Mattaus
Flashlight Enthusiast
Anyways, the 230% claim is rather arbitrary if you ask me since it's as open loop as you can get. But thermodynamically speaking there's nothing magical going on there. It's analogous to pumping up hot water and then stuffing it through a generator. Suppose the pump etc is 100 Watt and you can load the generator output by 230 Watt then your clever marketing monkeys can say "tada! 230% efficient! ^_^" in exactly the same way as these guys are doing.
I'm hungover and running on 3 hours sleep. I am an engineer so I should understand this but I'm struggling right now. Can you break this down a bit? It looks like it makes sense to me, but I want to be sure lol. When I posted the article above my first thought was how could it be 230% efficient without bringing out all the free energy crazies? I was waiting for someone to explain it well and your heat pump analogy seems pretty solid...