida, a big part of the year... but I suspect that having
a few bare-metal-pipe areas to act as controlled condensation points
would handle a lot of that.

If politer junctions were cheaper, it'd almost be worth it to paint
the roof black, then a layer of junction, then the 72 degree water
piping, then the interior ceiling. The water would get both the heat
from outside and the heat from inside, and you'd get a trickle of
electric too. If the water's gravity fed, then the only moving parts
would be shutoff or bypass valves that would only get used in
emergencies...