HotTwist heat system will reduce heating bills by 75%

Scottish startup SeaWarm, a subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh, has successfully tested a new technology called ‘HotTwist’. The idea is to extract heat from natural water sources that have not yet frozen and therefore store some thermal energy. It is not much, but it can be used for passive space heating.

Water can hold about 3,400 times more heat energy than air – which is why bodies of water do not immediately freeze when cold weather arrives. This will happen to most of them anyway, so taking away heat energy for human use will not create problems for the local ecosystem. A simple pump pumps the still warm water through a heat exchanger where it transfers the energy to the heat transfer medium, glycol.