Gee, what do they need a "hot water heater " for? Seems like a waste, heating hot water ;)
BTW - you're absolutely correct, "cool" or "cold" are simply the absence of heat. There is no physical property of "coolness." All objects have a physical property of "temperature" which is percieved as "hot" or "cold." Many chemical reactions are quite exothermic (generate heat) - anyone who has ever used an MRE will know exactly of what I speak, but there are very, very few
reactions which are endothermic.
The only application I can think of which might be feasible for the good Admiral is evaporative cooling.
Have some solar cells power a fan which blows air across a wet surface. If you can move enough air, you can generate substantially cooler temperatures.
I've seen laboratory setups which could reduce water by 50+ degrees by evaporation alone.
Greenhouses use a similar technique to keep plants from cooking in the summer.
These are generally called 'swamp coolers'.
Similar processes can be seen at NFL games with those mist/fan setups.
[quote]Similar processes can be seen at NFL games[/quote]
The cooling process I have seen at NFL games here in Kahleefohneeya where the NFL play in 80 degree Farenheit weather involves cold beer and is therefore inappropriate for Muslim countries.
Hmmmm, outside of the alcoholic variants, some of these ideas sounded promising. The Arabs have actually used a variant of one of these for centuries. When sufficient water is available, they have a pool or fountain in their courtyard and "wind pipes" that bring air down and across the water. The cooler air then flows into the house.
My idea for an innovation was not for an "anti-microwave" - I agree that this is problematic at best. Instead I was thinking of an "anti-water heater." In other words, a refrigerated tank of water. It would not have to be as cool as a normal refrigerator, just knocking off about 40 degrees F would be very welcome. At home I use a special cooler for a van, it has a heat pump that keeps it 40 degrees cooler than its environment. A similar device should be able to chill a tank of water.
I hit post too quickly. I wanted to add that Drew's observation about some Californians would work pretty well here. Air conditioning is fairly common here (and becoming more so every day) and just having a room temperature source of cold water would be much better than the current situation.
A Thermoelectric (T/E) cooler would be a solution if not for the fact that opposite the cool side is a very hot side and that heat must be disapated else the device will burn itself out. In Oman, disapating that heat would be a problem.
They also draw tremendous current, probably far in excess of what a simple solar supply could provide.
I am not an engineer but I sometimes play one on Television:
You mean, make something like a microwave oven but one which uses energy to cool things, rather than heat things?
As I understand the second law of thermodynamics, you can't.
There is no "cooling device", only "move the heat somewhere else" devices. Once heat (random kinetic energy) exists you are stuck with it for all eternity.
A refrigerator, for example, doesn't "generate cold" but it pumps the heat from the refrigerator into the surrounding room.
With that in mind, my ordinary refrigerator does something like what you want It takes tap water, cools it inside the refrigerator, and then dispenses that cool water from a tap in the door.
The limits are that you will warm the room by more than the amount of energy you take out of the water, and you probably can't do that on the fly. IE you can't wrap a small device around a pipe, but rather have to take a volume of water, cool it, and wait for someone to want that cool water.
I suspect the minimum size for such a device would be about the size of a bar refrigerator (about 0.5 meters on a side) to hold enough water to be worthwhile (a few liters allowing space for the heat exchange pump).
As an aside, in desert areas of California, some people have an insulated "hot water heater" inside their (airconditioned) houses. They don't turn on the water heater, and use that reservoir of water (which is cooled to room temperature) as the "cold water".