EW OF US south of Siberia would describe a 45° day as warm. But even if we don't feel warm, there's a lot of heat in that air. In fact, even when the temperature dips to 0°, the air contains more than 80% of the heat that’s there when it’s 100°. A heat-pump water heater is a device that can extract some of that energy from the air, concentrate it, and use it to heat your hot water. If that sounds like some high-tech marvel, consider that an air conditioner is a type of heat pump and so is a refrigerator. Since a heat pump only moves heat from place to place rather than gener- ating it, the only electricity needed is to run its compressor and fan. Heat-pump performance is measured in terms of a coefficient of performance (COP). That's the ratio of the amount of energy used to the amount delivered. With electric- resistance water heat, you get one Btu of heat for every Btu of electricity con- sumed, so it has a COP of 1. Heat into consideration average yearly tem- peratures and energy costs, the com- puter found that a heat-pump water heater could save those families that were heating water with electricity an aver- age of 2,400 kilowatt hours a year. That can mean a yearly savings of up to $175. In every city, using a heat pump was also cheaper, although less dramatically so, than heating water with an oil-fired boiler. Only a gas water heater was cheaper than a heat pump, at least ev- erywhere but Seattle, where the cost of electricity is unusually low. Heat-pump water heaters are de- signed to make use of “waste” heat, but that doesn't mean they should be put in a part of the house that’s heated. For one thing, it’s inefficient, since the heat pump would be drawing on heat being produced by a furnace or electric strips. Further, heat pumps produce cold air as a by-product—enough to lower a room’s temperature by 10°—so having one near your kitchen in the winter would be like