An experimental study of waste heat recovery from a residential refrigerator

This paper describes the design, construction, and testing of an integrated heat recovery system which has been designed both to enhance the performance of a residential refrigerator and simultaneously to provide preheated water for an electric hot water heater. A commercial, indirect-heated hot water tank was retrofitted with suitable tubing to permit it to serve as a water cooled condenser for a residential refrigerator. This condenser operates in parallel with the air-cooled condenser tubing of the refrigerator so that either one or the other is active when the refrigerator is running. The refrigerator was housed in a controlled-environment chamber, and it was instrumented so that its performance could be monitored carefully in conjunction with the water pre-heating system. The system has been tested under a variety of hot water usage protocols and the resulting data set has provided significant insight into issues associated with commercial implementation of the concept