My retirement dream/plan consists of building a small apartment building using Insulated Concrete Form (ICF) construction. I've been considering several different ways to make this building as self-sustaining as possible, including installation of a biogas plant (the idea of putting a veritable mountain of poop to useful work sounds awesome!). As part of this self-sustaining quest, I ran across the no-moving-parts (and thus nothing much to break down) refrigerator patented by Einstein and Szilard. Since it would be possible to incorporate the required piping into the cast concrete (and well-insulated) walls of my planned building fairly easily, it occurs to me that equipping each apartment with such a device - or even cooling the entire building this way - might be doable.

What concerns me is that even if I can figure out a good design, the original patented design is supposed to "yield only 5% efficiency." Is that too low to be functional? How does it compare to a standard refrigerator [or air-conditioning system]?

Thoughts?
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