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@@jamesbizsbuddy.. it is not the best native advertising, but for him to do this a lot requires a sponsor for funding.. youtube ads in itself are nowhere near as clever.. i am now getting multinational military submarine ads here, and nonstop ads about 1400 obama checks which are not even really allowed..
I'm too stupid to realize this now. We should get heat energy from AirCond, and redirect that heat into desert like Egypt/Africa. The desert itself becomes the "largest battery" in the world. This can solve Climate heat issue, as well as provide energy.
My grandfather had a sand radiator in his logging cabin for over 110 years ago. It was a metal box filled with sand that the smoke pipe of the stove zigzagged through. It kept the cabin warm 24 hours even in -40 Celsius. Blessings and prayers from arctic part of Sweden 🇸🇪
@@mdube391 the reason creosote builds up is that the chimney cools down, allowing the exhaust to cool and crystalize. so yeah, it would be a lot dirtier than a straight pipe, but it beats the hell out of freezing. the Russians did the same thing with their masonry stoves. though the medium there is stone, not sand. they need a lot of clean out ports to keep those things clear.
@@stagiestpizza The REAL reason that creosote builds up, is incomplete combustion which produces creosote. Using a damper and trying to run the fire all night is the problem. Create a strong updraft, allow maximum oxygen to fully burn all the wood gases, run the flue through sand which never gets completely cold, and there will be no creosote. Burn hard and fast for half an hour or so, capture all that heat efficiently inside a sand or masonry mass, and the fire is over for the day. Heat will slowly radiate from the mass, until it needs topping up again.
I've told this story before. A friend of mine kind of built one of these himself. He built a south-facing solarium on the back of his house, but underneath the concrete pad he installed a three foot deep pit and filled it with pea gravel. He used simple PVC pipe and some small fans to blow air from the warm solarium into the gravel pit during the day. The cool air coming back would help regulate the temps in the summer. In the winter he could divert the warm air into his house to help lighten the load on his furnace. Colder return air would go back into the pit to be warmed up before going to the furnace. He could let it charge all day, even in the winter, and use the extra warm air at night when the heating demand was higher. While these TES systems are certainly very nice, if you have the money, don't be afraid to see what you can DIY for a LOT less. All my friend had to buy for his was the gravel, some cement, some foamboard insulation, pipe and a couple of blower fans. For his skill level, it was easy work. It certainly wasn't as efficient as a custom built system, but it didn't need to be for the cost of entry and daily operation. How much power can a blower and a few relays use? If you are the handy kind of person who could us swimming pool hoses, wood and glass to make a solar thermal collector, well, here's some place to put all that energy.
Great story! We built a hot-house with the south wall made of glass, and the other 3 walls made of 1/2 inch plywood. The roof was normal composite shingle. In the summer we would open a large door on the north side to cool it off, and it would still be too hot for many fragile plants. In the winter it was warm enough inside to grow cactus all year round. There was no fans, pipes, insulation, nothing actually, just a glass wall.
@@OfficialFoodForThough, for that you might want something ground-sourced, which can be a lot more work to DIY. Ground temperatures, especially once you get down a few feet, are usually pretty steady and in FL would probably be in the 60s. If you have a well already it's pretty simple to run some pipe down the well and simply circulate water through that loop of pipe to a radiator and fan in your house. The radiator will absorb heat and take it down to the well. If you have to do _any_ digging for that, you may as well get a ground-sourced AC/heat pump put in. It'd cost more but it would be loads more efficient. The thing to remember is that heat will always flow towards cold, so even if you have an above ground pool that is cooler than your house, you can move heat from the house to the pool, cooling the house and warming the pool, until they are equal.
In Organic Gardening magazine in the 1970s they advertised plans for a Hunsa house. Block constructed with passages that guided hot air from a small fire in the center, and vented it through 20 tons of sand. A small fire burning for two hours a day could heart a house in Scandinavia all night in the winter .
Even better.... i teach others this stuff. You might as well just make a greenhouse rocket stove. Also, you can put compost piles packed next to greenhouses, in winter, and get it tp 70-80F using just lawn leaves and food scraps... all winter, decomposing compost can make heat over 115F. this is shown by youtuber van powell
@@dertythegrower compost piles catch fire occasionally from the heat. Our oldest brother showed us this in 1962 when I was 8. He rolled the top layer back and it was steaming hot. A week later it literally caught fire. Phoenix AZ in the 110 degree heat.
My TES is an insulated 275 gallon IBC that cost me $50. My electricity all comes from solar panels and a grid-tied inverter. My hot water is from a Black & Decker flash water heater that cost me less than $200 new. Incoming cold water passes through a copper heat exchanger in the IBC, and that feeds the flash heater. These heaters have a temperature setting, so if your incoming water is warmer, they use less electricity. This is a way to use even VERY low-quality heat from solar thermal panels to lower your electricity use. For example, if my ground water pipes supply 64 F water, the flash heater has to warm it up 40 degrees to reach the 104 F setting. If the IBC warms it to 84 F, that cuts my water heating electricity use in half.
I scored a never never used smaller 20 gallon electric hot water heater cheap. I got a brand new radiator from a 98 jeep Cherokee just laying around. I'm going to hook it all up so the hot water can be circulated with a small battery powered pump and power the hot water heater with 6 solar panels. Even in winter it should work pretty well with the 6 solar panels. Any time there is hot water that is 10 degrees hotter then the air in the shop the pump will turn on. I'll get a large computer fan that runs on 12v for the radiator and run the pump and fan via battery charged by solar. Should work pretty well. Now using resistive oil heater and it is really making my electric bill skyrocket over winter. My power company is sending me notices I am using too much power... Bill is way to high. I am going to turn the heater off and see how well this system heats the shop. Will it not... will it only get up to 35 degrees or will or keep the shop at 72 degrees? Be interesting to find out. If it seems to work pretty well I will up the size of the water heater.
@@robert5 Make sure your battery charger is inside, so any heat loss from inefficiency warms the room. Solar panels make more power when they are cold, as long as they point at the sun and the day is clear. Sun power maximum is about 1 KW per square meter, but the panels are only about 15% efficient. So that would be about 150 watts per square meter. 10 square meters would be roughly equivalent to a 1500 watt space heater.
We had TES in my home lounge when I was a kid in the 1960s in England. It was called a 'night storage heater', was about 1.8m x 1m x 1m and inside was a massive concrete block (or stacked smaller blocks). It was heated by off-peak (cheaper) electricity at night and emitted that heat energy during the day when electricity was more expensive. It had resistance wire to heat it at night and louvres, a fan and air channels that could be opened and turned on during the day to release the heat.
Same here in Austria. They are called nachtstromwaermespeicher, which translates to night electricity heat storage. They have ceramics inside I think. The ones we had, looked like a slightly oversized radiator and you could also sit on the warm stone slap on top.
Many UK homes still have these what they call "NightStore" heaters. Many date back a good twenty years and are still working perfectly fine. The internal bricks which store the heat are extremely heavy and I think they are made of some sort of magnetite sand. They are an excellent form of heating because of the half price night-time electricity. Never ever ever buy a heat pump they are complete and utter junk - I know from experience. Rather than having a heat pump, a nightstore heater is a far wiser choice and my guess is that they can be picked up cheaply secondhand. There is nothing to wear out and only the heating elements and switch might need replacing at some stage.
Single family homes often include a garage. where I live, homes have basements and footings are dug at least 4 feet deep. After pouring foundation walls, garage areas are typically back-filled to create a solid base for parking cars. This would be an opportunity to burs a thermal sand reservoir without additional cost of digging.
I have no doubt that this clever idea will become standard practice in time to come. Same in the UK, footings/foundations are dug to three feet deep initially and if they don't reach suitable ground they dig deeper until typically a good clay base is reached. This is necessary since the buildings are of heavy bricks and/or concrete block, necessitating a substantial foundation.
The main problem I see is the competition from hear pumps. Why store electricity as heat at 95% when I can store the electricity in a battery at 80% efficiency but then use a heat pump with a COP of 3.5 - 4 to provide home heating and hot water. Plus electric batteries can be used for AC in summer or during blackouts.
@@johnmcfarlane9416 Nop. Look at Carnot Efficiency. Heat pump are less good than resistive heating when the difference of temperature between the source and the sink is above 100oK. That's why heat pumps are a challenge to install in large building.
@@johnmcfarlane9416Nah, the heat pump works best at moderate temperatures. Sands main advantage is being able to go to higher temperatures than water. So you either don't get to use the sand very well or you have to use an inefficient and expensive high temperature heat pump.
Farmers use these methods for years in their glass houses. When the glass house is too hot at noon, the air is blown through a thick layer of gravel in the bottom of the house for cooling it down. At colder moments the heat is recuperated from the gravel to heat up the glass house.
Not enough heat.. i work in them... compost piles implementing rocket stove greenhouse methods is the way, and no cost since compost can be made from recycled local waste, leaves, or food scraps to make heated piles over 110F. Of course if you added the sane it would hold that even longer.. a hybrid of all that can and has been done, no electric needed except a small solar panel in cloudy cold days during season transition
@@dertythegrower So, does that translate to using solar panel electricity to run a heater that blows over/under the heat container gravel or burning compost in a rocket stove to do the same, then just letting it radiate naturally from the gravel ?
This is the storage option that interests me the most, largely because of its simplicity and resource demand to build. Very glad to hear there are smaller units being developed. It seems to me to be something that a community to could install. For me, living in a cold country, I can see how I can limit electricity demand but I struggle to limit heating demand.
and then you do the math. And then you laugh a lot! A small home would required only few hundred thousand gallons sand tank plus few millions in hardware...
@@pierregravel-primeau702 in Germany a DIY LFP Battery with 8kWh is actual 2000€. Next year, it will bei 16kWh for 1200€. This sand battery must be very very cheap, to compete with an easy to install Li Battery and Inverter.
There was an episode of "This Old House" where they spoke with someone with a not so old house who built everything himself and he works in commercial HVAC. He used two cisterns and used a heat pump to transfer heat from one cistern to the other. This resulted in a cistern so cold that it was frozen and another with very hot water. He could run the heat pump whenever it made sense to run it based on energy cost, or energy availability (solar or wind). Then, whenever heating or cooling of any kind is needed, it could tap into the appropriate cistern for that capability. It think that is really awesome because whenever we're running a heat pump, it would be good to capture both extremes... it is basically doubling the efficiency. I'd like to capture the heat from my refrigerator to pre-warm the water into my water heater (though that probably would have a negligible impact since it wouldn't run long enough).
Capture the refridgerator heat is possible. They do make heat reclaim units for this. There are ones you can buy for your central AC unit. I do not know the cost of them yet I am sure that they are expensive. Not only for the part to reclaim the heat. The tank you have to circulate the water in to extract the heat. Which would be a 2nd water heater to warm the water before it gets to said water heater. Then while your at it you might as well add another heating element and putt 1000 watts on it. The heat coming off my 2 fridges, 1 upright freezer and 3 chest freezers is quite alot. I would not mind having much larger walk in units or larger reach ins. I have considered buying 3 door reach in freezers/fridges like the ones you see in the stores yet without the glass doors and adding said reclaimer on it. Would these fridge/freezer (6 doors) be cheaper than a new fridge/freezer and would they be cost effective and would they last a long time? Not sure yet by my count they could be reasonably priced. I can put the compressors in the maintenance room and with a large enough pre tank could extract the heat from it. The question remains what If the water gets to the max temp. How do I cool it from there. I would like to add in a hot water loop in to the Hvac system and the floor heat loop as well. There is a lot of ideas and with enough money all of these systems could work together quite well. I could even use the excess heat to heat the slabs outdoor to remove snow. The other thing I was also thinking of was the concrete patio could have hot water tubes run in them then you circulate that water into the pool. Extracting every oz of heat from the concrete pad. One would have to blow out the water at the end of the year yet you could very well heat a pool from the slabs all around your pool.
@@kameljoe21 You're talking about a desuperheater. Those are only made for a geothermal heat pump, even though they could be made for any AC. They're actually not that expensive... usually $200-300.
@@dus10dnd """desuperheater""" I looked in to that word and these heat recovery units are made for any thing that compresses refrigerant. Does not really matter what its for. Now I have also seen a "smart" waterheater that uses duct work to use the air inside or outside to extract heat. While those water heaters are in the thousands and thousands of dollars, I think I would rather have a seperate unit as if it breaks down you can shut it off and bypass it. Same would go with the compressor recovery unit. For the cost of 800 to 1200 for the unit and install cost total of maybe 2k additional on a 5 ton unit. This could see a return pretty quick. My only problem right now is the design of my new house could be one HVAC unit or 3 HVAC units all heat pumps. The same with the water heater, one unit or 3 units. 2 living areas (bedroom, bathroom, living room office per living area) and the Kitchen and storage areas. Think of it like a duplex yet its not a duplex. I had intended to do a heat pump and water heater in each living area to not only allow for zoned heating and cooling. Adding 2k on top of this cost for all 3 units is just not ideal. Going to a single unit and water heater is cheaper yet not being able to split the zone to keep contaminated air out. So this is just not cost effective at all. Now if I could find a source cheaper we still need to have a pre water heater and a pump to circulate that water around in the tank. If the tank is too small it will not save any money. If the tank is too big I do not think it will make any difference. Like 5 to 120 gallon size change. The only thing would be alterntive heating capabilities for said tank. Like installing a 500 watt panel on the roof to supply direct currect to the water heater during the day.
Living in Maine I have a bias toward using wood for heating as it is cheap,and renewable here. I built a wood fired, sand battery to heat a friend’s home. It was simple to build and very efficient. We built it from plans he had acquired from the University of Maine back in the seventies. Some of the materials used should probably be updated to newer, better materials but I will describe it as we built it. It started with a concrete slab about 10x10x6” thick. We built a concrete block building 8x8x8 with a wood stove running down the middle of it. The stove was about 7’ long and 24”high and wide. The building was insulated on the inside of the brick with 4” of styrofoam and 6” of vermiculite under the wood stove to protect the concrete. We then filled the building with sand to a point about a foot over the firebox. We then put in what seemed to be miles of 1/2” pvc pipe arranged in manifolds feeding cold water in the bottom and hot water out of the top. Each run of pipe had a blow over valve in case it got too hot. We insulated the top with a foot of styrofoam and plywood screwed down on top. Around all of this we built a wood shed with a six cord capacity and room in front of the firebox to tend the fire. We used antifreeze in the water to insure that it wouldn’t freeze if it was left un attended in the winter. All of this was about 20’ behind his house. We dug a trench and insulated the pipes heavily about 4’ underground These pipes were brought into the basement and attached directly to an existing water boiler which could be valved off so you could use either heat source but with the same circulation equipment. My friend lights a small fire once or twice a day and provides all the heat he needs for his home. If I was to build it today I would use pex pipe and the styrofoam concrete forms rather than blocks.
This is neat, but the problem is sand is an insulator when it's at rest. That's why you see these modern sand batteries use blowers to agitate the sand with hot air. I contemplated doing something like this but ultimately decided the complexity/cost of a blower that could handle the very hot air, and the cost of energy to continuously 'stir' heavy sand, was not worth it on a small scale.
Sounds basically like a more complex bonfire over a box of sand and i like it. Like the natural "AC units" burrowed beside the houses in many hot arabic countries. We run a 15 kW peak PV system with 10kWh storage, the energy we dont use goes via a heat pump into a 3000l water buffer storage for the central heating. In tandem in colder days with bad weather we have a 30kW wood gasifier to bring up the buffer storage to 80 or even 85°C for 2-3 days of heating capacity. Typically a 300l hot tap water boiler with 11kW internal electric heater is heated by the 3000l buffer in winter, but in summer they act independently, tap water boiler heated electrically and the 3000l buffer is cooled down to about 7°C via heat pump to cool the house "24/7". The first thing we got was the heat pump beside the wood gasifier, 3000l buffer and 300l boiler. Without PV system, the heat pump was rarely used and only when it really made sense, yet it costed "much" to run, they are only nice when you produce your own energy. Just the PV system made the whole heat pump so different to use... It runs nearly daily with PV system (to avoid feeding into the grid) and so either gives us FREE room heating, hot tap water or even cooling the whole house. In general about 90-95% of our yearly electricity consumption is covered by 15kW peak with 10kWh battery and mostly enough excess production to keep the house warm or cold, just in the winter a bit wood is needed when its really cold and bad outside. Still, as much we try to avoid feeding in the grid, about 30-40% of our electricity production we give the greedy energy suppliers for little money (and even have to pay 25% taxes on this SUPER TINY "profit"...)
What about using salt instead of sand? We have plants extracting fresh water from the oceans left with excess salt that they can't throw back into the ocean. Salt also has a higher specific energy.
Phase change materials (PCMs) are substances that absorb and release heat when they change state. They can be used to store thermal energy for a variety of applications. There are several materials that are considered as PCMs, their characteristics being increasingly investigated in order to incorporate them into thermal energy storage applications. Some of them include: Inorganic systems (salt, salt hydrates and metal alloys) Organic compounds (paraffins, fatty acids) Polymeric materials (polyethylene glycol) These present different temperature storage ranges and enthalpy energy storage characteristics. For instance, paraffins and salt hydrates are typically enough to guarantee thermal energy storage as incorporated in building materials; on the other hand, salts are used for storage at higher temperatures, such as the one needed in power plants.
Sodium sulphate degahydrate is one nice option for storing heat for house heating with heat pumps. It's cheap, phase change (melts) is about 32 C. Thats easy to heat with heat pump, and if heated max 60 C, also plastic vessel can be used with foam insulation. Sodium acetate hydrate melts about 60C.
I've been considering something like this when we build a home with underground water storage. Not a compact system, but 5-10k gallons underground in heated or cooled water with a high efficiency heat exchange system. The critical failing between this and almost all the systems that are out there is that they will not work for people with low to moderate incomes. It's only going to be people with nice homes and a bit of land. What's going to work for everybody is going to be fissiom-based nuclear power for the next 30 to 40 years while we transition to fusion.
If your state allows that much water at a residence... heh. Some states do not even allow simple rain barrels now.. Cheers.. one of the realest, and smartest gurus.. cool to see you here.
100 time less dumb than pumping sand! But you can't make a start up in Abu Dabi to pump and dump, pump pump and dump! (That's Matt role in the universe)
@@dertythegrower they do, a guy near me has only rainwater runoff to a uv+reverse osmosis system for all household water, two 10k gallon holding tanks.
Yeah it's like a storage heater. We had them here in the UK in the 80's, 90's and 2000's but the heat was stored in bricks in the heater itself and insulated until the heat is released. They are designed to heat up when the energy use is low and so cheaper and release the energy in the evening in Winter time. The heat released from the isn't very hot, just warm.
Cheap n perhaps not so cheerful. Problem is that they give out most heat when you don’t want it, early in the day. Very simple though, if energy at night is cheap enough, and you are at home all day, acceptable. One other issue is that they roast the air, or at least the dust, making it a bit irritating
They were great until the were render obsolete by heat pump. Problem 1 : they are almost impossible to set up efficiently. How do they get the signal to heat up and how do they get the signal to release heat? Problem 2 : having 500oC bricks waste a lot of heat. Studied show that the efficiency of this device is about 80%. Loosing 20% of the heat to store 10 kWh of heat is not great when an heat pump reach 300% efficiency at -20oC. Problem 3 : they are huge and cost a lot.
You want high specific heat, not low, for storage (eg: more watt-hours to heat up a Kg of water or sand or ceramic - and of course get it back when needed). There are heat storage devices such as ceramic based base board heaters. Thus, during the night when the utility rate is low, you heat up the ceramic in the baseboard heater - it traps that heat. Then, in the daytime when the thermostat demands it, louvers open to allow air to flow through and release the heat. This has been sold for several decades in Canada. The real issue is "heat quality" where the best way to store heat is as at hot a temperature as possible (needs really good insulation - because of the heat loss equation where heat is lost as 4th power of the temperature).
"heat loss equation where heat is lost as 4th power of the temperature" And thats the issue i have with sand storage. I mean, what if i "overdrive" the sand storage to a point it basically loses much energy because of the temperature difference or even worse... burn the insulator or worst.... bring the metal box to melt! As much i appreciate new and more environmental friendly attempts for central heating and heating in general, most people dont have the money and ground to do that. We do it a "hybrid" way of big PV system, mediocre battery size for overnight and small electric boilers mainly and excess energy produced goes via a heat pump in a 3000l buffer storage, either cooled down to 6°C in summer or around 45-65°C for heating via the central heating system. I rather prefer a heat pump and 3,5-4,5x the heat energy per electric energy than a storage which can at best produce like 90% of what you put into (electrically!). Good for MUCH excess electric energy and "high" demands over night, but i prefer the heat pump and a "big" water storage, gives you at least 3-4x the heating power per watt than sand storage and is smaller. Or heat pump is already an old model from like 2009, yet it runs like a beast and mostly daily for 2-15 hours depending on cooling/heating needs. I am pretty sure without the additional heating energy "created" by the heat pump our 15 kW PV system might not be enough for our needs at all.
@@harrison00xXx The systems presumably have an upper bound on temperature so as you approach that it won't allow more to be added (a thermostat of sorts). As the system stabilizes (heat spread inside) it may permit some last bits of heat to be added. Vacuum vessel walls may play a role in great insulation. It is hard to justify the expense and complexity of this system to a good heat pump. I still see this as a off-peak solution, however, similar to what I described for baseboard heating (already in use) which stores purchased heat at lower cost and releases it when electricity rates are higher.
Owned a home in the UK for a few years in the 1970s that used sandstone as a heat sink in a forced air system-very rare at the time. Electricity heated the system at night on the “white meter” when rates were low. Occasionally, we’d run out of heat during the day, but never before the pubs reopened. 😮 Electric blankets helped too. Brits recommended hot water bottles or foot warmers. Didn’t have a fire for the latter. Great times!
Your house is also a thermal energy storage device. In the summer, cool it down during the day (with solar) more than you normally would and you can enjoy a good amount of cooling at night. Similar with heating in winter
One low tech no energy heat storage solution that many can implement if they have south facing windows is called a trombe wall. It is achieved by creating thermal mass, with either sand or water in containers or tubes (preferably black).
🏡 agreed. I use a combination of heat pump, solar panels, LI-batteries, whole house fan, and the opening and closing of thermally insulated cellular window shades to regulate our home’s temperature year round for near-net-zero energy usage.
ive heard stories of people in hot countries keeping sandbags in their house which they move outside at night and bring back inside in the day to regulate their homes temperature.
@@pyrholorange 'heard'? Do you remember where? I live in a hot country, though never seen any sandbag. I will search for it, but any help is appreciated.
Here in rural France we are used to having giant holes dug in our gardens as there is no mains drainage on these 200 year old stone houses. A BatSand battery would take up about the same space as a 3,000 litre 'fosse septique'. All our neighbours have huge gardens, ours is a hectare..so space isn't a problem. What is a problem is putting solar panels on the roof as there are no loft voids to keep inverters cool. We have our solar panels on a barn roof about 40 metres from the house. If you didn't or couldn't use solar a home sand battery could be used for time shifting the energy, France has a lot of nuclear power with nowhere to go during the night. Keeping the sand hot with cheap overnight power and distributing it to the property during the day would help balance the grid.
I think you're right, using these systems to balance the grid. Decentralized and diversified energy storage is going to be the future. The more distributed it is, the less sensitive to outages and disasters.
In time the UK, Eire, and Norway will have the same problem re. wind energy that France does re. nuclear. Since we'll be exporting to the Benelux and Germany, it's a good thing that a Dutch company is among those focusing on this area.
Given the type and distribution of properties this form of energy saving will make no appreciable difference to the overall situation. Less than 1% of properties could either afford nor find he space for such systems.
I live in a very sunny area, and we got a solar water heater installed in our roof. It set me back like $500 but I spent $50 on gas last year, for the entire year
I live in the not so sunny UK, and fitted a 20 tube hot water solar panel about 17 years ago. I don’t know how much it has saved us over the years, but gas use for hot water is zero in the summer.
We compound this, we store solar in water here, comes off the roof via wires, goes to the heat pump hot water service, then we use it when the sun don't shine. Once the water is heated (or realistically at the same time) we top up batteries for everything else.
This idea reminds me of an old idea for storing heat from solar collectors some time ago. The basic idea was to move heat from the collector to a rock storage bin, generally placed under the floor of the structure. These TES's strike me as an update to that same idea with a more mature, well thought out compartmentalization between the thermal storage media and the heat source/sink.
I have a few thermal batteries in my house. My water heater is an electric one that I heat with my woodstove in the winter and the I heat it with my excess solar power in the summer. We have lots of hot water year round here in Canada. Also my insulated cement floor is a thermal mass that heats up from my passive solar, southern windows in the summer but not in the winter (because of how I sized my roof overhang) and also in the winter the glycol that heated my water then goes into my infloor heating pipes and also warms the floor. It works very well and was inexpensive to install and maintain. In the cellar I did not insulate under the floor so that it can stay naturally cool all summer and winter. My house is built into a south facing hillside and is 8 feet deep at the back but above ground at the front
In AZ, my whole backyard is sand. Literally, in the summer, I turn the hot water heater OFF because the sun does a good job keeping the water hot in the summer. I actually use my hot water heater in the summer as my cold water. Plus, it helps keep my electrical costs down by not heating the water in the summer.
You miss the point. And didnt see the sand is contained into a strong durable holder. If it wast forvaand, earth would not exists. Maybe you should find a nice spit on ie Venus.. remember Mars is like earth .. compacted from sand ..
To improve the system it would be beneficial to: 1. Avoid energy conversion by heating sand more directly (without converting sun to electricity) at least for initial heating 2. Retrieve energy same way 3. Use existing space, like under building space, in UK most houses have suspended floors, if not water flooded, it may be useful 4. Warm up space AND water used in bathroom, as these two are biggest energy consumers 5. Think about cooling possibilities in summertime.
I’m working towards establishing a green, off-grid commune and this technology seems like the only option that really is non-toxic, I hope it is launched soon. I’d be a guaranteed buyer.
Back in 1980 my neighbor put electric heat elements in a sand bed under a slab on grade home . It was heated during/ on off peak rates. Now with solar pv panels are so cheep it could be powered. In my build at the time I put 320 soft of hot water collectors into a 800 gallon ss tank I welded up in my basement that supplies radiant slabs & backed up with a wood fired boiler in the garage.
We have a large brick chimney inside our home that is heated with wood ( from our property ) . Even after the fire goes out, it seems the large mass of warm brick keeps at least the living room warm for at least a day. ( but takes a lot to heat it up when we first light the fire ) Somewhat the same as what you are talking about here Matt.
Yeah, people from around the world have different ways to use thermal mass. In some parts of the world, fireplace and cooking stove are together and in the middle of the house, and the chimney goes up and down a few times to retain as much heat as possible inside the chimney "wall".
This is what Masonry Heaters are all about - thermal mass and moving the air around inside of it through channels. I'll be installing one in my next home instead of a conventional fireplace. They can even be made with a water channel in them to go into a buffer tank for pre-heating a hydronic radiant heat system.
I bought a 180 year old house and rehabbed it. I installed in-floor radiant heat. I used sand as the thermal mass. It was lighter and slower to release energy as concrete. In addition I didn't have to worry about floor deflection too much, though I beefed up the floor support a lot. While it takes a long time to heat up the sand at the beginning of winter its ability to hold and slowly release the heat means even in worst case where we loose power our house only drops about 5-8 degrees F in a 24 hour period, even taking into account we usually only loose power during winter storms. So we don't modulate the heat up or down during winter and can keep the sand warm through a slow "trickle charge". Because I treat my sand like a "battery" I can use a small tankless hot water heater to keep it warm instead of a boiler.
@GreyDeathVaccine It was something like 4 yards. So yes, it is in the floor. I sealed the original subfloor, built risers, laid the pex, buried the pex in sand then laid a new plywood subfloor on the risers. The original subfloor is pine planks had much too high deflecting to support concrete or gypsum-crete so sand was the best option.
we in Malaysia had abundant of solar sunshine and rain all year round. We did not fully utilized this gift yet we keep on making so much of noise on gas fuel prices yet never willing to try on alternative energy. Sometimes people which live in a colder climate tend to have a clever brain. They able to use every single drop of resources available without waste.
It is actually the insulation that holds the heat in as anyone that lives in the desert can attest to, sand heats quickly and realeases the heat just as quickly. You can experience thermal swings from 100+ ferinheight to ~60 f when it transistions from day to night and the transistion only takes an hour to 3 hours.
In the late 1970s - early 80s, our local electric co-op in northern Minnesota promoted off-peak water heaters and home heating to try and smooth out power demand. We had a forced air, oil furnace. With the rise of OPEC, oil had become very expensive, so my dad converted. The hot water heater was like a typical electric heater, but 2x larger, made of plastic and super-insulated. The furnace was essentially a large box filled with bricks and a blower unit (took up a little less space in the basement space as had the oil tank, oil furnace and chimney stack). Both were charged up with heat during off-peak electrical usage hours. That was overnight generally, but during exceptional cold the power company would provide a bump in the afternoon. That didn’t happen very frequently. We paid a much lower rate for the off-peak power. To make it work required upsizing our transformer and line drop wire gauge, and installing a second, dedicated, off-peak meter, power feed, and electrical panel. Winters are cold in northern Minnesota, but it always kept us warm. The hot water heater worked ok for a family of four, but you couldn’t take long showers. Both the water heater and the furnace are still working fine almost 50 years later, with one replacement of the heating elements in the furnace. The only problem is the furnace was from Europe, and the manufacturer no longer exists, so replacement parts and service are hard to get/non-existent. With how well that old system has worked in a very cold environment, I’d have no qualms adopting one of these new versions of stored heat home heating.
First US-households have other energy saving measures to tackle. Most houses in the US have very bad thermal insulation ! One glass- panel windows are still Standard while in the EU 3-panel glass with infrared-reflecting coating are de-facto Standard! Isolation of your home can save you lots of money and energy. With windows and wall isolation about *50%* of heating/cooling cost!
Love the channel! We went fully electric, solar, and are now the first zero carbon auto glass company in Colorado. I hope this new tech can help us all to store our solar now!!!! Thanks again Matt.
I think that thermal energy capture and storage generally deserves more thought and investment than it currently receives, and the relative ease and efficiency of storage is one of the main benefits. A few years ago I designed and installed a system for capturing the waste heat from multiple small refrigeration sets in a medium sized cheese factory. Water cooled condensers were added to the refrigeration sets, and water was circulated through these via accurate flow control valves. Temperature probes on the refrigeration pipes leaving the condensers fed data to a PLC, which controlled the water flow through the valves. This was so accurate that the refrigeration outlet temperature was stable to within half a degree, and we could capture effectively 100% of the available thermal energy. The warmed water was stored in an insulated stainless steel silo, then fed into the main boiler instead of cold water. The temperature of the water in the tank continued to rise overnight, so in the morning the main boiler got up to temperature much quicker and the factory was operational sooner. The output temperature of the boiler was also more stable, making it easier to keep processes in the factory stable. There was a 25% reduction in gas usage in the main boiler, 10% reduction in electricity use in the refrigeration sets and a considerable increase in reliability in the refrigeration sets, with reduced failure rate and maintenance. and over-pressure cutouts on extremely hot days were no longer an issue. Based on measurable parameters (reduction in electricity and gas bills) the payback was 14 months, with many significant "other" benefits. I simply cannot understand why this type of system is not built into all factories and commercial premises which have refrigeration and a need for hot water or space heating. I am definitely keen to see thermal energy storage brought into the domestic scene as well.
The potential of thermal energy storage in transforming residential energy use is immense. It's exciting to see how TES can integrate with renewable sources to enhance home efficiency
Years ago, I watched a video where a builder of an earth-berm home heated his entire house all winter with an earth battery made of several layers of 6-mil plastic, foam sheets of insulation, and very, very dry and clean sand. All of this was made into a hill next to the house (on the highest part of the property) in order to prevent the super heated sand from ever getting wet. If the sand became the least bit damp, the system could fail. I had considered doing a poured "basement" under the floor of my three car garage that I could super-insulate, fill with sand, cover with @ 12" of foam board, then pour my reinforced cement floor over the entire battery. A couple of evacuated tube solar water heaters on the roof should provide sufficient heat all summer to then be released via a secondary loop system that could either feed radiators or even an A-coil in a forced air system. I haven't crunched the numbers to see how many cubic yards of medium would be needed or the exact number of solar heaters needed to super heat the sand... But, for years, I've wanted to try this.
Sand only has an advantage when high temperatures are acceptable. Sand has low specific heat (start from 3:10 minuts). You bring it as an advantage, but it is a real disadvantage as you need more of it, or higher temperature to store the same amount of heat energy. Sand has about 800 J/kg/K, water has 4000 J/kg/K. Volume based, sand has 1400 kJ/m3/K, water has 4000 kJ/m3/K. Last winter I used 110 m3 of natural gas for heating and hot water (3.6 GJ). I already use some passive heating. This year maybe less as I added more insulation to the house. So I need about 20 m3 of water to store my heat energy for the winter. Assumed that losses are not that big compared to the stored heat energy. Losses will be a problem. Loss goes with surface, and storage goes will volume. So large heat storage installations can have less relative heat loss. At some time in the season It may be better to store directly via solar thermal panels instead of PV panels.
@prressurr definitely a telltale sign that people do not know wtf they are talking about. I worked for a renewable startup where they did the same thing, they could not grasp energy or power units. Their utter ignorance was blatantly obvious.
@@tanner3801 Don't get me wrong, kWh is useful and easy to work with within certain industries. It's just conceptually inelegant because it isn't simplified; its like working with 2(10/5) because someone can't be bothered to reduce it to to the equivalent value of 4. i.e. 1 W = 1 J/s, so 1 Wh is 1 joule per second times 1 hour
If you build a new house you can make the TES part of the foundation of the house. Fill your empty foundation parts full of sand and make it into a TES, with solar panels on the roof to heat it.
I did something similar when I built my energy efficient new home in ct , I used 150 evacuated solar hot water directly into 1 ft sand under 6” concrete slab along with heat 120 gal hot water tank. I use roof overhang to partially shade solar water system in summer. Otherwise I would get too much hot water
actually i think there is a shortage of sand, and cost increase at the moment, something to do with preserving beaches. Though i guess a lot in the sahara
Your deep dives on tech are great. You should do a deep dive into regenerative agriculture. You'll discover that industrial monocropping of corn, wheat, and soy -- the basis of vegetarianism -- is the most destructive thing on the planet, and that properly-raised livestock are the only way to produce the soil we need to survive on this planet, not to mention that meat is far more nutritious than plants.
This video made me wonder if a water heater blanket made with sand would be beneficial? Trapping the heat in sand might extend the time the water heater holds the thermal energy.
I wonder if you just buried your water heater underground, so that it your heating delta from ambient is higher and the tank is insulated. Wait isn't that just geothermal now.
Emphasizing sustainability, another benefit of TES especially these solutions that the materials to make them are both environmentally inert and more ethically sourced than those of Lithium ion batteries. If these fail or need to be decommissioned, materials like sand and water pose very little risk to a local ecosystem.
During the previous winter, we frequently experienced power outages due to issues with our neighbors. Our home uses an electric water heating system and a fireplace that heats water. This heated water then passes through a heat exchanger to warm the house. We also have a 5kw solar station. Our hot water needs are catered to by a 250-liter water boiler, which can utilize up to three heat sources. These include electricity, heat from the fireplace, and a gas heater. However, we never installed a gas heater, so one of the heater's in/out was unused. I decided to connect this unused in/out to our heating system. Through home automation, I set it up so that during a power outage, the hot water from the boiler would serve as a heat source to maintain a comfortable temperature in the house. The system was configured to stop the heat exchange when the boiler's water temperature dropped to 32 degrees. Thus, I was able to use the heat range from 70 to 32 degrees. This heat energy was sufficient to maintain the home's temperature during power outages, eliminating the need to start the fireplace. The boiler model we use is the Drazice OKC 250 NTRR/BP. Essentially, this solution mirrors what was demonstrated in the video, but at a significantly lower cost :)
My regional power company has an electric thermal storage system as an option for those that want to sign up for a “time-of-day rate” power plan (lower cost per kWh during off-peak period). The ETS apparently uses ceramic bricks, and has three installation options: room unit systems, central heating, and in-floor radiant. It’s just that if the peak period wasn’t so wide (7am-11pm) and its cost/kWh so expensive, an ETS would be practical for more people. (Peak cost in winter is ~105% more than the cost of off-peak; in summer the peak cost is ~60% more than off-peak.)
Indoor air, outdoor air, and hot water tank. We need a multi-directional heatpump that can harvest heat from temps as low as -60C, and heat water to 99C. You could perhaps also put a refrigerant coil in the attic where temps soar in the summer or in the earth where they're fairly constant nomatter what you do. Isn't geothermal just TES using the earth's mass as your battery?
@@hrushikeshavachat900 nope. At least in the "European" part of Russia where I grew up, hearing is turned off for about half a year. It's actually hot during summer months and you may want air conditioning.
@@hrushikeshavachat900 even behind the polar circle, in permafrost areas, you've got summer with temperatures that would make heating uncomfortable at least. But in those places you actually do not have sun for half a year, so ...
😮 Building it into a foundation of a house might be a good idea, in my opinion. You already have to dig a pit to put in foundations anyway. It could solve the size issue if it's under the house itself. 🤷♂️ Just a thought anyway.
Building your house on sand is not the best idea. Even contained like this, you are putting significant load on a material that can gradually be pushed out of the way, leading to foundation cracks. You basically need all the structural support of a basement going through the sand, which adds the cost right back.
@@christianvanderstap6257 Sorry, but that's not true. The cost of installation he gave above subtracts out to $11,300 for his low end projection. The Batsand low end size is 40 cubic meters, which would cost $3,900 to excavate, meaning you're looking at $7,400 in hardware and thermal containment. On average, a basement costs $8k more than no basement for a home, so for this system with all the costs he mentioned, you're looking at $23,100 to do it as a basement vs letting them dig their sand pit in your yard for a total cost of $19,000. You might be able to get some efficiencies with clever engineering, but that would be a per-house situation so you'd be paying for the architect AND the approval process for that, which is an order of magnitude more expensive. Being a cookie-cutter system saves a lot of money. Not to mention the risks of differential load if you did go seeking those efficiencies.
For 60 years storage heaters using heavy blocks were quite common in areas without a gas supply in the UK. This was due to a lower tariff at night brought in with the introduction of nuclear power which can’t easily reduce it’s power output. It used to be less than 50% of the day rate, although now a bit more. The Nationalised electricity supplier would fit a special meter which changed over the readings, and a lot of installations had the switching for the heaters built in. Their use has decreased over the years as old heaters have reached the end of their life.
Your content is always inspiring possibilities shot down by a terrifying price tag despite the fact that much of this groundbreaking green energy tech is simple devices made with cheap materials. Its like watching an awesome movie with a horrible ending every time. Im gonna start making my own black market versions with blueprints included and hand them out to poor people. Enough is enough.
In the US, there are several reasons why high efficiency / high capex systems aren’t common… 1. Most people move every 5-7 years, even those building their ‘forever’ home rarely stay more than 10 years. 2. Residential homes aren’t energy rated and most people don’t understand cash flow modeling, these systems are ‘fully depreciated’ (I.e. given no value vs basic hot water heater or similar) when sold. So why would an owner pay for a 30-40 year device they are only going to use for 5-10 years? 3. Landlords should be the target for credits and rebate programs, as they may actually hold on to the asset for 10+ years and they are able to amortize & depreciate the cost - but many of these credits are written specifically for ‘home owners’. Since landlords don’t have to pay for the utilities, they don’t have any other motive to upgrade their assets’ energy efficiency. This leaves tenants paying higher utilities vs homeowners, which is unfortunate. Landlords do however want low maintenance, so I think if these were subsidized for landlords, you could get more adoption over time.
Just a minor point. Southern Alberta, Drake’s Landing is not “dark” in Winter or Summer. Cold, yes, but the region gets more sunlight per year then southern Italy.
@@ghsfdl4350 This was a minor mistake and I corrected it for the sake of clarity. Stop with the "green energy pushers" nonsense, since there has been a widely documented campaign since as far back as the 1950's by the oil industry to obfuscate and confuse the public about climate change.
Here's a novel concept why not build the interior walls from high density clay blocks or bricks as these will store alot of heat and make the exterior walls from low density highly insulative materials giving a building effectively a spine that acts as a thermal store. You could even run heating elements through the wall or add IR wallpaper to it and it's insulated from the exterior by your home.
It's used in some buildings but not often enough. It's called thermal mass. Underfloor heating is a great way to heat a house as it has a large area, so only needs low temperatures.
@@Ed.R Exactly maybe they should consider this more often as it can have a big effect. Personally I'm not a fan of under floor heating as I have always suffered with hot feet but the principle is good.
I lived in a 'green' house way back in the 1970s in Vermont. We had TWO windmills in our yard. That experience, and observations since, have led me to conclude that coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power are the best, most efficient and most environment-friendly energy sources of all.
Heat storage has been around for decades in the form of night storage radiators containing heating elements and special bricks. These have been popular in the UK since the time electricity became available cheaply for 7 hours a night - hence economy 7. More recently smart meters have allowed people to get cheaper tariffs at different times for varying periods and uses.
@peaksoil another way to solve this is with thermally massive, but vapor permeable insulating materials. Hemplime and other similar biocomposites are an example.
I grew up with this kind of heating in Germany. it's called "Nachtspeicherofen". Basically just an insulated box with around 500 kg of rocks in it. It charges over night, when the prices are lower, and then stays warm over the day. To output heat, you can activate a little fan. Really old technology
The thermal battery I built in 1986 consists of a 800 gallon 308 stainless tank & radiant slabs on all floors. Heat source is 320 square feet of hydronic solar panels & a wood fired boiler for backup.
This makes way more sense if paired with geothermal where heat acquired = heat stored instead of solar or wind where electricity to heat to electricity. Wing Chun works because you use the momentum of energy and redirect it, constantly trying to change an energy's form is the brute force method and results in avoidable loss and wear.
You forgot to mention that these systems dont lose efficiency unlike current battery technology systems. So in theory those sand batteries can last a lifetime.
@@torginus they said the about the electric car and its still is kinda true. But I get what you mean I've stopped watching his videos as often, Because alot of them are like kickstarter campaigns they seem good on paper but such when put into action. Also he seems to ignore true technological progress such as wood gassifiers or methane. Which are already proven technologies that will likely be where our economy will head.
Humans are specifically designed to thrive on meat. There's a very good reason the vast majority of people who go vegan end up returning to a naturally omnivorous state.
@@joeds3775 Except everything I stated in my op is backed by empirical facts. I'd be happy to get into this when I have some free time, but I'll warn you in advance that it won't go well for you. There are limited legitimate arguments for veganism to be found on environmental grounds, but the dietary angle and moral imperative are easily debunked. Feel free to make your best case, and I'll come back in the next couple of days with a comprehensive response.
I once saw a experimental house that collected sunlight through giant windows and just inside of those windows were a few tall pillars made out of many 150L oil steel barrels welded together, painted black and filled with sand. The black steel would absorb the heat of the sun and heat up the sand within it, which then would slowly released the heat when the sun was down. It was not used as a primary heat source but as a big complementary one. The ones living there said it worked as intended and they were very saticfied with it. Another house did similar through a green house part of the house that heated up a cob/brick wall and floor. The excess heat generated was then pumped into the house (or ventilated out depended on the temperatur). When the night came the floor tiles ans the backwall of cob/brick the slowly released the heat stored during the day. None of these used water as a way to carry the heat, only air.
The heat capacity per volume is about 3 times higher for water than for sand!!! Better to use a classic water boiler for energy storage if only little space is available!
I have always wanted a residential CHP fuel cell for my home. Being able to overflow from one of those into a heat battery could really go a long way towards boosting efficiency. The fantasy has always been to run it off a methane waste digestor, but that is really a fantasy.
In South Florida, finding heat is not really a problem. We just use blankets, jackets, and space heaters for those 10 or so nights a year when it gets cold.
About 20 years ago we lived in Maryland and had a house that used heating oil and heated with baseboard water radiators. So, our system was also our water heater. It was incredibly expensive to use! We paid as much as $900 a month for the heating oil. We kept the thermostat at 50F all winter. The tech is here, we just need cheaper energy production.
The sand battery should be built under the floors of new buildings...like they do for septic storage in Nepal..where there is little land and expensive. Then the heat simply rises to warm the houses or buildings.
Great to see everyone's stories of low tech TES solutions over the years. I'm an engineer and I worked in solar thermal and thermal storage for a while. It's great to see it come back to life. I agree with some of your last thought about electric resistance heating coming back to life. If we have enough solar and renewable energy it makes sense again. I don't see solar thermal hot water coming back for residential because of all the moving parts required. PV is more versatile although less efficient.
I have a 3T mass stove in the center of the house. This is a great way of heating. It is made of massive stone...the only issue is the time to heat up...around 6h. But you do a fire once a day and it is comfy for 24h.
Here in Norway, geothermal heat pumps have become more and more popular, as the price for installation have become cheaper. Not the same thing as TES but, as you said, most of our energy consumption is for heating, so the principal is still the same. Use energy stored in the earth to heat exchange with some thing stored inside the house, usually water.
What I really want is a heat battery that will store heat for about 6-9 months. At that point, I can hold all the heat from summer over to warm my house in winter and then use the cold from winter to cool my house in summer. Alas, thermodynamics and heat insulation limits make that a pipe dream. Current systems are only good for a few days at best as the heat leaks away: they're really designed just to level out daily heating loads, not annual heating and cooling loads.
@johnfreiler6017 ...seasonal storage is what the Batsand system does, at least in one direction. You warm the insulated sand battery in summer with excess solar PV energy to use in winter for your heat. It doesn't work the other way, but that is how a number of ground source heat pump systems work in places with appropriate ground conditions that either naturally don't leak heat too much or that can be insulated. You dig a borehole field that you heat in summer with your AC load (and top up with solar thermal collectors if your heating load is sufficiently high relative to your cooling load), and cool in winter with your heating load (and if your cooling load is bigger than your heating load, supplement the heat loss with radiators). Generally this has only been cost effective with fairly large district heating/cooling systems such as the Drake's Landing system, or institutional ones like at multiple university campuses that have operated for decades. In the case of universities they often put them under a field.
A couple decades ago, I tried to convince my parents to add a thermal energy storage system to the house, as due to huge underground rocks found when they dug the foundation, we had a section of our basement that only had a six foot ceiling, around 800 square feet of room that did little other than accumulate junk. In my imagination I was using rocks in insulated tanks full of water, gaining heat from rooftop water cooled solar panels. The water pump for the roof array would have been powered by a photovoltaic panel, which automatically controls the pump to only run on sunny days. then another water loop from the tanks that would be used by a heat pump to warm up the water for domestic hot water and water based heating system. It was never anything more than imagination, as they wouldn't let me do it. But I do feel vindicated that the idea seems sound, and low cost.
Im building a thermal battery out of my wood furnace. It has a very large volume for a wood box. I'm tired of burning wood. I want to be completely off grid and every little thing helps.
I use a instant on gas water heater... turned on ONLY when I need a shower or hot water elsewhere. Of course my plumbing has been down for months due to leaks (I am disabled due to issues standing for long due to a bad knee -- hope to take my Addmotor etrike to the store today -- would use my regular adult trike except one hill I need to go up is too dangerous for me to go up at under 2-3 mph (west bound shoulder is mostly unusable due to mailboxes now too near the widened roadway and drainage ditches along the road and the speed limit 55 mph, and only two lane, so need to get up hill ASAP so I do not cause an accident by someone trying to go around me near the crest of the hill... I live under 100 yards on the west side of the crest of the hill... and also have to cross the roadway to get to my driveway -- both car & truck rotted away due to Ohio road salt).
I've heard in Quebec they install these furnaces with insulated ceramics bricks that are heated when electric rates are low. then that heat is released to heat your house when rates are high.
How about including US customary units along with metric so we don’t have to keep pausing the video to calculate conversions? I get a third of the way through the video then decide it’s just not worth finishing.
I live in Calgary (just north of where the Drake Landing community is in Okotoks) and I can promise you that while you are correct that it gets very cold here in winter going down to -36C or -32.8F plus the wind chill effect but Calgary (a 15 min drive from my community in the SE corner to Drakes Landing in Okotoks), is also literally the most sunny spot in Canada with over 333 days of sunshine per year. So to be fair, that will be a major factor in solar efficiency and a big reason solar is very popular here (plus solar panels are well known to work best when not physically hot). I personally think all new homes, the world over should be combining passive house design (especially building the north side onto an earth burm for the northern hemisphere, opposite for the southern hemisphere and r70 or greater insulation), solar, wind, principals of natural convection and geothermal run through a sand battery tech, along with heat pumps in colder areas. Plus we use 2 very portable, indoor use solar furnaces (large one inside the house very close to an east facing patio door and a smaller one in a south facing small garage window) that I made myself using aluminum window screen for less that $50 for both. I end up up keeping the temp at about 21C +/- 2C inside the house into the late afternoon and do not have the furnace turn on, the garage while no means as warm as the house is far warmer in winter than our previous house that had no windows.
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Do I want thermal energy for my home? Use this code for food? Do you not even see how cringy these sponsored posts are becoming?
Appreciate the feedback, but the video itself (TES) isn’t a sponsored post. I should have separated this sentences better from the sponsor.
Not to mention the seed oils will fill your cellular membranes with double bonds.
@@jamesbizsbuddy.. it is not the best native advertising, but for him to do this a lot requires a sponsor for funding.. youtube ads in itself are nowhere near as clever.. i am now getting multinational military submarine ads here, and nonstop ads about 1400 obama checks which are not even really allowed..
I'm too stupid to realize this now. We should get heat energy from AirCond, and redirect that heat into desert like Egypt/Africa. The desert itself becomes the "largest battery" in the world. This can solve Climate heat issue, as well as provide energy.
My grandfather had a sand radiator in his logging cabin for over 110 years ago. It was a metal box filled with sand that the smoke pipe of the stove zigzagged through. It kept the cabin warm 24 hours even in -40 Celsius.
Blessings and prayers from arctic part of Sweden 🇸🇪
That's amazing. I'd love to try that uograde here for my Canadian shop woodstove
Did it clog up the stovepipe more with it having all the extra bends ?
@@mdube391 the reason creosote builds up is that the chimney cools down, allowing the exhaust to cool and crystalize. so yeah, it would be a lot dirtier than a straight pipe, but it beats the hell out of freezing. the Russians did the same thing with their masonry stoves. though the medium there is stone, not sand. they need a lot of clean out ports to keep those things clear.
Thank you for explaining this to me. I've now done some research and want to build a whole new heating setup for my shop
@@stagiestpizza The REAL reason that creosote builds up, is incomplete combustion which produces creosote.
Using a damper and trying to run the fire all night is the problem.
Create a strong updraft, allow maximum oxygen to fully burn all the wood gases, run the flue through sand which never gets completely cold, and there will be no creosote.
Burn hard and fast for half an hour or so, capture all that heat efficiently inside a sand or masonry mass, and the fire is over for the day.
Heat will slowly radiate from the mass, until it needs topping up again.
My main concern would be giant sandworms, we have seen what they have done to Arrakis.
Definitely a flaw in this tech that has not been addressed seriously yet.
Will need to make sure there are no thumping sounds around it.
Thought Kevin Beacon had killed them all…
Get some drum n' bass going an summon up your worm
Just be sure you don’t install it next to your spice rack, problem solved
I've told this story before. A friend of mine kind of built one of these himself. He built a south-facing solarium on the back of his house, but underneath the concrete pad he installed a three foot deep pit and filled it with pea gravel. He used simple PVC pipe and some small fans to blow air from the warm solarium into the gravel pit during the day. The cool air coming back would help regulate the temps in the summer. In the winter he could divert the warm air into his house to help lighten the load on his furnace. Colder return air would go back into the pit to be warmed up before going to the furnace. He could let it charge all day, even in the winter, and use the extra warm air at night when the heating demand was higher.
While these TES systems are certainly very nice, if you have the money, don't be afraid to see what you can DIY for a LOT less. All my friend had to buy for his was the gravel, some cement, some foamboard insulation, pipe and a couple of blower fans. For his skill level, it was easy work. It certainly wasn't as efficient as a custom built system, but it didn't need to be for the cost of entry and daily operation. How much power can a blower and a few relays use? If you are the handy kind of person who could us swimming pool hoses, wood and glass to make a solar thermal collector, well, here's some place to put all that energy.
Great story! We built a hot-house with the south wall made of glass, and the other 3 walls made of 1/2 inch plywood. The roof was normal composite shingle. In the summer we would open a large door on the north side to cool it off, and it would still be too hot for many fragile plants. In the winter it was warm enough inside to grow cactus all year round. There was no fans, pipes, insulation, nothing actually, just a glass wall.
@@ellenorbovay5226, That's what kind of inspired my friend, he just needed to be able to move the heat where he wanted and save it for later.
I was wondering about the ac side. Thank you from Florida!
@@OfficialFoodForThough, for that you might want something ground-sourced, which can be a lot more work to DIY. Ground temperatures, especially once you get down a few feet, are usually pretty steady and in FL would probably be in the 60s. If you have a well already it's pretty simple to run some pipe down the well and simply circulate water through that loop of pipe to a radiator and fan in your house. The radiator will absorb heat and take it down to the well. If you have to do _any_ digging for that, you may as well get a ground-sourced AC/heat pump put in. It'd cost more but it would be loads more efficient. The thing to remember is that heat will always flow towards cold, so even if you have an above ground pool that is cooler than your house, you can move heat from the house to the pool, cooling the house and warming the pool, until they are equal.
In,out efficiency: .92x.94 = .86 overall.
In Organic Gardening magazine in the 1970s they advertised plans for a Hunsa house. Block constructed with passages that guided hot air from a small fire in the center, and vented it through 20 tons of sand. A small fire burning for two hours a day could heart a house in Scandinavia all night in the winter .
Even better.... i teach others this stuff.
You might as well just make a greenhouse rocket stove. Also, you can put compost piles packed next to greenhouses, in winter, and get it tp 70-80F using just lawn leaves and food scraps... all winter, decomposing compost can make heat over 115F.
this is shown by youtuber van powell
@@dertythegrower compost piles catch fire occasionally from the heat. Our oldest brother showed us this in 1962 when I was 8. He rolled the top layer back and it was steaming hot. A week later it literally caught fire. Phoenix AZ in the 110 degree heat.
My TES is an insulated 275 gallon IBC that cost me $50. My electricity all comes from solar panels and a grid-tied inverter. My hot water is from a Black & Decker flash water heater that cost me less than $200 new. Incoming cold water passes through a copper heat exchanger in the IBC, and that feeds the flash heater. These heaters have a temperature setting, so if your incoming water is warmer, they use less electricity. This is a way to use even VERY low-quality heat from solar thermal panels to lower your electricity use. For example, if my ground water pipes supply 64 F water, the flash heater has to warm it up 40 degrees to reach the 104 F setting. If the IBC warms it to 84 F, that cuts my water heating electricity use in half.
I scored a never never used smaller 20 gallon electric hot water heater cheap. I got a brand new radiator from a 98 jeep Cherokee just laying around. I'm going to hook it all up so the hot water can be circulated with a small battery powered pump and power the hot water heater with 6 solar panels. Even in winter it should work pretty well with the 6 solar panels.
Any time there is hot water that is 10 degrees hotter then the air in the shop the pump will turn on.
I'll get a large computer fan that runs on 12v for the radiator and run the pump and fan via battery charged by solar. Should work pretty well.
Now using resistive oil heater and it is really making my electric bill skyrocket over winter. My power company is sending me notices I am using too much power... Bill is way to high.
I am going to turn the heater off and see how well this system heats the shop. Will it not... will it only get up to 35 degrees or will or keep the shop at 72 degrees? Be interesting to find out. If it seems to work pretty well I will up the size of the water heater.
@@robert5
Make sure your battery charger is inside, so any heat loss from inefficiency warms the room. Solar panels make more power when they are cold, as long as they point at the sun and the day is clear. Sun power maximum is about 1 KW per square meter, but the panels are only about 15% efficient. So that would be about 150 watts per square meter. 10 square meters would be roughly equivalent to a 1500 watt space heater.
We had TES in my home lounge when I was a kid in the 1960s in England. It was called a 'night storage heater', was about 1.8m x 1m x 1m and inside was a massive concrete block (or stacked smaller blocks). It was heated by off-peak (cheaper) electricity at night and emitted that heat energy during the day when electricity was more expensive. It had resistance wire to heat it at night and louvres, a fan and air channels that could be opened and turned on during the day to release the heat.
Same here in Austria. They are called nachtstromwaermespeicher, which translates to night electricity heat storage. They have ceramics inside I think. The ones we had, looked like a slightly oversized radiator and you could also sit on the warm stone slap on top.
I still have old storage heater in Montenegro. It was in old disused house I have kept it with a plan to use it as a solar power dump in the winter.
Many UK homes still have these what they call "NightStore" heaters. Many date back a good twenty years and are still working perfectly fine. The internal bricks which store the heat are extremely heavy and I think they are made of some sort of magnetite sand. They are an excellent form of heating because of the half price night-time electricity. Never ever ever buy a heat pump they are complete and utter junk - I know from experience. Rather than having a heat pump, a nightstore heater is a far wiser choice and my guess is that they can be picked up cheaply secondhand. There is nothing to wear out and only the heating elements and switch might need replacing at some stage.
Yes yes the night storage heater.
Brilliant.
Single family homes often include a garage. where I live, homes have basements and footings are dug at least 4 feet deep. After pouring foundation walls, garage areas are typically back-filled to create a solid base for parking cars. This would be an opportunity to burs a thermal sand reservoir without additional cost of digging.
That’s a good idea!
I have no doubt that this clever idea will become standard practice in time to come. Same in the UK, footings/foundations are dug to three feet deep initially and if they don't reach suitable ground they dig deeper until typically a good clay base is reached. This is necessary since the buildings are of heavy bricks and/or concrete block, necessitating a substantial foundation.
The main problem I see is the competition from hear pumps. Why store electricity as heat at 95% when I can store the electricity in a battery at 80% efficiency but then use a heat pump with a COP of 3.5 - 4 to provide home heating and hot water. Plus electric batteries can be used for AC in summer or during blackouts.
If you can add a stirling engine, these could be a cheaper and longer duration storage option.
Heat pump to sand?
To be fair, most contries don't use AC
@@johnmcfarlane9416 Nop. Look at Carnot Efficiency. Heat pump are less good than resistive heating when the difference of temperature between the source and the sink is above 100oK. That's why heat pumps are a challenge to install in large building.
@@johnmcfarlane9416Nah, the heat pump works best at moderate temperatures. Sands main advantage is being able to go to higher temperatures than water. So you either don't get to use the sand very well or you have to use an inefficient and expensive high temperature heat pump.
Farmers use these methods for years in their glass houses. When the glass house is too hot at noon, the air is blown through a thick layer of gravel in the bottom of the house for cooling it down. At colder moments the heat is recuperated from the gravel to heat up the glass house.
Simple can be so very elegant.
Not enough heat.. i work in them... compost piles implementing rocket stove greenhouse methods is the way, and no cost since compost can be made from recycled local waste, leaves, or food scraps to make heated piles over 110F. Of course if you added the sane it would hold that even longer.. a hybrid of all that can and has been done, no electric needed except a small solar panel in cloudy cold days during season transition
@@dertythegrower So, does that translate to using solar panel electricity to run a heater that blows over/under the heat container gravel or burning compost in a rocket stove to do the same, then just letting it radiate naturally from the gravel ?
Love how you show stock footage of a cat in it's litter box and then jump to a food sponsor. Really gets the appetite goin
This is the storage option that interests me the most, largely because of its simplicity and resource demand to build. Very glad to hear there are smaller units being developed. It seems to me to be something that a community to could install. For me, living in a cold country, I can see how I can limit electricity demand but I struggle to limit heating demand.
and then you do the math. And then you laugh a lot! A small home would required only few hundred thousand gallons sand tank plus few millions in hardware...
@@pierregravel-primeau702 in Germany a DIY LFP Battery with 8kWh is actual 2000€. Next year, it will bei 16kWh for 1200€. This sand battery must be very very cheap, to compete with an easy to install Li Battery and Inverter.
Insulation. A properly insulated house requires very little added heat. Think 12” walls.
@@pierregravel-primeau702 It's very early days, all tech is expensive at the start... including lithium batts only a decade or so ago.
You can use your house itself as a TES device if it's insulated well enough. Just heat while the sun is out and you can use solar panels!
There was an episode of "This Old House" where they spoke with someone with a not so old house who built everything himself and he works in commercial HVAC. He used two cisterns and used a heat pump to transfer heat from one cistern to the other. This resulted in a cistern so cold that it was frozen and another with very hot water. He could run the heat pump whenever it made sense to run it based on energy cost, or energy availability (solar or wind). Then, whenever heating or cooling of any kind is needed, it could tap into the appropriate cistern for that capability. It think that is really awesome because whenever we're running a heat pump, it would be good to capture both extremes... it is basically doubling the efficiency. I'd like to capture the heat from my refrigerator to pre-warm the water into my water heater (though that probably would have a negligible impact since it wouldn't run long enough).
Use a heat exchange on your home computers to preheat a swimming pool or something 🤔
Capture the refridgerator heat is possible. They do make heat reclaim units for this. There are ones you can buy for your central AC unit. I do not know the cost of them yet I am sure that they are expensive. Not only for the part to reclaim the heat. The tank you have to circulate the water in to extract the heat. Which would be a 2nd water heater to warm the water before it gets to said water heater. Then while your at it you might as well add another heating element and putt 1000 watts on it.
The heat coming off my 2 fridges, 1 upright freezer and 3 chest freezers is quite alot. I would not mind having much larger walk in units or larger reach ins. I have considered buying 3 door reach in freezers/fridges like the ones you see in the stores yet without the glass doors and adding said reclaimer on it. Would these fridge/freezer (6 doors) be cheaper than a new fridge/freezer and would they be cost effective and would they last a long time? Not sure yet by my count they could be reasonably priced. I can put the compressors in the maintenance room and with a large enough pre tank could extract the heat from it. The question remains what If the water gets to the max temp. How do I cool it from there. I would like to add in a hot water loop in to the Hvac system and the floor heat loop as well.
There is a lot of ideas and with enough money all of these systems could work together quite well. I could even use the excess heat to heat the slabs outdoor to remove snow.
The other thing I was also thinking of was the concrete patio could have hot water tubes run in them then you circulate that water into the pool. Extracting every oz of heat from the concrete pad. One would have to blow out the water at the end of the year yet you could very well heat a pool from the slabs all around your pool.
@@kameljoe21 You're talking about a desuperheater. Those are only made for a geothermal heat pump, even though they could be made for any AC. They're actually not that expensive... usually $200-300.
@@dus10dnd """desuperheater""" I looked in to that word and these heat recovery units are made for any thing that compresses refrigerant. Does not really matter what its for.
Now I have also seen a "smart" waterheater that uses duct work to use the air inside or outside to extract heat. While those water heaters are in the thousands and thousands of dollars, I think I would rather have a seperate unit as if it breaks down you can shut it off and bypass it. Same would go with the compressor recovery unit.
For the cost of 800 to 1200 for the unit and install cost total of maybe 2k additional on a 5 ton unit. This could see a return pretty quick.
My only problem right now is the design of my new house could be one HVAC unit or 3 HVAC units all heat pumps. The same with the water heater, one unit or 3 units. 2 living areas (bedroom, bathroom, living room office per living area) and the Kitchen and storage areas. Think of it like a duplex yet its not a duplex. I had intended to do a heat pump and water heater in each living area to not only allow for zoned heating and cooling. Adding 2k on top of this cost for all 3 units is just not ideal. Going to a single unit and water heater is cheaper yet not being able to split the zone to keep contaminated air out. So this is just not cost effective at all. Now if I could find a source cheaper we still need to have a pre water heater and a pump to circulate that water around in the tank. If the tank is too small it will not save any money. If the tank is too big I do not think it will make any difference. Like 5 to 120 gallon size change. The only thing would be alterntive heating capabilities for said tank. Like installing a 500 watt panel on the roof to supply direct currect to the water heater during the day.
@@tonylarose4842Ltt did a few videos on doing exactly that
Living in Maine I have a bias toward using wood for heating as it is cheap,and renewable here. I built a wood fired, sand battery to heat a friend’s home. It was simple to build and very efficient. We built it from plans he had acquired from the University of Maine back in the seventies. Some of the materials used should probably be updated to newer, better materials but I will describe it as we built it. It started with a concrete slab about 10x10x6” thick. We built a concrete block building 8x8x8 with a wood stove running down the middle of it. The stove was about 7’ long and 24”high and wide. The building was insulated on the inside of the brick with 4” of styrofoam and 6” of vermiculite under the wood stove to protect the concrete. We then filled the building with sand to a point about a foot over the firebox. We then put in what seemed to be miles of 1/2” pvc pipe arranged in manifolds feeding cold water in the bottom and hot water out of the top. Each run of pipe had a blow over valve in case it got too hot. We insulated the top with a foot of styrofoam and plywood screwed down on top. Around all of this we built a wood shed with a six cord capacity and room in front of the firebox to tend the fire. We used antifreeze in the water to insure that it wouldn’t freeze if it was left un attended in the winter. All of this was about 20’ behind his house. We dug a trench and insulated the pipes heavily about 4’ underground These pipes were brought into the basement and attached directly to an existing water boiler which could be valved off so you could use either heat source but with the same circulation equipment. My friend lights a small fire once or twice a day and provides all the heat he needs for his home. If I was to build it today I would use pex pipe and the styrofoam concrete forms rather than blocks.
I want to move to N. Maine.
@@mackbolan5126 Did you take any photos? You should make a video tour.
This is neat, but the problem is sand is an insulator when it's at rest. That's why you see these modern sand batteries use blowers to agitate the sand with hot air. I contemplated doing something like this but ultimately decided the complexity/cost of a blower that could handle the very hot air, and the cost of energy to continuously 'stir' heavy sand, was not worth it on a small scale.
If I had to do it again , I'd
Move to a more temperate climate .
Sounds basically like a more complex bonfire over a box of sand and i like it. Like the natural "AC units" burrowed beside the houses in many hot arabic countries.
We run a 15 kW peak PV system with 10kWh storage, the energy we dont use goes via a heat pump into a 3000l water buffer storage for the central heating. In tandem in colder days with bad weather we have a 30kW wood gasifier to bring up the buffer storage to 80 or even 85°C for 2-3 days of heating capacity.
Typically a 300l hot tap water boiler with 11kW internal electric heater is heated by the 3000l buffer in winter, but in summer they act independently, tap water boiler heated electrically and the 3000l buffer is cooled down to about 7°C via heat pump to cool the house "24/7".
The first thing we got was the heat pump beside the wood gasifier, 3000l buffer and 300l boiler. Without PV system, the heat pump was rarely used and only when it really made sense, yet it costed "much" to run, they are only nice when you produce your own energy. Just the PV system made the whole heat pump so different to use... It runs nearly daily with PV system (to avoid feeding into the grid) and so either gives us FREE room heating, hot tap water or even cooling the whole house.
In general about 90-95% of our yearly electricity consumption is covered by 15kW peak with 10kWh battery and mostly enough excess production to keep the house warm or cold, just in the winter a bit wood is needed when its really cold and bad outside.
Still, as much we try to avoid feeding in the grid, about 30-40% of our electricity production we give the greedy energy suppliers for little money (and even have to pay 25% taxes on this SUPER TINY "profit"...)
What about using salt instead of sand? We have plants extracting fresh water from the oceans left with excess salt that they can't throw back into the ocean. Salt also has a higher specific energy.
Phase change materials (PCMs) are substances that absorb and release heat when they change state. They can be used to store thermal energy for a variety of applications.
There are several materials that are considered as PCMs, their characteristics being increasingly investigated in order to incorporate them into thermal energy storage applications. Some of them include:
Inorganic systems (salt, salt hydrates and metal alloys)
Organic compounds (paraffins, fatty acids)
Polymeric materials (polyethylene glycol)
These present different temperature storage ranges and enthalpy energy storage characteristics. For instance, paraffins and salt hydrates are typically enough to guarantee thermal energy storage as incorporated in building materials; on the other hand, salts are used for storage at higher temperatures, such as the one needed in power plants.
Sodium sulphate degahydrate is one nice option for storing heat for house heating with heat pumps.
It's cheap, phase change (melts) is about 32 C. Thats easy to heat with heat pump, and if heated max 60 C, also plastic vessel can be used with foam insulation.
Sodium acetate hydrate melts about 60C.
I've been considering something like this when we build a home with underground water storage. Not a compact system, but 5-10k gallons underground in heated or cooled water with a high efficiency heat exchange system.
The critical failing between this and almost all the systems that are out there is that they will not work for people with low to moderate incomes. It's only going to be people with nice homes and a bit of land. What's going to work for everybody is going to be fissiom-based nuclear power for the next 30 to 40 years while we transition to fusion.
If your state allows that much water at a residence... heh. Some states do not even allow simple rain barrels now..
Cheers.. one of the realest, and smartest gurus.. cool to see you here.
100 time less dumb than pumping sand! But you can't make a start up in Abu Dabi to pump and dump, pump pump and dump! (That's Matt role in the universe)
@@dertythegrower they do, a guy near me has only rainwater runoff to a uv+reverse osmosis system for all household water, two 10k gallon holding tanks.
Swimming pool... adds to the fun
Where would all the houses deposits all the nuclear waste that come with fission?
Yeah it's like a storage heater. We had them here in the UK in the 80's, 90's and 2000's but the heat was stored in bricks in the heater itself and insulated until the heat is released. They are designed to heat up when the energy use is low and so cheaper and release the energy in the evening in Winter time. The heat released from the isn't very hot, just warm.
My friend still has them and they are still working as well as the day they where installed.
Thanks for sharing!
At this point you could have a heat exchanger pull very hot ejwt back from them
Cheap n perhaps not so cheerful.
Problem is that they give out most heat when you don’t want it, early in the day.
Very simple though, if energy at night is cheap enough, and you are at home all day, acceptable.
One other issue is that they roast the air, or at least the dust, making it a bit irritating
They were great until the were render obsolete by heat pump. Problem 1 : they are almost impossible to set up efficiently. How do they get the signal to heat up and how do they get the signal to release heat? Problem 2 : having 500oC bricks waste a lot of heat. Studied show that the efficiency of this device is about 80%. Loosing 20% of the heat to store 10 kWh of heat is not great when an heat pump reach 300% efficiency at -20oC. Problem 3 : they are huge and cost a lot.
You want high specific heat, not low, for storage (eg: more watt-hours to heat up a Kg of water or sand or ceramic - and of course get it back when needed).
There are heat storage devices such as ceramic based base board heaters. Thus, during the night when the utility rate is low, you heat up the ceramic in the baseboard heater - it traps that heat. Then, in the daytime when the thermostat demands it, louvers open to allow air to flow through and release the heat.
This has been sold for several decades in Canada.
The real issue is "heat quality" where the best way to store heat is as at hot a temperature as possible (needs really good insulation - because of the heat loss equation where heat is lost as 4th power of the temperature).
"heat loss equation where heat is lost as 4th power of the temperature"
And thats the issue i have with sand storage. I mean, what if i "overdrive" the sand storage to a point it basically loses much energy because of the temperature difference or even worse... burn the insulator or worst.... bring the metal box to melt!
As much i appreciate new and more environmental friendly attempts for central heating and heating in general, most people dont have the money and ground to do that.
We do it a "hybrid" way of big PV system, mediocre battery size for overnight and small electric boilers mainly and excess energy produced goes via a heat pump in a 3000l buffer storage, either cooled down to 6°C in summer or around 45-65°C for heating via the central heating system.
I rather prefer a heat pump and 3,5-4,5x the heat energy per electric energy than a storage which can at best produce like 90% of what you put into (electrically!).
Good for MUCH excess electric energy and "high" demands over night, but i prefer the heat pump and a "big" water storage, gives you at least 3-4x the heating power per watt than sand storage and is smaller.
Or heat pump is already an old model from like 2009, yet it runs like a beast and mostly daily for 2-15 hours depending on cooling/heating needs.
I am pretty sure without the additional heating energy "created" by the heat pump our 15 kW PV system might not be enough for our needs at all.
@@harrison00xXx The systems presumably have an upper bound on temperature so as you approach that it won't allow more to be added (a thermostat of sorts). As the system stabilizes (heat spread inside) it may permit some last bits of heat to be added. Vacuum vessel walls may play a role in great insulation.
It is hard to justify the expense and complexity of this system to a good heat pump.
I still see this as a off-peak solution, however, similar to what I described for baseboard heating (already in use) which stores purchased heat at lower cost and releases it when electricity rates are higher.
Owned a home in the UK for a few years in the 1970s that used sandstone as a heat sink in a forced air system-very rare at the time. Electricity heated the system at night on the “white meter” when rates were low. Occasionally, we’d run out of heat during the day, but never before the pubs reopened. 😮 Electric blankets helped too. Brits recommended hot water bottles or foot warmers. Didn’t have a fire for the latter. Great times!
Your house is also a thermal energy storage device. In the summer, cool it down during the day (with solar) more than you normally would and you can enjoy a good amount of cooling at night. Similar with heating in winter
One low tech no energy heat storage solution that many can implement if they have south facing windows is called a trombe wall. It is achieved by creating thermal mass, with either sand or water in containers or tubes (preferably black).
🏡 agreed. I use a combination of heat pump, solar panels, LI-batteries, whole house fan, and the opening and closing of thermally insulated cellular window shades to regulate our home’s temperature year round for near-net-zero energy usage.
Some places don't need air conditioning at night even in peak summer.
ive heard stories of people in hot countries keeping sandbags in their house which they move outside at night and bring back inside in the day to regulate their homes temperature.
@@pyrholorange 'heard'? Do you remember where? I live in a hot country, though never seen any sandbag. I will search for it, but any help is appreciated.
Here in rural France we are used to having giant holes dug in our gardens as there is no mains drainage on these 200 year old stone houses. A BatSand battery would take up about the same space as a 3,000 litre 'fosse septique'. All our neighbours have huge gardens, ours is a hectare..so space isn't a problem. What is a problem is putting solar panels on the roof as there are no loft voids to keep inverters cool. We have our solar panels on a barn roof about 40 metres from the house. If you didn't or couldn't use solar a home sand battery could be used for time shifting the energy, France has a lot of nuclear power with nowhere to go during the night. Keeping the sand hot with cheap overnight power and distributing it to the property during the day would help balance the grid.
I think you're right, using these systems to balance the grid. Decentralized and diversified energy storage is going to be the future. The more distributed it is, the less sensitive to outages and disasters.
In time the UK, Eire, and Norway will have the same problem re. wind energy that France does re. nuclear. Since we'll be exporting to the Benelux and Germany, it's a good thing that a Dutch company is among those focusing on this area.
If it was profitable to store the energy in residential sized sand tanks surely the nuclear plants would do it at a larger (more economical scale).
Given the type and distribution of properties this form of energy saving will make no appreciable difference to the overall situation. Less than 1% of properties could either afford nor find he space for such systems.
There is no reason to put an inverter on a panel unless you have shaded panels... string inverters are pretty much always more cost effective.
I live in a very sunny area, and we got a solar water heater installed in our roof. It set me back like $500 but I spent $50 on gas last year, for the entire year
Would you mind sharing what you installed? I'm interested to see the details of what that hookup looks like. Thanks!
I live in the not so sunny UK, and fitted a 20 tube hot water solar panel about 17 years ago. I don’t know how much it has saved us over the years, but gas use for hot water is zero in the summer.
We compound this, we store solar in water here, comes off the roof via wires, goes to the heat pump hot water service, then we use it when the sun don't shine. Once the water is heated (or realistically at the same time) we top up batteries for everything else.
This idea reminds me of an old idea for storing heat from solar collectors some time ago. The basic idea was to move heat from the collector to a rock storage bin, generally placed under the floor of the structure. These TES's strike me as an update to that same idea with a more mature, well thought out compartmentalization between the thermal storage media and the heat source/sink.
I have a few thermal batteries in my house. My water heater is an electric one that I heat with my woodstove in the winter and the I heat it with my excess solar power in the summer. We have lots of hot water year round here in Canada. Also my insulated cement floor is a thermal mass that heats up from my passive solar, southern windows in the summer but not in the winter (because of how I sized my roof overhang) and also in the winter the glycol that heated my water then goes into my infloor heating pipes and also warms the floor. It works very well and was inexpensive to install and maintain.
In the cellar I did not insulate under the floor so that it can stay naturally cool all summer and winter. My house is built into a south facing hillside and is 8 feet deep at the back but above ground at the front
In AZ, my whole backyard is sand. Literally, in the summer, I turn the hot water heater OFF because the sun does a good job keeping the water hot in the summer. I actually use my hot water heater in the summer as my cold water. Plus, it helps keep my electrical costs down by not heating the water in the summer.
That's awesome!
This sounds like some kind of joke about Hell- using water heaters for cold water because the water outside is too hot 😂
You should use solar
In australia, cold is hot and hot is hot, all year round 😂
I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. - Anakin
There is a nice quote about sand in the first Tomb Raider movie as well... something about sand getting into any crack or something like that...😉
I came here to write the same lol
Sand's just a bunch of tiny rocks - eternal sunshine
You miss the point. And didnt see the sand is contained into a strong durable holder. If it wast forvaand, earth would not exists. Maybe you should find a nice spit on ie Venus.. remember Mars is like earth .. compacted from sand ..
To improve the system it would be beneficial to:
1. Avoid energy conversion by heating sand more directly (without converting sun to electricity) at least for initial heating
2. Retrieve energy same way
3. Use existing space, like under building space, in UK most houses have suspended floors, if not water flooded, it may be useful
4. Warm up space AND water used in bathroom, as these two are biggest energy consumers
5. Think about cooling possibilities in summertime.
I’m working towards establishing a green, off-grid commune and this technology seems like the only option that really is non-toxic, I hope it is launched soon. I’d be a guaranteed buyer.
Back in 1980 my neighbor put electric heat elements in a sand bed under a slab on grade home . It was heated during/ on off peak rates. Now with solar pv panels are so cheep it could be powered. In my build at the time I put 320 soft of hot water collectors into a 800 gallon ss tank I welded up in my basement that supplies radiant slabs & backed up with a wood fired boiler in the garage.
We have a large brick chimney inside our home that is heated with wood ( from our property ) . Even after the fire goes out, it seems the large mass of warm brick keeps at least the living room warm for at least a day. ( but takes a lot to heat it up when we first light the fire ) Somewhat the same as what you are talking about here Matt.
Yeah, people from around the world have different ways to use thermal mass. In some parts of the world, fireplace and cooking stove are together and in the middle of the house, and the chimney goes up and down a few times to retain as much heat as possible inside the chimney "wall".
This is what Masonry Heaters are all about - thermal mass and moving the air around inside of it through channels. I'll be installing one in my next home instead of a conventional fireplace. They can even be made with a water channel in them to go into a buffer tank for pre-heating a hydronic radiant heat system.
great idea with the water through the thermal mass Brad @@bradforrester2417
I bought a 180 year old house and rehabbed it. I installed in-floor radiant heat. I used sand as the thermal mass. It was lighter and slower to release energy as concrete. In addition I didn't have to worry about floor deflection too much, though I beefed up the floor support a lot. While it takes a long time to heat up the sand at the beginning of winter its ability to hold and slowly release the heat means even in worst case where we loose power our house only drops about 5-8 degrees F in a 24 hour period, even taking into account we usually only loose power during winter storms.
So we don't modulate the heat up or down during winter and can keep the sand warm through a slow "trickle charge". Because I treat my sand like a "battery" I can use a small tankless hot water heater to keep it warm instead of a boiler.
That's really nice setup. Congrats. How much sand did you use? Is it only in the floor or does it go to the foundation?
@GreyDeathVaccine It was something like 4 yards. So yes, it is in the floor. I sealed the original subfloor, built risers, laid the pex, buried the pex in sand then laid a new plywood subfloor on the risers. The original subfloor is pine planks had much too high deflecting to support concrete or gypsum-crete so sand was the best option.
Yes, sounds great. How many inches thick is the sand?
we in Malaysia had abundant of solar sunshine and rain all year round. We did not fully utilized this gift yet we keep on making so much of noise on gas fuel prices yet never willing to try on alternative energy. Sometimes people which live in a colder climate tend to have a clever brain. They able to use every single drop of resources available without waste.
It is actually the insulation that holds the heat in as anyone that lives in the desert can attest to, sand heats quickly and realeases the heat just as quickly. You can experience thermal swings from 100+ ferinheight to ~60 f when it transistions from day to night and the transistion only takes an hour to 3 hours.
aerogel?
In the late 1970s - early 80s, our local electric co-op in northern Minnesota promoted off-peak water heaters and home heating to try and smooth out power demand. We had a forced air, oil furnace. With the rise of OPEC, oil had become very expensive, so my dad converted. The hot water heater was like a typical electric heater, but 2x larger, made of plastic and super-insulated. The furnace was essentially a large box filled with bricks and a blower unit (took up a little less space in the basement space as had the oil tank, oil furnace and chimney stack). Both were charged up with heat during off-peak electrical usage hours. That was overnight generally, but during exceptional cold the power company would provide a bump in the afternoon. That didn’t happen very frequently. We paid a much lower rate for the off-peak power. To make it work required upsizing our transformer and line drop wire gauge, and installing a second, dedicated, off-peak meter, power feed, and electrical panel. Winters are cold in northern Minnesota, but it always kept us warm. The hot water heater worked ok for a family of four, but you couldn’t take long showers. Both the water heater and the furnace are still working fine almost 50 years later, with one replacement of the heating elements in the furnace. The only problem is the furnace was from Europe, and the manufacturer no longer exists, so replacement parts and service are hard to get/non-existent. With how well that old system has worked in a very cold environment, I’d have no qualms adopting one of these new versions of stored heat home heating.
Been using sand batteries to heat my greenhouses for nearly 20 years, works a treat
First US-households have other energy saving measures to tackle.
Most houses in the US have very bad thermal insulation !
One glass- panel windows are still Standard while in the EU 3-panel glass with infrared-reflecting coating are de-facto Standard!
Isolation of your home can save you lots of money and energy. With windows and wall isolation about *50%* of heating/cooling cost!
Single pane windows are NOT the standard in the US
@@MrSteeDoo Standard Here in Europe are Three-pane 🪟 FYI
Its called accumulation furnance and is quite common in Poland for about 70yrs. But we use brick instead of Sand for easier installation
Love the channel! We went fully electric, solar, and are now the first zero carbon auto glass company in Colorado. I hope this new tech can help us all to store our solar now!!!! Thanks again Matt.
I think that thermal energy capture and storage generally deserves more thought and investment than it currently receives, and the relative ease and efficiency of storage is one of the main benefits.
A few years ago I designed and installed a system for capturing the waste heat from multiple small refrigeration sets in a medium sized cheese factory. Water cooled condensers were added to the refrigeration sets, and water was circulated through these via accurate flow control valves. Temperature probes on the refrigeration pipes leaving the condensers fed data to a PLC, which controlled the water flow through the valves. This was so accurate that the refrigeration outlet temperature was stable to within half a degree, and we could capture effectively 100% of the available thermal energy.
The warmed water was stored in an insulated stainless steel silo, then fed into the main boiler instead of cold water. The temperature of the water in the tank continued to rise overnight, so in the morning the main boiler got up to temperature much quicker and the factory was operational sooner. The output temperature of the boiler was also more stable, making it easier to keep processes in the factory stable.
There was a 25% reduction in gas usage in the main boiler, 10% reduction in electricity use in the refrigeration sets and a considerable increase in reliability in the refrigeration sets, with reduced failure rate and maintenance. and over-pressure cutouts on extremely hot days were no longer an issue.
Based on measurable parameters (reduction in electricity and gas bills) the payback was 14 months, with many significant "other" benefits.
I simply cannot understand why this type of system is not built into all factories and commercial premises which have refrigeration and a need for hot water or space heating.
I am definitely keen to see thermal energy storage brought into the domestic scene as well.
The potential of thermal energy storage in transforming residential energy use is immense. It's exciting to see how TES can integrate with renewable sources to enhance home efficiency
Thank you, Matt. Your presentations are always inspiring and informative.
Years ago, I watched a video where a builder of an earth-berm home heated his entire house all winter with an earth battery made of several layers of 6-mil plastic, foam sheets of insulation, and very, very dry and clean sand. All of this was made into a hill next to the house (on the highest part of the property) in order to prevent the super heated sand from ever getting wet. If the sand became the least bit damp, the system could fail.
I had considered doing a poured "basement" under the floor of my three car garage that I could super-insulate, fill with sand, cover with @ 12" of foam board, then pour my reinforced cement floor over the entire battery.
A couple of evacuated tube solar water heaters on the roof should provide sufficient heat all summer to then be released via a secondary loop system that could either feed radiators or even an A-coil in a forced air system.
I haven't crunched the numbers to see how many cubic yards of medium would be needed or the exact number of solar heaters needed to super heat the sand... But, for years, I've wanted to try this.
Sand only has an advantage when high temperatures are acceptable. Sand has low specific heat (start from 3:10 minuts). You bring it as an advantage, but it is a real disadvantage as you need more of it, or higher temperature to store the same amount of heat energy. Sand has about 800 J/kg/K, water has 4000 J/kg/K. Volume based, sand has 1400 kJ/m3/K, water has 4000 kJ/m3/K.
Last winter I used 110 m3 of natural gas for heating and hot water (3.6 GJ). I already use some passive heating. This year maybe less as I added more insulation to the house. So I need about 20 m3 of water to store my heat energy for the winter. Assumed that losses are not that big compared to the stored heat energy. Losses will be a problem. Loss goes with surface, and storage goes will volume. So large heat storage installations can have less relative heat loss. At some time in the season It may be better to store directly via solar thermal panels instead of PV panels.
Hi
Can you explain the mechanism of converting thermal energy into electrical energy?
Batsand uses kW/h instead of kWh in most of their marketing, really makes me doubt how credible their claims are.
I just looked at the website and I can't shake the feeling that it seems a bit scammy.
To be fair, kWh is a nonsensical unit
@@judgywudgy do you prefer Joules? kWh matches energy scale closely to personal/residential energy use daily...
@prressurr definitely a telltale sign that people do not know wtf they are talking about. I worked for a renewable startup where they did the same thing, they could not grasp energy or power units. Their utter ignorance was blatantly obvious.
@@tanner3801 Don't get me wrong, kWh is useful and easy to work with within certain industries. It's just conceptually inelegant because it isn't simplified; its like working with 2(10/5) because someone can't be bothered to reduce it to to the equivalent value of 4.
i.e. 1 W = 1 J/s, so 1 Wh is 1 joule per second times 1 hour
If you build a new house you can make the TES part of the foundation of the house. Fill your empty foundation parts full of sand and make it into a TES, with solar panels on the roof to heat it.
I did something similar when I built my energy efficient new home in ct , I used 150 evacuated solar hot water directly into 1 ft sand under 6” concrete slab along with heat 120 gal hot water tank. I use roof overhang to partially shade solar water system in summer. Otherwise I would get too much hot water
6:06 :) "sand is dirt cheap" Frunkin' hilarious,
Sand is officially speaking, more expensive than dirt because it is very specific.
@@bravojrSand Mining is also surprisingly disruptive to the ecology and politics of where it is mined from!
@ericlotze7724 river/sea sand for concrete yes. However desert sand will probably be used for this
Sand is actually a very clean material compared to dirt. So dirt is really of lesser quality. Unless you use it for plants instead of energy.
actually i think there is a shortage of sand, and cost increase at the moment, something to do with preserving beaches. Though i guess a lot in the sahara
Your deep dives on tech are great. You should do a deep dive into regenerative agriculture. You'll discover that industrial monocropping of corn, wheat, and soy -- the basis of vegetarianism -- is the most destructive thing on the planet, and that properly-raised livestock are the only way to produce the soil we need to survive on this planet, not to mention that meat is far more nutritious than plants.
We HAVE already tried it and loved it - Thermal Batteries are available to buy for homes. They are the size of washing machines.
This video made me wonder if a water heater blanket made with sand would be beneficial? Trapping the heat in sand might extend the time the water heater holds the thermal energy.
I wonder if you just buried your water heater underground, so that it your heating delta from ambient is higher and the tank is insulated. Wait isn't that just geothermal now.
This + a Rocket Stove = Rocket Mass Heater 🙌
I heard that rocket stoves are illegal in some places.
Emphasizing sustainability, another benefit of TES especially these solutions that the materials to make them are both environmentally inert and more ethically sourced than those of Lithium ion batteries. If these fail or need to be decommissioned, materials like sand and water pose very little risk to a local ecosystem.
There is a global shortage of sand, with millions of tons being gobbled up by the fracing industry alone.
During the previous winter, we frequently experienced power outages due to issues with our neighbors. Our home uses an electric water heating system and a fireplace that heats water. This heated water then passes through a heat exchanger to warm the house. We also have a 5kw solar station.
Our hot water needs are catered to by a 250-liter water boiler, which can utilize up to three heat sources. These include electricity, heat from the fireplace, and a gas heater. However, we never installed a gas heater, so one of the heater's in/out was unused.
I decided to connect this unused in/out to our heating system. Through home automation, I set it up so that during a power outage, the hot water from the boiler would serve as a heat source to maintain a comfortable temperature in the house. The system was configured to stop the heat exchange when the boiler's water temperature dropped to 32 degrees. Thus, I was able to use the heat range from 70 to 32 degrees.
This heat energy was sufficient to maintain the home's temperature during power outages, eliminating the need to start the fireplace. The boiler model we use is the Drazice OKC 250 NTRR/BP.
Essentially, this solution mirrors what was demonstrated in the video, but at a significantly lower cost :)
My regional power company has an electric thermal storage system as an option for those that want to sign up for a “time-of-day rate” power plan (lower cost per kWh during off-peak period). The ETS apparently uses ceramic bricks, and has three installation options: room unit systems, central heating, and in-floor radiant.
It’s just that if the peak period wasn’t so wide (7am-11pm) and its cost/kWh so expensive, an ETS would be practical for more people. (Peak cost in winter is ~105% more than the cost of off-peak; in summer the peak cost is ~60% more than off-peak.)
07:10 clearly states in dutch 'daily loss of 30% - painpoint on top*' - ' Dagelijkse verlies van 30%- pijnpunt *on top''
at 3:25 I love that you put Anakin there. A character known for his hate for his home planet being full of sand :D
Great review of very relevant technologies. Many thx to for showing NEStore and pointing its benefits.
Indoor air, outdoor air, and hot water tank. We need a multi-directional heatpump that can harvest heat from temps as low as -60C, and heat water to 99C.
You could perhaps also put a refrigerant coil in the attic where temps soar in the summer or in the earth where they're fairly constant nomatter what you do.
Isn't geothermal just TES using the earth's mass as your battery?
TES will make sense for spaces, which are cold. There, anyhow, the largest use of energy is for heating (water or house).
Half of the year
@Skandish Norway, Sweden, Russia have below 10 degree 12 months a year
@@hrushikeshavachat900 nope. At least in the "European" part of Russia where I grew up, hearing is turned off for about half a year. It's actually hot during summer months and you may want air conditioning.
@Skandish I don't know about European side of Russia. I am talking northern Russia which falls in Asia
@@hrushikeshavachat900 even behind the polar circle, in permafrost areas, you've got summer with temperatures that would make heating uncomfortable at least. But in those places you actually do not have sun for half a year, so ...
Wait, you all have homes?
21st century version of bringing rocks into the cave that were heated by the sun all day to keep you warm while you sleep
Apparently, I failed 20th century BC technologies class. That's so simple and should be very effective if there's a lot of sun.
😮 Building it into a foundation of a house might be a good idea, in my opinion. You already have to dig a pit to put in foundations anyway. It could solve the size issue if it's under the house itself. 🤷♂️ Just a thought anyway.
Garage!
Building your house on sand is not the best idea. Even contained like this, you are putting significant load on a material that can gradually be pushed out of the way, leading to foundation cracks. You basically need all the structural support of a basement going through the sand, which adds the cost right back.
@@Merennullimuch less cost than retrofit however.
@@christianvanderstap6257 Sorry, but that's not true. The cost of installation he gave above subtracts out to $11,300 for his low end projection. The Batsand low end size is 40 cubic meters, which would cost $3,900 to excavate, meaning you're looking at $7,400 in hardware and thermal containment.
On average, a basement costs $8k more than no basement for a home, so for this system with all the costs he mentioned, you're looking at $23,100 to do it as a basement vs letting them dig their sand pit in your yard for a total cost of $19,000.
You might be able to get some efficiencies with clever engineering, but that would be a per-house situation so you'd be paying for the architect AND the approval process for that, which is an order of magnitude more expensive. Being a cookie-cutter system saves a lot of money. Not to mention the risks of differential load if you did go seeking those efficiencies.
For 60 years storage heaters using heavy blocks were quite common in areas without a gas supply in the UK. This was due to a lower tariff at night brought in with the introduction of nuclear power which can’t easily reduce it’s power output. It used to be less than 50% of the day rate, although now a bit more. The Nationalised electricity supplier would fit a special meter which changed over the readings, and a lot of installations had the switching for the heaters built in. Their use has decreased over the years as old heaters have reached the end of their life.
Your content is always inspiring possibilities shot down by a terrifying price tag despite the fact that much of this groundbreaking green energy tech is simple devices made with cheap materials. Its like watching an awesome movie with a horrible ending every time. Im gonna start making my own black market versions with blueprints included and hand them out to poor people. Enough is enough.
In the US, there are several reasons why high efficiency / high capex systems aren’t common…
1. Most people move every 5-7 years, even those building their ‘forever’ home rarely stay more than 10 years. 2. Residential homes aren’t energy rated and most people don’t understand cash flow modeling, these systems are ‘fully depreciated’ (I.e. given no value vs basic hot water heater or similar) when sold. So why would an owner pay for a 30-40 year device they are only going to use for 5-10 years?
3. Landlords should be the target for credits and rebate programs, as they may actually hold on to the asset for 10+ years and they are able to amortize & depreciate the cost - but many of these credits are written specifically for ‘home owners’. Since landlords don’t have to pay for the utilities, they don’t have any other motive to upgrade their assets’ energy efficiency. This leaves tenants paying higher utilities vs homeowners, which is unfortunate. Landlords do however want low maintenance, so I think if these were subsidized for landlords, you could get more adoption over time.
Just a minor point. Southern Alberta, Drake’s Landing is not “dark” in Winter or Summer. Cold, yes, but the region gets more sunlight per year then southern Italy.
Was looking for this fact. I hate how green energy pushers always obsure the facts.
@@ghsfdl4350 This was a minor mistake and I corrected it for the sake of clarity. Stop with the "green energy pushers" nonsense, since there has been a widely documented campaign since as far back as the 1950's by the oil industry to obfuscate and confuse the public about climate change.
Here's a novel concept why not build the interior walls from high density clay blocks or bricks as these will store alot of heat and make the exterior walls from low density highly insulative materials giving a building effectively a spine that acts as a thermal store. You could even run heating elements through the wall or add IR wallpaper to it and it's insulated from the exterior by your home.
It's used in some buildings but not often enough. It's called thermal mass. Underfloor heating is a great way to heat a house as it has a large area, so only needs low temperatures.
Was quite popular in the 1970 until people rediscover heat pump...
Add a second layer of sheet rock especially to the ceiling.
@@Ed.R Exactly maybe they should consider this more often as it can have a big effect. Personally I'm not a fan of under floor heating as I have always suffered with hot feet but the principle is good.
price. some people actually want to be able to afford a home. any sort of "extra" insullation like this drives up the cost to the home buyer
I love your videos!!! Continue with the awesome content!!!
I lived in a 'green' house way back in the 1970s in Vermont. We had TWO windmills in our yard. That experience, and observations since, have led me to conclude that coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power are the best, most efficient and most environment-friendly energy sources of all.
Heat storage has been around for decades in the form of night storage radiators containing heating elements and special bricks. These have been popular in the UK since the time electricity became available cheaply for 7 hours a night - hence economy 7. More recently smart meters have allowed people to get cheaper tariffs at different times for varying periods and uses.
The next level up from this: designing houses so well insulated that they don't need thermal energy to heat or cool them!
The lack of airflow from over-insulating presents its own problems for human health.
Passivhaus does exactly this, and handles the ventilation challenges that come with a tight building envelope.
@peaksoil another way to solve this is with thermally massive, but vapor permeable insulating materials. Hemplime and other similar biocomposites are an example.
"sand is dirt cheap"
It's so expensive, it would require financing for most people.
Luckily, there are plenty of sandbanks.
I'll see myself out.
Please do. Don't forget to forget to return.
I grew up with this kind of heating in Germany. it's called "Nachtspeicherofen". Basically just an insulated box with around 500 kg of rocks in it. It charges over night, when the prices are lower, and then stays warm over the day. To output heat, you can activate a little fan. Really old technology
The thermal battery I built in 1986 consists of a 800 gallon 308 stainless tank & radiant slabs on all floors. Heat source is 320 square feet of hydronic solar panels & a wood fired boiler for backup.
This makes way more sense if paired with geothermal where heat acquired = heat stored instead of solar or wind where electricity to heat to electricity.
Wing Chun works because you use the momentum of energy and redirect it, constantly trying to change an energy's form is the brute force method and results in avoidable loss and wear.
You forgot to mention that these systems dont lose efficiency unlike current battery technology systems. So in theory those sand batteries can last a lifetime.
They won't lose efficiency because they will never be commercially viable. Which is a recurring theme with Undecided videos.
@@torginus they said the about the electric car and its still is kinda true. But I get what you mean I've stopped watching his videos as often, Because alot of them are like kickstarter campaigns they seem good on paper but such when put into action. Also he seems to ignore true technological progress such as wood gassifiers or methane. Which are already proven technologies that will likely be where our economy will head.
That's a very good point. But they will probably need maintenance over their lifetimes.
Humans are specifically designed to thrive on meat. There's a very good reason the vast majority of people who go vegan end up returning to a naturally omnivorous state.
Utter bollox
@@joeds3775 Except everything I stated in my op is backed by empirical facts. I'd be happy to get into this when I have some free time, but I'll warn you in advance that it won't go well for you. There are limited legitimate arguments for veganism to be found on environmental grounds, but the dietary angle and moral imperative are easily debunked. Feel free to make your best case, and I'll come back in the next couple of days with a comprehensive response.
@@kenhiett5266 excited to hear about it
😂❤❤😂😂😂😂
I once saw a experimental house that collected sunlight through giant windows and just inside of those windows were a few tall pillars made out of many 150L oil steel barrels welded together, painted black and filled with sand.
The black steel would absorb the heat of the sun and heat up the sand within it, which then would slowly released the heat when the sun was down. It was not used as a primary heat source but as a big complementary one. The ones living there said it worked as intended and they were very saticfied with it.
Another house did similar through a green house part of the house that heated up a cob/brick wall and floor. The excess heat generated was then pumped into the house (or ventilated out depended on the temperatur). When the night came the floor tiles ans the backwall of cob/brick the slowly released the heat stored during the day.
None of these used water as a way to carry the heat, only air.
The heat capacity per volume is about 3 times higher for water than for sand!!! Better to use a classic water boiler for energy storage if only little space is available!
I have always wanted a residential CHP fuel cell for my home. Being able to overflow from one of those into a heat battery could really go a long way towards boosting efficiency. The fantasy has always been to run it off a methane waste digestor, but that is really a fantasy.
It seems that now the wise man builds his house upon the sand, wow how things have changed
In South Florida, finding heat is not really a problem. We just use blankets, jackets, and space heaters for those 10 or so nights a year when it gets cold.
About 20 years ago we lived in Maryland and had a house that used heating oil and heated with baseboard water radiators. So, our system was also our water heater.
It was incredibly expensive to use! We paid as much as $900 a month for the heating oil. We kept the thermostat at 50F all winter. The tech is here, we just need cheaper energy production.
The sand battery should be built under the floors of new buildings...like they do for septic storage in Nepal..where there is little land and expensive. Then the heat simply rises to warm the houses or buildings.
Great to see everyone's stories of low tech TES solutions over the years. I'm an engineer and I worked in solar thermal and thermal storage for a while. It's great to see it come back to life. I agree with some of your last thought about electric resistance heating coming back to life. If we have enough solar and renewable energy it makes sense again. I don't see solar thermal hot water coming back for residential because of all the moving parts required. PV is more versatile although less efficient.
I have a 3T mass stove in the center of the house. This is a great way of heating.
It is made of massive stone...the only issue is the time to heat up...around 6h. But you do a fire once a day and it is comfy for 24h.
Here in Norway, geothermal heat pumps have become more and more popular, as the price for installation have become cheaper.
Not the same thing as TES but, as you said, most of our energy consumption is for heating, so the principal is still the same. Use energy stored in the earth to heat exchange with some thing stored inside the house, usually water.
What I really want is a heat battery that will store heat for about 6-9 months. At that point, I can hold all the heat from summer over to warm my house in winter and then use the cold from winter to cool my house in summer. Alas, thermodynamics and heat insulation limits make that a pipe dream. Current systems are only good for a few days at best as the heat leaks away: they're really designed just to level out daily heating loads, not annual heating and cooling loads.
@johnfreiler6017 ...seasonal storage is what the Batsand system does, at least in one direction. You warm the insulated sand battery in summer with excess solar PV energy to use in winter for your heat. It doesn't work the other way, but that is how a number of ground source heat pump systems work in places with appropriate ground conditions that either naturally don't leak heat too much or that can be insulated. You dig a borehole field that you heat in summer with your AC load (and top up with solar thermal collectors if your heating load is sufficiently high relative to your cooling load), and cool in winter with your heating load (and if your cooling load is bigger than your heating load, supplement the heat loss with radiators). Generally this has only been cost effective with fairly large district heating/cooling systems such as the Drake's Landing system, or institutional ones like at multiple university campuses that have operated for decades. In the case of universities they often put them under a field.
A couple decades ago, I tried to convince my parents to add a thermal energy storage system to the house, as due to huge underground rocks found when they dug the foundation, we had a section of our basement that only had a six foot ceiling, around 800 square feet of room that did little other than accumulate junk. In my imagination I was using rocks in insulated tanks full of water, gaining heat from rooftop water cooled solar panels. The water pump for the roof array would have been powered by a photovoltaic panel, which automatically controls the pump to only run on sunny days. then another water loop from the tanks that would be used by a heat pump to warm up the water for domestic hot water and water based heating system. It was never anything more than imagination, as they wouldn't let me do it. But I do feel vindicated that the idea seems sound, and low cost.
Im building a thermal battery out of my wood furnace. It has a very large volume for a wood box. I'm tired of burning wood. I want to be completely off grid and every little thing helps.
Finally, you cover something that is actually viable, not like the heat pump estuary!!!! ,
I use a instant on gas water heater... turned on ONLY when I need a shower or hot water elsewhere. Of course my plumbing has been down for months due to leaks (I am disabled due to issues standing for long due to a bad knee -- hope to take my Addmotor etrike to the store today -- would use my regular adult trike except one hill I need to go up is too dangerous for me to go up at under 2-3 mph (west bound shoulder is mostly unusable due to mailboxes now too near the widened roadway and drainage ditches along the road and the speed limit 55 mph, and only two lane, so need to get up hill ASAP so I do not cause an accident by someone trying to go around me near the crest of the hill... I live under 100 yards on the west side of the crest of the hill... and also have to cross the roadway to get to my driveway -- both car & truck rotted away due to Ohio road salt).
I've heard in Quebec they install these furnaces with insulated ceramics bricks that are heated when electric rates are low. then that heat is released to heat your house when rates are high.
I have decided that Matt's channel is the one to watch! No sandbagging here! 😂
I saved $280 this past year on my heating bill. I simply didn't turn it on very often and wore a jacket instead... but that's crazy talk! lol
How about including US customary units along with metric so we don’t have to keep pausing the video to calculate conversions? I get a third of the way through the video then decide it’s just not worth finishing.
I live in Calgary (just north of where the Drake Landing community is in Okotoks) and I can promise you that while you are correct that it gets very cold here in winter going down to -36C or -32.8F plus the wind chill effect but Calgary (a 15 min drive from my community in the SE corner to Drakes Landing in Okotoks), is also literally the most sunny spot in Canada with over 333 days of sunshine per year. So to be fair, that will be a major factor in solar efficiency and a big reason solar is very popular here (plus solar panels are well known to work best when not physically hot).
I personally think all new homes, the world over should be combining passive house design (especially building the north side onto an earth burm for the northern hemisphere, opposite for the southern hemisphere and r70 or greater insulation), solar, wind, principals of natural convection and geothermal run through a sand battery tech, along with heat pumps in colder areas.
Plus we use 2 very portable, indoor use solar furnaces (large one inside the house very close to an east facing patio door and a smaller one in a south facing small garage window) that I made myself using aluminum window screen for less that $50 for both. I end up up keeping the temp at about 21C +/- 2C inside the house into the late afternoon and do not have the furnace turn on, the garage while no means as warm as the house is far warmer in winter than our previous house that had no windows.
due to the size of these units, it doesn't seem very likely they will become mainstream. they would be something more for rural areas