Best part: every fridge in every house already does this. You just collect the money!
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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The pic suggests adding a fan but that will actually cause less heat output, since the fridge will be more efficient at maintaining inside temperature with heat removed faster from the condenser. The difference is slight though, since the refrigeration system's waste heat (equal to its power consumption) is a small part of what exits the condenser, the rest is compensating the heat that seeps into the fridge by imperfect insulation (and does not heat your home anyway) plus a little bit for cooling recently-inserted warm things.
My house has hydronic heated wood floors. Warm water from the heater unit circulates through pipes under the floor, heating the room from the ground up. It rules. It's quiet, even, and amazing in winter.
I have a better idea
One system that is both an Air conditioning system that uses waste heat to heat water. And uses waste "cold" from heating water to cool house.
I can get you half way there with a heat pump water heater.
Thats the point, they both use the inverter based heat pumps, they even use the same refrigerant. By no-one builds one that shares the same unit, so they both dump waste temperature differential into the outside air.
i’ve always been frustrated by this… i want a heat pump system where you have high and low pressure refrigerant pipes like regular water pipes and have AC, fridge, hot water, and drier all just use the same big compressor outside… drying clothes in the summer with the AC running would be basically free (if you don’t have anywhere outside to hang them), using the fridge in the winter similar
having compressors for all these systems when they’re rarely all used together seems wasteful (plus, 1 big system is often far cheaper - not to mention more efficient - than 4 or 5 small systems)
A lot of newer water heaters use essentially an air conditioner type system to heat the water and blow cold/cool air away from it. Obviously only useful if you have your water heater in an area that can make use of said a/c, but I did and it was glorious.
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Yeah but now you've got to find a place to store or how to discard all the little arrows, and the orange light probably is too bright at night
When I was a kid, our family dog would drag his blanket to our fridge and spend the night bundled up in front of it (where the exhaust heat was)
startup idea: fridge with warm little nook for dog
No joke, I think thermal networking will one day be common in homes.
It exists to some extent already in large commercial building design if only because the business sense of the added efficiency is easy to illustrate at that scale.
i want that too. lots of houses already have hot and cold water lines so it shouldn't be too hard. problem is getting appliances to adopt a standard on how to connect to this network
especially in areas with district heating, it's a massive resource we're just throwing away currently.
They literally do that already. Heat doesn’t vanish from your food. It’s moved from the inside of the box to the outside of the box.
It’s an air conditioner built into a cooler.
that's the joke. i tried to imply it in the title but i didn't realize that in english you call it 2nd law of thermodynamics rather than 2nd rule
Yea I guess that should have been obvious to me. Sorry.
It also won't put out much more heat than is already in the room. It evacuates heat from it's interior, heat that was already present in the room. If the room was colder than the inside of the fridge, it wouldn't produce any heat at all. the thermostat would cut off after the temperature equalized and it wouldn't run at all.
When it does run it produces maybe a few dozen watts of waste heat. Definitely not useful to heat a space with.
This is why I don't think fridges should have their own cut out. It blocks the air flow
That's... Kind of what it already does though. It's just that it's not cooling the inside enough to heat very much of your house.
Why did I have to scroll to the bottom to find this? Like, where did you think the removed heat was going otherwise???
The heat is moved outside the environment
The heat also came from that environment in the first place. So a fridge doesn't actually heat up a house (ignoring the negligible losses)
Heat is stored in the microwave.
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Fridges have always been doing that for ages. I'd rather not let them dump heat indoors and instead move the heat directly outdoors to keep my air conditioner from running too hard.
Okay, but hear me out. If you reverse it, you'll have a heat pump oven that also cools your house. 🤓
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Can anyone explain why almost everyone operates a fridge inside a heated house in winter while there is "a fridge outside". Would the fridge not need less power to cool down the insides when it's already cold outside?
Am I really the only one in this world with a fridge outside?
I see plenty of secondary fridges outside. Rust is an issue though.
You can get fridges made for outdoor use, but I guess those are more for people who are willing to spend the extra money on having an outdoor kitchen.
This was originally what cellars and basements were for. Ground temperature was stable relative to outside temperatures, so it was warmer than freezing during winter but colder than outside during summer. Thus it could help preserve food.
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- Stability. Temperature outside fluctuates, food could freeze or get too warm.
- Containment. The fridge prevents critters from getting to your food.
- Location. The fridge is conveniently located in the kitchen.
In winter I do tend to keep drinks outside if the temps are alright, they cool down faster outside than in a fridge anyway.
I am using a fridge outside: It is like a small balcony first floor with a roof and cool most of the year. So #1 and #2 are checked. For #3 I have a small Japanese compressor fridge in the kitchen, only for the very important daily things like milk. The mustard stays in the outside fridge. The kitchen fridge never uses more than 30W for cooling. But only IF it runs. So that checks #3.
Fridge is expensive, only have one.
Fridge is large and heavy, not worth trouble of moving outside.
Waste heat from fridge go to heating house anyway with efficiency above typical resistive heater can manage before even consider double benefit of also cooling food.
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In Paris a lot of apartments had a cellar opening on the outside.
Like this one:
Unfortunately a lot of them have been removed since it's much easier to have everything in the fridge at constant temperature and energy used to be cheap.
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