Big Heat Pumps Are Doing Big Things

The heat pump has become a common fixture in many parts of modern life. We now have reverse-cycle air conditioning, heat pump hot water systems, and even heat pump dryers. These home appliances have all been marketed as upgrades over simpler technologies from the past, and offer improved efficiency and performance for a somewhat-higher purchase price.

Heat pumps aren’t just for the home, though. They’re becoming an increasingly important part of major public works projects, as utility providers try to do ever more with ever less energy in an attempt to save the planet. These days, heat pumps are getting bigger, and will be doing ever grander things in years to come.

Magical Efficiency

The heat pump is a particularly attractive tool because it has a near-mystical property that virtually no other machine does. It is capable of delivering more heat energy than the amount of electricity fed into it, appearing to effectively have an efficiency greater than unity. We’re told that thermodynamic laws mean that we can never get more energy out than we put in. If you put 1 kW of electrical energy into a resistive heating element, which is near 100% efficient, you should get almost 1 kW of heat out of it, but never a hair more than that. But with a heat pump, you could get 1.5 kW, or even 2 kW for your humble 1 kW input. The trick is that the heat pump is not actually a magical device that can multiply energy out of nothing. Instead, the heat pump’s trick is that it’s not turning your 1 kW input into heat energy. It’s using 1 kW of energy to move heat from one place to another. If you’re running a heat pump-based HVAC system to cool your home, for example, it might use 2 kW of electricity to pump 3 to 4 kW of heat from your lounge room and dissipate it outdoors. Since the outdoors doesn’t change much in temperature when you pump out the heat from your home, you can keep doing this pretty much all day. You can even reverse the flow if your heat pump system allows it, instead pumping heat from the outdoors into your home. This works well until temperatures get so low that there isn’t enough heat left in the outdoors to appreciably warm your house up.
A diagram of a heat pump system. Heat is pumped from the outdoors (B) to the indoors (A), with insulation (I) in between. Note the condensor coils (1), the expansion valve (2), the evaporator coils (3), and the compressor (4). Credit: Ilmari Karonen, GFDL
The heat pump achieves the feat of making heat go where we want it to go via the use of refrigerant. Specifically, refrigerant enters the compressor as a low pressure and low temperature vapor. It exits as a gas at high temperature and high pressure, and is then passed through a series of condenser coils. As it passes through, it releases heat to the surrounding environment and reduces in temperature, condensing into a liquid. From there, the liquid, still under high pressure, passes through an expansion valve, which rapidly lowers the pressure and drops the temperature further. The liquid is now cold, and passes through an evaporator coil where it picks up heat from the surroundings and turns back into a low-pressure, low-temperature vapor to start the cycle again as it heads back to the compressor. This system runs your fridge, your car’s air conditioner, and is used in so many other applications where it’s desirable to make something colder or hotter as efficiently as possible. You just choose which direction you want to pump the heat and design the system accordingly. Air conditioners and fridges pump heat out of a confined space, heaters and dryers pump it in, and so on. It’s heat pumps all the way down!

Bigger Applications

Thus far, you’ve probably used many a heat pump in your daily life, whether it be for heating, cooling, or drying clothes. However, there is a new push to build ever-larger heat pumps to work on the municipal scale, rather than simply serving individual households. The hope is to make utilities more energy efficient, and thus cheaper and greener in turn, by taking advantage of the efficiency gains offered by the magic of the heat pump.
An earlier project saw Siemens Energy team up with MVV to install a heat pump system to supply 3,500 households with 20 megawatts of heat in Mannheim. The new installation will be almost an order of magnitude larger. Credit: SiemensAt 82.5 megawatts each, the new installation features what are perhaps the largest heat pumps in the world. Credit: MVV
One such project is taking place just off the River Rhine in Germany. A pair of massive heat pump units are being constructed by MVV Energie, each with a capacity of 82.5 megawatts. They will deliver heat to a total of 40,000 homes via a district heating system, and will be constructed on the site of a former coal power plant. Each pump will effectively draw energy out of the massive watery heat battery that is the River Rhine, and use it to warm homes in the local area. Thankfully, the river’s capacity is large enough that drawing all that heat out of the river should only affect temperatures of the water by around 0.1 C.

The Rhine project builds upon a previous effort to install a large heat-pump heating system in Mannheim, in partnership with Siemens Energy. That installation draws 7 megawatts of electricity to supply 20 megawatts of heating to the local district heating grid. Installed in 2023, it supplies the heating needs of 3,500 local households.
The Danish installation will use slightly smaller heat pumps, but more of them, for a combined output of 177 megawatts. Credit: MAN Technology
A similar project is underway in Denmark, which will supply 177 megawatts of heat to homes in Aalborg. The installation of four 44 megawatt MAN Technology heat pumps will be hooked up to the existing district heating system, which is also supported by other sources including waste heat from a local cement factory. The benefit of using smaller individual units is that it allows some of the pumps to be shut down when heating demand is lower, as winter passes through autumn into summer.

What makes these projects special is their sheer scale. Rather than being measured in the kilowatt scale like home appliances, they’re measured in the many tens of megawatts, delivering heating to entire neighborhoods instead of single homes. As it turns out, heat pumps work just fine at large scales—you just need to build them out of bigger components. Bigger compressors, bigger expansion valves, and bigger condensors and evaporators—all of these combine to let you pump enormous amounts of heat from one place to another. As utilities around the world seek ever greater efficiency in new projects, heat pumps will likely grow larger and be deployed ever more widely, seeking to take advantage of the free heat on offer in the earth, water, and air around us. After all, there’s no point dumping energy into making heat when you can just move some that’s already there!

hackaday.com/2026/02/05/big-he…

Three Decades Of ReactOS

Over the past couple of years with the Jenny’s Daily Drivers series, we’ve looked at a number of unusual or noteworthy operating systems. Among them has been ReactOS, an open source clone of a millennium-era Windows OS, which we tried back in November. It’s one of those slow-burn projects we know has been around for a long time, but still it’s a surprise to find we’ve reached the 30th anniversary of the first ReactOS code commit.

The post is a run through the project’s history, and having followed it for a long time we recognize some of the milestones from the various ISOs we downloaded and tried back in the day. At the end it looks into the future with plans to support more up-to-date hardware as well as UEFI, which we hope will keep it relevant.

When we tried it, we found an OS which could indeed be a Daily Driver on which a Hackaday article could be written — even if it wasn’t the slickest experience on the block. It doesn’t matter that it’s taken a while, if you’re used to Windows XP this has become a usable replacement. We came to the conclusion that like FreeDOS it could find a niche in places where people need a modern version of the old OS to run older software, but perhaps as it now moves towards its mature phase it will move beyond that. We salute the ReactOS developers for bringing it this far, and for not giving up.

You can read our Daily Drivers review of a recent ReactOS build here.

hackaday.com/2026/02/05/three-…

How Industrial Robot Safety Was Written in Blood

It was January 25th of 1979, at an unassuming Michigan Ford Motor Company factory. Productivity over the past years had been skyrocketing due to increased automation, courtesy of Litton Industry’s industrial robots that among other things helped to pick parts from shelves. Unfortunately, on that day there was an issue with the automated inventory system, so Robert Williams was asked to retrieve parts manually.

As he climbed into the third level of the storage rack, he was crushed from behind by the arm of one of the still active one-ton transfer vehicles, killing him instantly. It would take half an hour before his body was discovered, and many years before the manufacturer would be forced to pay damages to his estate in a settlement. He only lived to be twenty-five years old.

Since Robert’s gruesome death, industrial robots have become much safer, with keep-out zones, sensors, and other safety measures. However this didn’t happen overnight; it’s worth going over some of the robot tragedies to see how we got here.

Just Following Orders

Perhaps the the most terrifying aspect about most industrial robots is that they are fairly simple machines, often just an arm containing a series of stepper motors and the electronics that strictly execute the tasks programmed into it when the manufacturing line was designed and assembled. This means a large metal arm, possibly weighing more than an adult human, that can swing and move around rapidly, with no regard for what might be in between its starting and end position unless designed with safeties in place.
Artist’s depiction of the accident involving a 34-year old US worker and an industrial robot. (Credit: US NIOSH)
This is what led to the death in 1981 of another factory worker, Kenji Urada, a maintenance worker, who was trying to fix a robotic arm. Although a safety fence had been installed at this Japanese plant that would disconnect the power supply of the robot when this fence was unhooked, for some reason Kenji decided to bypass this safety feature and hop over the fence. Moments later he would be dead, crushed by the robotic arm as it accidentally was activated by Kenji while in manual mode.

During the following investigation it was found that Kenji’s colleagues were unfamiliar with the robot’s controls and did not know how to turn it off by simply opening the fence. Subsequently they were unable to render him any aid and were forced to look on in horror until someone was able to power down the robot.

A similar accident occurred in the US in 1984, when a 34-year old operator of an automated die-cast system decided to cross the safety rail around the robot’s operating envelope to clean up some scrap metal on the floor, bypassing the interlocked access in the safety rail. In this case it wasn’t the arm that crushed the worker, but the back end, which the worker apparently had deemed to be ‘safe’. He had received a one-week training course in robotics three weeks prior.

Protecting Squishy Humans

ISO 7010 style warning sign for industrial robots. (Credit: Clemenspool, Wikimedia)
When it comes to industrial robot safety rules, we have to consider a number of factors beyond the straightforward fact that getting crushed by one is a scenario that a reasonable person would want to avoid. The first is that industrial robots are quite expensive, which makes adding major fencing and other safety measures not much of a financial issue in comparison.

The second factor is that while humans are really quite versatile, they tend to have the annoying habit of bypassing safeties despite endless briefings and drills that are designed for their own protection. Let’s call this factor “human nature”. Kenji Urada’s gruesome death is an example of this, but other industries are rife with examples too, giving agencies like the US Chemical Safety Board a seemingly endless collection of safety rule violations to investigate and condense into popular YouTube videos of disaster sequences.

The final, third factor that ties all of this together is that we no longer live in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, where having a human worker getting caught with an arm between some gears, or crushed by a mechanism would only lead to some clerk rolling their eyes, crossing out a name and sending out an errand boy to post a fresh ‘help wanted’ note.

Ergo, we needed to find ways to human-proof industrial robots against humans and protect us against ourselves.

ISO 10218

Although some nations have their own standards, the overarching international standard is found in ISO 10218, currently in its 2025 update. This standard comes in two parts, ISO 10218-1, which concerns itself with the robot’s individual parts and targets robot manufacturers, as well as ISO 10218-2, which looks at complete systems and the integration of robots.
Germany bakery robots for palletizing food products. Note the plentiful safety fencing. (Credit: KUKA Roboter GmbH, Bachmann)
There are a number of distinct types of hazards when it comes to working around industrial robots, the most obvious of which is the crushing hazard. To prevent this and similar hazards, we can install plentiful of safety fencing to ensure that the squishy human cannot get within the range of the unsuspecting robot.

In the case of an especially persistent human, or potentially a legitimate human maintainer or operator, it’s crucial to ensure that the robot is powered down or rendered harmless in some other way. For example, the safety fence that should have prevented Kenji Urada from losing his life was designed for this, but unfortunately could be bypassed.

Similarly, in the case of Robert Williams there was a tag in/tag out system in place for the robotics, but Robert had not been instructed in this and apparently unaware of the dangers. Being able to bypass such safeties gets us firmly sliding down the rabbit hole of the hierarchy of controls.

The most effective hazard elimination is basically that, but since the robots are rather needed, and we got no replacement for them other than forcing the humans to do all the work again, this step is no real option here.

Next we can try to make robots safer, by adding intrusion detection sensors to the robot’s hazard zone, or as Amazon trialed in 2019 by making the squishy humans in its warehouses wear a device that alerts the robots around them on the warehouse floor of their presence without relying on either machine vision or obstacle recognition.

The placing of physical barriers is next, as part of engineering controls. This effectively tries to prevent humans from wandering into the danger zone like a particularly big fly around a brightly lit up bug zapper. Theoretically by putting a sufficiently daunting barrier between the hazard and the worker will said worker not end up facing their doom.

In an ideal world this would be all that it’d take to guarantee a completely safe work floor, even in the case of some distracted wandering. Of course, this doesn’t help much if said robots are sharing a warehouse floor with humans. To patch up the remaining gaps we got safety training courses as part of the administrative controls, but if these were very effective then the USCSB would already be mostly out of a job.,

The final item in the hierarchy of PPE can easily be skipped in the case of industrial robots, other than perhaps steel-tipped boots, a hard-hat and safety glasses in case of dropped items and flying debris. If an industrial robot’s arm is headed your way, there’s no PPE that will save your skin.

The Future

At this point in time industrial robots are fairly safe from humans, though in the US alone between 1992 and 2015 at least 61 people died due to sharing the same physical space with such a robot or a similar unfortunate event. As the number of robots increases in industry, but also in construction and health care, the topic of safety becomes ever more important.

In the case of a stationary industrial robot it’s fairly easy to just put a big, tall fence around it, lock the only gate and force anyone who absolutely needs access to beg an audience with the maintenance chief. In the case of the thousands of robots rolling around in warehouses like Amazon’s, situational awareness on the part of the robots can help them detect and avoid obstacles.

As long as humans are more fragile and weaker than the robots that they find themselves working around, it’s probably reasonable to expect said humans to pay a modicum of respect to the Death Machine, as the engineers who built them can only add so many technological solutions to what ultimately ends up being a game of idiot-proofing. Because absolutely nobody would ever do these exact things to willingly endanger themselves and/or others.

hackaday.com/2026/02/05/how-in…

Electronic Waste Graveyard Immortalizes Dead Electronics

Everyone here can think of a cloud-connected product that was killed because the company that made it stopped supporting it. While these corporations have forgotten their products, the US PIRG Education Fund has immortalized them in their Electronic Waste Graveyard.

With an estimated “130,000,000 pounds of electronic waste” produced since 2014, the amount of wasted resources is staggering. The advent of the cloud promised us reduced waste as lightweight devices could rely on remote brains to keep the upgrades going long after a traditional device would have been unable to keep up. The opposite seems to have occurred, wreaking havoc on the environment and pocketbooks.

Of course, we can count on hackers to circumvent the end of companies or services, but while that gives us plenty of fodder for projects, it isn’t so great for the normal folks who make up the rest of the population. We appreciate PIRG giving such a visceral reminder of the cost of business-as-usual for those who aren’t always thinking about material usage and waste.

If PIRG sounds familiar, they’re one of the many groups keeping an eye on Right-to-Repair legislation. We’ve been keeping an eye on it too with places like the EU, Texas, and Washington moving the ball forward on reducing e-waste and keeping devices running longer.

hackaday.com/2026/02/05/electr…