Joule Heist search

references · updated 2026-07-30

Getting Started

confidence: high volatility: warm

A guide for new visitors: what this wiki covers, where to start reading, and how the knowledge base is organized.

This wiki is a living knowledge base about cooling — the physics of moving heat where you don’t want it, the machines people have built to do it, and the materials that make those machines work. The organizing question behind everything here is deceptively simple: what drives the pump? Every cooling system moves heat against its natural gradient, and the energy source that powers that move turns out to be the cleanest way to understand what you’re looking at and why it matters.

What you’ll find here

Every air conditioner, every chiller, every cold panel on a rooftop is solving the same thermodynamic problem: pushing heat from a cool space into a warm one. That takes energy. The question “what drives the pump?” sorts the entire landscape of cooling technologies into a handful of families — compressor-driven, heat-driven, electrically-driven solid-state, and passive rejection. Once you see the drive source, you see the trade-offs: capital cost, efficiency, what fuel you need, and whether you can run the thing off a flat-plate solar collector or if you’re stuck buying grid electricity.

This wiki is editorially biased toward heat-driven and passive cooling. That means adsorption and absorption chillers powered by waste heat or solar thermal collectors, radiative panels that reject heat to the cold sky, and phase-change materials that shift loads in time. These are the technologies that can run on thermal streams that already exist rather than demanding a compressor plugged into the wall. That bias is deliberate — not because vapor compression is bad (it’s remarkably good at what it does), but because the alternatives are underexplored and the information is scattered.

The project is called Joule Heist, named after kleptothermy — the biological strategy of harvesting someone else’s thermal stream instead of generating your own. A rattlesnake basking on sun-warmed asphalt is a kleptotherm. A sorption chiller running on rooftop solar heat is doing the same thing, thermodynamically speaking. What you’ll find here is physics, machines, working materials, and applications — compiled from roughly 134 registered sources with full provenance, drawn primarily from the hothothot Zotero group library.

Start here

I want to understand how cooling works

  1. Cooling Technologies Overview — the map of everything, organized by drive source
  2. Adsorption Cooling — the keystone: cold from low-grade heat via solid sorbents
  3. Vapor Compression — the baseline everything is measured against
  4. Radiative & Facade Cooling — passive heat rejection via the cold sky
  5. Cooling Technologies Comparison — the side-by-side table (COP, SCP, drive temp, maturity)

I want to build something

  1. Building a DIY Adsorption Chiller — working-pair decision, five subsystems, vacuum/leak-tightness
  2. DIY PCM Encapsulation — containment and materials for phase-change glazing panels
  3. Solar Thermal — collectors that supply drive heat
  4. Adsorbent Bed Engineering — bed physics, TPMS geometry, coatings

I want to compare options

  1. Cooling Technologies Comparison — every technology side by side
  2. Solar Cooling: PV vs Thermal — is solar-thermal sorption still the right call?
  3. Adsorption vs Absorption — the foundational surface-vs-bulk distinction
  4. Commercial Adsorption Chillers — what you can buy today

How this wiki is organized

Articles live in four buckets, and the bucket tells you what kind of knowledge you’re reading:

  • Topics — synthesis narratives that weave multiple sources into a coherent account of a technology or theme. These are the long-form articles where you’ll spend most of your time.
  • References — registries, operational docs, comparison tables, and how-to guides. These are data-dense and less narrative — you come here for numbers, procedures, and structured lookups.
  • Concepts — defined terms, principles, and distinctions. When you need to know what adsorption actually means (vs absorption), or what geometric blackness is, or why kleptothermy is a useful metaphor, this is where you look.
  • Theses — falsifiable claims with evidence and a verdict: supported, contradicted, or partially supported. These are the wiki’s way of tracking open questions and recording what the evidence actually says.

Every claim in the wiki traces back to a registered source in the raw/ directory. Sources originate from the hothothot Zotero group library and are ingested with full bibliographic provenance, so you can always check where a number or a claim came from.

See also