If it were real, which it isn't, a COP of 3 at a high delta-T would revolutionize the heating industry.
Yes that is the obvious application, but that does not necessarily show it is the most economical way to make hot water or a house warm in winter. Need to add in the cost the grinding energy that made the sub micron metal particles and the cost of making pure Li & Ni. When that is done, their COP will fall and be less than that of a heat pump, especially one with water as the heat source.
Both house heating and hot water needs the pump's output temperature less than 100C and can run mainly on cheap "time of day" metered base load power. In new houses, the cold source could be just some meters of pipe in bottom surface of a concrete basement slab. One near perimeter loop should be more than adequate. It may be worth the cost of a "flow switch" that reverses the direction of flow once per day. That, with the heat pump itself, needs to be above the concrete floor, as may need replacement or repair every decade or so. The standard steel re-enforcing rods in the concrete slab will keep all of it nearly "isothermal."
Until that cost accounting is honestly done, I hold the same POV as I do about controlled fusion - Very interesting physics, but very unlikely to ever be competitive with fossil fuels (or perhaps fast growing trees, etc. if you want or need to be "CO2 neutral.") for making heat. Here is more why I doubt it is a scam:
Here is start of the “independent report” entitled:
" Observation of abundant heat production from a reactor device and of isotopic changes in the fuel "
By authors:
Giuseppe Levi - Bologna University, Bologna, Italy
Evelyn Foschi - Bologna, Italy
Bo Höistad, Roland Pettersson and Lars Tegnér - Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Hanno Essén - Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Also from page 6 of main link: “ David Bianchini, MSc and expert in radiation detection, was in charge of assessing possible ionizing radiation and neutrons emitted by the reactor charge, before, during and after operation. … Bianchini evaluated the possible presence of alpha, beta and gamma radiation by applying his instruments directly to the powder that was subsequently inserted into the reactor. The same operation was repeated after the end of the test on the powder extracted from the reactor. In both cases, no signs of activity were found.”
Presumably a young man with long career in science ahead of him so he would not want to have it ended early by an exposed fraud, assuming there was no “slight of hand” trick played on him and he only believed his second sample was the material that that had been in the reactor.
That makes an improbable conspiracy of at least seven scientists.
Also there are many photographs in the report. Granted Photo- Shop could have made them from “scratch,” but photo 12 is quite impressive to me, if it is all fraud. Note that their results indicate greater COP for higher temperature. I. e. higher temperature increases energy production rate. This is a positive feed-back system instability. Where it is hotter, it will get hotter – as clearly seen in Figure 12a&b. I doubt they were smart enough to photo shop that effect if they had never seen it.
Also fabrication of the data in the four appendices so carefully that no obvious trace of its fabricated nature seems impossible to me. Too many graphs with spectral resolution and relative amplitudes shown.
Even figure 11, requires great understanding of the angular dependence of emissivity - it is higher in the normal direction than at lower "quasi-grazing" directions - If fraud via Photo shop they did not forget any real detail I can find.
