This month’s Green Hero is a magic box.

More information: renewable energy

This month’s Green Hero is a magic box. In fact, it’s an air source heat pump that utilises phase-change technology and the the associated phenomenon of latent heat to produce your domestic hot water. But I prefer to think of it as a magic box.
We showed it briefly on the side of Gregory and Rebecca’s house in Cornwall in the current series of Grand Designs, where the exterior part of the machine melded invisibly into the black cladding of the building.
What’s special about it? Well, like all air source heat pumps, it works like a fridge in reverse, but this one actually resembles a fridge backwards in that the absorption unit looks like, well, the back of a fridge; or a black minimalist radiator bolted to the outside of your house.
Full marks for style then and for restraint. For too long, building services engineers have taken products used in factories and sold them to consumers. It’s about time that we stopped sticking large pieces of factory engineering on to our houses and that companies produced kit that isn’t ugly.