Sorry to butt in, Mark, but I'll posit that while what you say here is true, it misses the point. No one was saying that energy was being created from nothing! The claim is that there is some hidden potential energy that ends up being converted to heat - that is a completely different thing from violating the laws of thermodynamics.
I worked with structural, mechanical and electrical engineers every day for nine years. Do you know what efficiency they say a good air-to-air heat pump gets under ideal conditions? FOUR hundred percent! How can this be? Because they define efficiency as the usable energy out divided by the total energy you have to apply to get it (per unit time, in both cases, of course). Using this definition, we allow for the fact that the heat output has been scavenged from outside the designed system. Of course, a physicist would find this definition of efficiency to be ludicrous - but to an engineer, who is comparing it to the pretty "weak" 100 percent efficiency of resistance heating, it makes perfect sense.
The same thing is happening here. Heat is being evolved from some unknown source, it is NOT being created on the spot. Whether this unknown source is cold fusion (which I doubt) doesn't matter in terms of practical application, just as it doesn't matter to me all winter long that I'm being warmed by heat harvested from sub-freezing outdoor air! (As long as it works, of course. If the power goes out, I go back to burning wood.)
