Amazon’s new campus will recycle heat from servers and repurpose it to warm its new buildings, but smaller developments of recycling wasted heat energy in the home are on the near horizon, too.
Innovation and design studio Space10 in Copenhagen is working with IKEA to develop ideas to harness wasted energy in the home. In the video, watch two students from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction, Sergey Komardenkov and Vihanga Gore, explain their work — a table that harnesses the power of excess heat to power devices.
They call it “Heat Harvest,” and it can turn the average table into a charging station.
“We don’t think much about the excess heat our homes produce, even though there is so much of it,” the Space10 post about the Heat Harvest project states.
“Everything from our cookware and tea pots to computers and game consoles can get very hot to the touch, but we just let the heat dissipate into the air. This is a terrible waste, because the heat is actually energy that can be reused in our homes, bringing down our energy bills along with our impact on the planet.”
Heat Harvest uses thermoelectricity to capture heat and convert it into electricity, a process that is much more efficient thanks to recent developments in nanotechnology.
The project was part of a two-week challenge for many students at Space10’s lab. Heat Harvest is only one of six ideas to emerge. Learn more about Space10, a “future-living lab,” here.
