Heat Pumps

Is heat a substance? Is cold a substance? This is a matter of debate for philosophers but the heat pump proves that when you extract the heat from an object it becomes cold (or perhaps when you extract the cold it becomes hot). A heat pump moves heat, or cold, from one place to another as a water pump moves water from below to above. Once widely used around Morton, some of the secrets of this technology have been lost over the years and has reverted, for the most part, to a tabletop curiosity.

Access & Availability

Small and medium sized units, able to cool and preserve an animal carcass have been available in Morton for several hundred years - though the use of them has not spread far beyond the town. Some of this reflects the suspicion that such technology must harness dark forces, some relates to the availability and safety of hornstink which is vital to the operation of the units. In practice therefore this means that as long as one lives in Morton, is wealthy enough to have a house large enough to avoid issues with hornstink and to keep it topped up they are readily available.

In practice this means that they are few and far between and whilst acknowledged as useful; valuable even, few households or businesses use them and thosen that do are not always trusted by their neighbours.

Discovery

The first heat pumps were developed around the year 50 MD with the available evidence suggesting that it was one of the first collaborations between the drakiss artificers and alkiss and their human equivalents. Discovering a principle does not, however, make for a useful technology and they remained table top toys for the next few decades, before becoming more widely used.

The application of the technology reached its peak in the second and third centuries MD, when the largest heat pumps known were produced to manage the hot and cold houses of Duke Cadrill's Marvellous Menagerie. These exceded in size and capacity any known examples from more recent times and to this day it is not known how the problems that limit the use of this technology today were overcome.