These days we are all about recycling. We want to reuse everything we can without letting anything worth something drift out into the nothing to harm everything. In other words, people are serious about conservation. Let's talk about conservation of heat. Heat is energy in its rawest form, so why are we letting so much heat go unused? Put aside the fact that we're doing so little to harness the sun's energy, this is an auto repair site and we're talking about hot exhaust.
Your engine creates a lot of heat as it burns fuel. Aside from keeping you warm in the winter, most of this heat goes unused. But heat has so many uses! One of the most rewarding uses is cooking. Why not use the heat from your engine to cook your meals on the way home? This is not a new concept. Outdoorsmen have been heating cans of beans and baking potatoes under the hoods of their cars for decades. There's even a cookbook about under-hood cuisine. But my interest was newly piqued when I read a blog post that recalled an invention from long ago. In a June, 1930 article in Modern Mechanics the idea of properly cooking with your hot exhaust gases was explored. Why couldn't we take the same technology and use it today? As long as we're driving cars that run internal combustion engines we'll have plenty of extra heat. You can use this heat to cook food without adding any strain on the engine or decreasing fuel mileage. It's heat that's already there and is currently being pumped willy-nilly into the air. Think about the benefits. You can cook dinner on the way home from work, saving valuable time in the kitchen that could be spent with your family or playing Halo. In the summer, you'll save lots of electricity that would normally be used to cool your house down from heat generated by indoor cooking. You'd save precious gas on your outdoor grill.
The idea might sound silly right now, but if the right apparatus was put together, you could cheaply and conveniently heat food with your engine's exhaust. Every little bit counts.