This is a pretty interesting concept from IKEA’s Space 10 Lab. Think about all the wasted heat in your home from things like appliances, and solar gain. Imagine if you could take that energy and convert it to green electricity for tasks like charging your phone.

That is the clever idea behind the Heat Harvest concept designed by Sergey Komardenkov and Vihanga Gore. Komardenkov and Gore are students from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction and during a two week workshop at IKEA’s Space10 innovation lab they came up with this concept and designed it. Heat Harvest is a concept for a device that can be used either as a stand alone object or be integrated into household items, such as a table, in order to capture wasted heat from our everyday objects and our surroundings and turn it into free, green electricity that can be reused at home. Pretty smart right?

By exploiting basic physics, and putting to use the fact that temperature differences between two surfaces can generate electricity Heat Harvest works. It captures that wasted energy and converts it into a clean energy source. By coupling it with recent developments in nanotechnology it is possible to make the conversion of heat to electricity more efficient than ever. If IKEA actually brings this to market, I’d snap one up in a heartbeat just to get rid of all the power vampires I have charging phones and tablets in my house.