Electronics generate a lot of “waste heat,” and cats enjoy sitting on warm surfaces: a match made in heaven?

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Background:

Modern households have many “always on” appliances that generate waste heat. Although some devices can sleep in a low-power mode (e.g., laptops, game consoles), others (e.g. WiFi routers, Figure 1) are warm to the touch 24/7.

Fig. 1: The fiber modem and WiFi router shown here generate a noticeable amount of waste heat (A) all day long.

Proposal:

Let’s harness some of that wasted energy and use it to heat a cat bed!

This can be accomplished very easily by placing the heat-generating electronics under a wooden platform with a cat bed on top (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: Simple! Now the waste heat from the electronic devices (B) will heat up the cat bed.

Future Work:

Ideally, we would harness the waste heat from the refrigerator (since it’s usually the top waste-heat-producing home appliance). But this might be complicated, since the heat is usually exhausted out the back of the fridge.

PROS: A warm cat will become lazy and will be less likely to claw you in a fit of irritation. (Or possibly the cat will become invigorated by the heat, and will claw you in a fit of enthusiasm. I guess that could more accurately go in the “CONS” section.)

CONS: May reduce people’s motivation to switch to energy-efficient devices: “Oh, I can’t buy a more efficient WiFi router—my poor cat’s paws will freeze!”

Originally published 2026-04-20.