1607 A DIY Sand Battery
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2024
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To me, rocket stoves were made to be used with mass heaters. Run the exhaust through a thermal mass. Sand, dirt, bricks, clay whatever.
The heat coming out of the chimney is very little.
Letting the heat go straight up the chimney is a total waist of fuel.
Paul Wheaton has been on the forefront of rocket stove mass heaters for decades. His results for reducing fuel used is impressive.
And the time to burn is minutes instead of constantly burning all day as with conventional wood stoves.
for sure mate
Yup! I agree. Read up on Russian stoves, Finnish stoves.
My entire rocket stove is homemade out of clay, brick, sand, and the chimney piping. I can burn a 5 gallon bucket of wood in the winter with it being 20 degrees F outside and I'll get my tiny home heated to about 85 by the time the fire dies down. But the residual radiant heat trapped in the clay and sand form of the stove that it'll keep it warm all night and it'll be about 65 degrees by the time I wake up.
Waste not waist.
Other than that I agree.
@@RareVBlue put up a video
The indigenous peoples of New-Zealand would dig a large hole and line it with stones with a stone layer at the bottom. They would light a fire to keep warm at night then as the fire went out they would put food for the tribe in the cooling pit and cover it with dirt and let the food cook for a few days.
So, an oil drum , 200liter of sand. Copper coil. Good amount of insulation around the drum. Heating element of a water heater at the bottom. Smart plug that dumps my extra solar power during the day into the sand. I could send water trough the copper pipe and into a radiator with fan, heating up the room long after the sun has gone down.
this is the channel for me.. so many interesting innovations.. thank you very much master
Hi Robert, enjoyed this video and the subject, while contemplating making a storage device like this I wondered if granular table salt would work in this application 🤔, it's cheap and readily available, my other option would be pilfering the white bunker sand at my local golf course 👀, maybe someone would know the thermal retention of table salt?
As a Norwegian, just love your comment on Swedish stove (kakkeloven), and you love those crazy Finns......
anyway, fantastic videos,
lol - it is just my way of saying how impressive it is mate - I hope it didn't offend
@@ThinkingandTinkering I know, and none offended at all (I think...but i can only talk for the Norwegians...
By the way, Would it be ok for me to send you some pictures of my " propane driven solar Heat collector ? It moves heat against gravity with no pump,(oposit of fluids) it works everyday so if interested i will send some pictures and details?
Now cook a pizza in it while you charge it. And water in copper pipes, i want one for my greenhouse this winter.
I wish i had, my greenhouse was doing well, tomatoes were surviving, then temps dropped slowly during 1 day so the greenhouse got too cold towards the morning, many plants didnt survive.
That looks perfect for my steam powered flying saucer project! Wood powered storage heaters. ... whatever next? Before you know it some bright spark will be making sand bricks and heating them with electricity .....😄
Ok if I had 2 fire extinguishers for example joined together. 1 has a heating element which is connected to a wind turbine or solar power to provide power to the element. The other is full of sand. The heat transfers to the sand. How would you then pump heat out in to my home? Is this doable? Or am I thinking BS. Thinking of an alternative to a wood burner?
Great videos!
I wonder if there are good DIY sand battery heaters using (multiple) PTC heating elements to heat up a room or at least to cheaply pre heat a room?
Damn, now its obvious why these heat waves appeared.
Congratulations. Can you afford a schema of the internal parte?
Well, chimneys were batteries then because they would get hot and slowly release heat all night
Sand is a much better insulator! I insulate extremely high temperature created by concentrated solar.
WHAT ABOUT ROBERT IF INSTEAD OF THE ROCKET STOVE WE USE A WOOD GAS REACTOR TO PRODUCE THE HEAT WE NEED FOR THE SAND BATTERY AND AT THE SAME TIME WE WILL GET GAS FOR OUR HOMES? HOW CAN WE MAKE A PROTOTYPE OF A SAND BATTERY? CAN YOU PLEASE ELABORATE ABOUT THIS TOPIC?
So how do you convert the thermal energy displaced from a sand battery into electricity?
in so many ways and I have already answered this question - twice
@@ThinkingandTinkering Ok so I answered my own question in a way. Would a well insulated sand battery with a coiled pipe in the sand that has a input sucking in cold air that is then heated up inside the sand battery with a out put using said heated air to turn a turbine in a solar tower work? My question is not very well articulated but I can't think of a simpler way to frame it
@@terrafirma9328 Thanks
What video was it that shows him making this... err is that supposed to be a water heater?
Hi Robert I purchased the concrete mould and 300mm box section as per video and I watched this video and I thought if I add a pot holder like you made for the rocket stove and filled a large saucepan with sand would I create another version of a sand battery? If it works possibly buy something bigger
yeah you would mate - pretty cool idea - you should do a video and share it too!
@@ThinkingandTinkering Thanks I think I will when it gets delivered next week, although I'm more than happy if you want to do a video on it as you are fantastic at doing the videos
How does this compare to the molten salt heat storage used in large scale solar thermal systems?
Use water and sand, water can be over 100C, in car 110
Nice nice nice
cheers mate
Thank you. I'd been reading about these in the news recently. Your enthusiasm and humour when presenting your videos always gives me a lift. Please don't ever stop.
oh wow cheers mate
In Germany and Scandinavia it's common to have a wood burning stove surrounded by a lot of masonry as a heat store.
That used to be the case in cities, but it's only true for the countryside these days
Here in Michigan there are thousands of old silos on farms no longer in use, imagine filling one with sand and putting solar panels every few feet surrounding them from top to bottom. Have some heat generating resisters in the sand and you have a massive sand battery! I only wish I had one 🤔🤔 Spray foam the inside for insulation, sure seems like this would work.
Or lqryer it into cells and use as a earth battery
I'm a urethane foam sprayer. That's a great idea. You could spray the outside to and coat it and or wrap it with lath and trowel something over like clay or stucco
@@ThirtytwoJ what does layering it into cells do? I'm pretty new to this and battery and I'm trying to figure it out
If sand retains heat...then ...why do deserts get cold in the night time ? 🤔
@@ScoobyD2 because it's not insulated and has cold air rushing over it.
Great video! I think it would be interesting to find a simple way to utilize the sand in situ with minimal expenses. For example, if you want to install a solar cel array in the desert, dig a hole in the sand, throw some kind of lining and spray insulation, put whatever is needed in the hole, like pipes for medium circulation, push the sand back into the hole, and insulate and cover the top. Of course, what exactly should be used as the lining and insulation is for another debate, maybe just polyurethane foam and metal plates, or concrete, but in any case, if it would work, it would make possible to transform Sahara into a giant battery in no time, and would also have near zero impact on the environment. In fact, if you put dunes back in place carefully, none would be the wiser LOL.
something similar with copper coils inside and a fan to force air as a way to distribute the heat further away as into the interior of a house or another room would also be interesting.
for sure
Can you talk about dangers of temperatures above 1000F and how it destroys ozone layer?.
Seeing you heat that water so fast has inspired me to replicate this immediately.
Really love your work Rob. Your delivery is why people love you. Thankyou very much!!
I love it Rob!! I've thought about making a sand layer with a steel jacket around my existing wood stove just to remove hotspots, (I have clumsy oblivious dogs 🐕 🤣 I had wondered about the thermal battery value of it, so this encourages me immensely! Thanks Rob! You're one of the greats!
cheers mate
I live in Alaska and heat the main living space with a home-built woodstove. It's a horribly inefficient design (basically an old propane tank with 3-inch pipe for a chimney) that sends most of the heat straight up the pipe and out. Now you've got me thinking.
awesome mate - cheers
You could wrap copper pipe around the flue and
take the heat anywhere u like from there
Or get a fan?
The Romans ran a pipe beneath the floor of their homes. The fire was on one side the pipe ran slightly uphill beneath the floor warming the floor and the home. Smoke escaped the pipe the other side. Add sand or water on either side of the pipe to retain and radiate the heat and you have a more efficient system. Run the pipe back and forth (left and right) as you see in old indoor radiators (hot water pipes with radiators in individual rooms for warmth) but instead of running hot water up and down you run the hot air back and forth through sand (water will eventually rust the pipes) and you would probably have a great system. It would also prevent smoke entering the home though cracks in the pipes. Having a furnace beneath the home was common in places with basements in eastern USA where feasible. Florida not so much.
Look at rocket mass heaters
There was a guy in Ukraine putting videos on YT of his Fresnel lens heating solution. Although I knew someone who used a similar tactic by heating rocks during the day, and then moving them inside at night in the mountains of KY. So unless you are in the dark, u can make heat on cold days passively. Sometimes simple stuff like putting a radiant barrier in your attic and/or making sure there is a jog in your exhaust pipe can keep what heat you do get inside. But I live in Fl, I have a fireplace which is surrounded by rock ... so that one day a year I do use it... it stays hot/warm for 12+ hours or so after burning. yes, most of the heat escapes. but the flue column surrounding the pipe also is a contained air gap, I could steal heat with a small fan to reduce cold spots in the room ... but like I said, I don't need it. Personally I'd try a closed loop of mineral oil, although i know nothing about how to passively pump it into a radiator. glhf.
Hi Rob, that was really interesting. One question if I may……you said it took about an hour’s burn followed by 3.5hrs of useful heat……how long did it take before the stove gave off any useful heat? In other words did the sand itself soak up all the heat in the first hour?. Thanks 👍
The metal body of the stove is continuous so it must conduct the heat from the burner and radiates heats before the sand is even hot
Thanks for another great video Robert, this is something I'd definitely like to try myself, it could be used for simple home heating or in some industrial applications where a lot of heat is required for certain manufacturing or chemical processes. Could you do one or two videos that would demonstrate 1. how to heat the sand to 500 degrees using a heat pump and 2. what type of insulation would be appropriate to keep in the heat for as long as possible as they have done in Finland? Edit: I see you have answered the insulation issue in video 1622, you must have read my mind 😁 Thanks a million!!
Continue your good work.
And,
I agree with my son's assessment of everything you do, "There's nothing dumb about anything that you have ever posted."
Can you combine this with solar panels and electrical heating? Im sure a lot of us would want to see the first low cost diy home build solar sandbattery
Back in the day, a couple of centuries ago, rocks were heated by the fire and were put into metal buckets or containers and used to heat certain areas, like under the seats of carriages, in bedrooms, or wherever they were needed. Today, rocks are used for heating tents in camping, and they last a long time. I had started wondering about sand, as I live in Florida, and we don't really have rocks by the beach, just limestone, but that's kind of further inland. We are on shale here. So I started looking up sand as a heat-holder, due to the fact that I didn't really want to buy some rocks, as they are expensive, used mostly for decoration in front yards, or fire pits. I was pleased to find that sand does indeed hold heat extremely well. The sand we have is mixed with organic debris, but it can be cleaned - I have done that a lot in making some homemade fertilizer. Pure white sand is the result. We have power outages here once in awhile, but being in Florida, heat is not too much of concern, as our temps stay pretty moderate most of the year. We don't see freezing too often. Daytimes can hang around 50 or so in the winter. But putting a bucket of hot sand from a fire pit in the yard under my chair could be a warm welcome if the electric goes out in the wintertime.
Well done Rob I like the design, I used granite stone chippings but I like this solution as it's all nicely contained, my only concern is the potential to melt the firebox as sand is also an incredible insulation and mine glows bright yellow when it's been running for a while. Spalling may also be an issue so check inside occasionally for the metal flaking off but the thickness off pipe you're using you shouldn't have an issue.
How fine do you get the granite stone chippings?
@@originsdecoded3508 just loose chips that you would put in garden I think they were probably around 30mm long at most, so any loose stone will do from chippings to sand
@@shortbuslife3440 WOW! This Comfirms What i've suspected long time ago regarding some ancient archeological discoveries near Angkor temple complex by the Sra Srang basin in Cambodia. They found hundreds of of clay shaped turtles burried into the ground with pure quartz crystals tightly packed inside, and all them connected with metal wires in series. Seems to me they were utilizing the same concept you are describing here. They were using pure Quartz crystal instead of sand. I imagine the sun would heat up the clay turtles, heating up the crystals inside, and you know the rest. The ancient Past was not primitive at all!
Again very nice video Robert! 😁 We actually have found out that this doesn't work so well if you burn something because of the losses in exhaust. When you heat with electricity you don't have that problem 😁
How about video where you heat a ton of sand with solar panels? 😁 There you have to find the right resistivity.
Thank you Tommi - I agree - just when you look at the numbers you can see a lot has been lost - the sand is storing well - which is what I was interested in but the percentage loss of possible thermal energy was high and like you I concluded the heat loss was through exhaust - you can actually see that in the heat haze. Cheers mate
Paul, I've been watching your channel for a short time, I love the content.
In regards to the sand battery idea, I'm thinking about using a magnetic induction coil to heat the sand a bit quicker. I'm just a thinker on many subjects and certainly no scientists. I would love to see the possibilities for this idea though. Great show and quite addictive 👌
Thank you But How can we extract the heat and use it for other purposes???
I love what you made there. It would be most interesting if you filled the bottle as you did, BUT put a stainless coil inside to draw out the heat with water as needed.
I was thinking of moving the hot sand around. For steel 1000°C should be possible. So you would have a well insulated box and you cold take the heat out.
But then, why not having a steel pipe and blowing air through. And rotate the box if needed.
But whats the difference to the electric heaters in the rooms which were heated up electrically by night and where the heat was taken out over day.
Whats good, desert sand (that cannot be used for construction).
@@klauszinser At that temp, you could cook your food as well and create a convection oven using a fan, or even an air fryer. Air may prove to be better than water for removing the heat though water is better at storing the heat at lower temps below boiling.
Perhaps a hybrid system where the ultra high temp material is left outside and pumped via air into living quarters to heat water below boiling to provide heat where needed over time as water is best at storing heat at lower temps. You still need to insulate the water so the heat does not dissipate to rapidly but not to much so it provides heat. Then you can use the hot air also for cooking, and in my case, experimenting with other projects and perhaps a pizza oven! 🍕
Robert, can you show us the most efficient way to convert heat to electricity?
An atomic plant.
Steam
@@maxmax-sr9lhwhat about thermoelectric panels. If it snows outside you can create a even greater temperature differentiation.
@@julianblacksmith8539 not very efficient like 5 to 10% conversion the Best its a stirling engine can reach 40 to 50 % if its well construct
@@maxmax-sr9lhisnt it impossible to reach 100 efficency for any given engine. So even I manage to make the other side really cold, I would still be unable to reach 100 percent efficiency. But turbine engine might be 80 percent efficent.
I can see this simple thermal store being ideal for narrow boat as a flue to outside is simple to achieve and they can get very cold during the night, the weight wouldn’t be an issue either being fixed and could form part of the ballast. Add a couple of peltiers in the right places and you’ll get a bit of continuous power. Now I just need a narrow boat 😆
put a coil of steel pipe inside the sand, a small pump to circulate some water and you have a circulating hot water radiator for your narrow boat. Just the thing for those cold nights on the cut. Seems that you and I are missing one important thing to cruise the cut, that pesky missing narrow boat. LOL
it would be ideal mate!
Awesome! Thanks so much for making this video! …. So after 3.5 hours, it had cooled down completely to ambient? You didn’t mention the temp reading at the end of the video. Thanks !! Deeply appreciate you sharing your curiosity, exploration and industriousness!
Check the bit at 5:20
Slightly over 50°
I remember reading an article long ago about a cinder block container filled with sand and a fire box was built into it as well as copper water coils throughout the sand. The whole little building was just a box filled with sand and a fire box. The copper tubing ran from the box to the house and then they would build a fire in the box and just crank it up then let the fire die out. It would give in the dead of winter a good two to three days of comfortable heat to the home via a hot water system that also heated up the water for hot water for the home. The heat was not drying heat. During the summer you would not need that heat. When you did need the heat solar would not be viable because the weather was not producing enough electricity. Some days maybe. But if you have wood or some other source of burnable material you can have good heat through out the winter. May need to figure out a good way to do the solar or incorporate solar heat and fire box or some sort of natural gas for those with natural gas.
Put a copper coil tubing surrounded by the wet sand that you heated up (inside the heater) and the copper tubing going to a radiator inlet and outlet. Much like a pass through system. Fill the radiator up with antifreeze and make sure there are no leaks. What this will do is circulate the hot antifreeze inside the tank with the wet heated up sand outside and that circulation will keep the radiator heater heated all night long. I watched a guy do this in alaska where the temp outside was below zero and it kept him warm inside his little shack he build comfortable all night long. He was very far from freezing to death. He had his heating unit sitting outside in a campfire but the same premise applies here also. Can also use an H2 burner (if youre living off grid and doing the H2 generation thing) to keep the heater warm, much like a gas-powered hot water heater.
@@alfredharrison597 How would you do the H2 production efficiently off grid? That takes a whopping amount of electrical power to produce dangerous H2. Just use the electricity directly to heat the sand for evening use. But you’d still need alternative forms and ways to heat the sand as solar may be obscured for days, weeks at a time. Combustibles are the option. Producing H2 is not efficient on a small scale. Why waste energy. I’d say for off grid, build a solid solar array and us battery backup and build a solar reflector to heat water during the day and pump that into your sand through copper pipes to heat the interior and have a huge sand container with plenty of piping.
Great idea!
So your saying you should run hot water into copper wires to heat up the sand???
@@alfredharrison597can you refer the guy from Alaska
I'd love to see you hook up a sterling engine and electric generator to this thermal battery. Then see how long you can run an LED that's bright enough to light a small room.
yes or/and loads of peltiers
I wanna try it with a solar concentrator heating setup.
Seeing those big silos in finland holding loads of sand is obviously very expensive but I thought of a much cheaper way to do it, just dig a hole in your garden, say 1 mtr square and 2-3 MTs deep. Use thermal insulated blocks on the outside and fill it with sand and the exhaust of a rocket stove, up and down a couple times then out and then either pipes for water or ducting for air. Water or air goes down cool and comes up warm/hot, put an insulated lid on top and that amount of sand will hold alot of heat for a long time at not a huge price. Charge it over a few hours like a huge storage heater but the heat should last a long time, days I reckon
If I heat sand to 400 degrees temp, then what will the half life be, or in other words how much heat diminishes over a period of time. So will sand cool slower than water. Surely heating sand must be much harder than heating water, then why not just heat water. What advantage does sand provide, I am still confused.
It would be interesting to see how long a coil of steel pipe would produce hot water for in the sand battery. Steel would be structurally better than copper or aluminium as it has a higher melting point. One should get a lot of hot water/low pressure steam out of the device for a long time which could be fed into a radiator of some kind for heating. I would imagine that with the hot water recirculating back into the battery would extend the cooling off time.
maybe - go for it mate build it and let us know how you get on
I often hear the comment that concrete is one of the highest contributors to GHG via CO2 emissions during production. Not as well known is that it has been shown that over the lifetime of that same concrete, the same if not more CO2 has been sequestered by it.
cheers mate
"apart from herd of cows"
Cows are producing CO2 only by respiration and not contributing to overall CO2 emissions that much. 87% comes from fossil fuel.
I wonder what would happen if you had a copper coil in there, but ran the copper coil through the sand. The sandwich would be a heat buffer, the water is easier to move and use.
it's an idea mate - go for it
This could work the best for storing solar energy since both lead acid battery and dry cell batteries are getting more n more expensive as well as causing environment hazard.
Focused sunlight to some kind of heat exchanger is an Idea. The same concept as using it to melt sodium in desert solar power plants.
@@markusgarvey sounds interesting and workable
it's a good idea mate
This video is particularly interesting to me because I've been sitting around imagining a "fix" to the battery storage problem that solar panels have (which makes them an intermittent power source at the time--sun goes up, sun goes down kind of issue). I imagined thermal batteries as a solution. I was thinking something awfully expensive like molten metal at over 1000 C, but it's nice to see we can do the same thing by principle with sand or whatever earthy materials we have laying around. Plus, a lot of metals have lower heat capacities than sand. Overall, this video is great. Thanks.
If heating sand has a high half life and retains heat really well, then surely heating sand must also be much harder than water. Then why not directly heat water then.
A great channel, your keeping my brain very busy.
I watched this and the rocket stove water heater video and I can't help thinking a combination of the two would be helpful. Run water pipes through the sand bank and add an oil drum cap and chimney to gather the wasted heat.
That would hopefully have the effect of gathering heat for hot water for along time after the fire has gone out. Rocket stove mass heaters are great but as its illegal to fit one in your house(in the UK) an efficient water heater outside might be more use to alot more people.
What do you think. Would the 100c temperature cap on the water drain the sand batterys usefulness too quickly?
Thanks again for the excellent channel!
You can add insulation, so no heat will escape
Everyone keeps calling these sand batteries but no one is showing how to use it in a real World application like powering an RV or a home.
They're not for power they're for heat
It's for power if you use steam to turn a generator. There are commercially available sand batteries that do this
@@Laurel-Crowned, curious. Heat isn't power?
@@the_natrix9959. Heat is energy. Power is a measure of how much energy is used over some time interval.
Ur reading my mind again....
Isn't it funny how he does that?
lol - my bad!
Two points this would be exellent as t tent heater no worries about fire in the middle of the night. I am back in Portugal working on my house and I have noticed that the sandy rock in my area is very high in iron. Night storage heaters are basically fuse iron oxide bricks. So I am going to give this a go with our local sand. Try adding iron oxide cement dye to your sand it may help with the absorption of the heat charge.
Hi Robert, nice videos about sand batteries. Any chance you can record another one showing characteristics of a sand batteries and it's capacity to store heat on a long run(days, weeks, months)?
Could you crush broken glass and turn it into sand? If so, how much sand can you create from broken glass?
How do u make a big one cheap? Cement block tower with insulation wrap maybe? Cheap heat transfer fluid? Maybe water is good enough
Did you say “cows” are causing global warming?? You’ve lost the plot!
0:28 😂 The casing you have max for your sand battery reminds me of Bender off futurama 😂
Water collects heat very rapidly but it then dumps that heat very rapidly. That’s why it’s used in car radiators etc. SAND AND OTHER MASONRY COLLECT HEAT SLOWLY AND RELEASE IT VERY SLOWLY. THOSE WHO PUT DRUMS OF WATER IN THEIR GREEN HOUSE TO COLLECT HEAT FOR THE NIGHT WOULD BE MUCH BETTER OFF USING SAND.
i dont doubt the capabilityfor one second. BUT... anybody with storage heaters will know the impossible situation of trying to control WHEN and HOW MUCH the device releases the stored energy.
Haha, oh my God, your videos, but this one idea of yours? I could use it right now, keeping me warm at night in peru.... i need to go buy one, or build one, the bigger it is, the warmer I am....
isnt it possible to take distilled water to a higher temp in a microwave? i remember it would explode yeah?
Hi, I like to build a 2m3 sandbattery. I hope this will be enough for a 100 sqm house. But I am afraid that the iron rocket stove will melt or deform, due the heavy sand insulation. Anybody any ideas or suggestions. Will be highly appreciated. Thanks. Robert
thanks for this. I was going to put a smaller canner full of sand on the wood stove but maybe a chunk of concrete will work just as well, less mess and adjustable since there are a few of them around here. Should be able to let the fire go out at night.
Hi, afraid my O level physics hasn't equipped me with the knowledge to answer my own question here so can I throw it open? I have a multi-fuel stove in my living room. Would it be worth me placing a biscuit tin full of sand on top of it to maximise heat from it even after it goes out?
My gut reaction says that it would require a LOT of sand before it made any difference but I don't have any facts to back that up. So over to those more knowledgeable........
Fork you talk a lot Robert, still having said that you have a way of holding my attention, so I’ve liked and subscribed, and will check your other videos.
Regards
Norfolkngood
How can you compare the emissions from cows with concrete?
Cows eat grass. Grass eats CO2. It is circular.
Pasture raised grassfed cattle even binds CO2 permanently in the ground by treading plants into the soil.
Concrete releases CO2 bound in minerals and fuel for the rotary furnace. Thats way more problematic. However even the calciumoxide slowly reacts with the CO2 in the atmosphere to calciumcarbonate, the rawmaterial of concrete.
If using Spray Foam insulation your working temperature would have to be limited to keep from melting and Burning it! 🤨🙄
So why don’t you mix your sand with graphite to make it flow this way you could use capillary heating in small tubes to intensify the heat pump, the sand and graphite through your lines into a container that is set up like a honeycomb, and would disperse the heat, more evenly while pumping air across it, making the Santaflow and pumping it from container to container, I would think Would allow you to get it up to a higher temperature and thereby lasting longer as a battery.
Hey Hey!! Less of the agriculture bashing like you did at 5:54, do a bit of proper research on the actual amount of emissions from agricultural and livestock before you start lumping that in with real polluters like industry and transport, I would have expected more from an intelligent bloke than trotting out the party line on this.
I read about this a few days ago... but in that article they said sand has about 25% efficiency??.
So that's a loss of 75% or roughly 3 times the energy it takes to heat it than it stores
if the initial energy is free and in abundance you may not care, but if it expensive or if burning a pollutant then its environmental value is debatable.
It seems like the most practical use for this is an oven. There isn't really any loss in efficiency over a heat pump or battery storage since the only way to heat up an oven is either gas or resistance elements because of the high temperature. Using a fresnel lens to heat up the sand rather than a solar panel and resistance element would mean you'd be capturing and storing solar energy as heat at close to 100% efficiency. Then the oven it will be warm or ready to warm your oven whenever you need it. You could also slap a TEC to the sand and another to the back of the oven, so electricity is generated as the oven cools down and generates electricity from the sand if there is ever an excess of heat. So you could in theory have an oven that gets all its energy from sunlight and would generate electricity as the oven cools down or there is an abundance of solar thermal energy. With all except the electricity generation operating at near 100% efficiency. Even the TECs could operate at their best efficiency due ro rhe high heat and the heat passing from the oven/sand through thr TEC could even be used to heat water for residential use.
This is a nice start. One very interesting thing that the Finnish company is doing is heating the sand electrically and then removing the heat from the outer parts of the sand first. By doing this in a controlled way, they actually can increase the efficiency quite a lot (they claim 2x) because the sand you have cooled becomes a partial insulator for the remaining sand. That approach does, however, mean that larger batteries have a large advantage over smaller ones.
How long can you get heat for w the sand battery?
Ideally someone is probably thinking of comparing this to how much warmth they can buy before going to sleep at night with it heating their room. I doubt it would last a full 8 hours?
Of course you could use recycled concrete and clay brickdust and sand mix so there is no carbon cost using the recycled stuff.
Very sadly Ukraine will have loads of that stuff now. They do have some sand batteries
We have a lot of old concrete from our crumbling infrastructure that we could recycle into heat batteries (as one of the ways to reuse this old concrete.).
now that is an awesome idea mate
4.6 kWh is about enough to keep one medium size room warm for one hour in the winter. The temperature starts off nice but then gets cooler with time. You need to put it in a box with flaps or something to control the release of the heat.
actually with the right chemical additives water can go over 12,000f...
wait. Sand battery = accessible thermal mass?
okay so a flywheel but for heat
a water battery that doesn't use gravity or slosh about
nice
I went down the mass heater road and after a lot of trying I decided you are better off just letting the heat enter the room the mass actually insulated and caries the heat out of the system if you are looking for efficiency weather proofing is a much better use of time I do use a pellet rocket stove gravity fed and home made so I know how fun they are I have a water system that heats a radiator no electric needed the burn chamber is 2 inch treaded pipe into a small barrel and out a 4 inch exhaust steam punky simple and super efficient and clean
Oh my! Those concrete cows in Milton Keynes must be really bad for the environment.🐄
Thanks Rob. I was wondering if we would see this one. Excellent execution as always. Some days I come to the channel just to you see you get excited about the possibilities. Its infectious and believe me, many in today's world need this optimism and to know you can do this. But as you always say, its about doing. Thank you again.
There's a town in Finland (I think) using a heat pump to heat a large sand battery to over 500 degrees and i think its being used for local town heating
Yes!!! Now I have a question: how can we heat the sand without wood or cokes. I want to do it wit 12 V ir more but how???
I had an idea to mix the sand with graphene powder and put from the electricity 220 V or battery 14-48 V 2 wires in the graphene sand One from the + and one from the - like you did with the graphene conductive paint on the wall. Or was it a infra red strip?
Something very easy is there that we can do with free energy to heat the sand. In those times it is so important that we are self supporting with our heaters in the next winters.
Hope you all will think about it:
How can we heat the sand without cokes or wood.
Maybe a conductive graphene connection between the wires?
Wich sand did you use? I could not hear quite right the name. In Finland they use, as far as I know, granit sand.
I was thinking about
granit, silicium, lime and graphene powder.
Make a mix, put it in a stove and than with 2 wires and an graphene connection between them.... what do you think?
for sure mate - just use a resistive element
@@ThinkingandTinkering Wow, thank you!!!
Could you coil some copper pipe inside the sand and heat a set of radiators through the night with this idea?
A cast iron is the best heat storage in terms of a volume, price and convenience
Except for youtube channel filling .... does it produce electricity ?
Seems like the same as rocket mass heaters
This tech would go really well with an off grid woodburning stove...
So if I filled the reflecting box for my methanol heater with sand it will keep pumping out heat long after its ran out of fuel
They work well, I want to build or buy one for my house!
Will make a great heater if you use Terracotaclay pot or The tradisionsl Spanidh fireplace made of terracota
I believe the Chinese created a heating system using ceramic , with a firebox built underground, to heat houses. Still used today.
@@markusgarvey Thnx very interresting, putting heated sand, and then using a hallogen lamp to first heat-up the sand, in other words using a hallogen lamp as a heating element.I took a 150watt hallogen lamp and measured the temprature, it reached 230degrees celsuis in les than 4 minutes. I think there is going to be a lot of ideas that will be taking off from this sand /battery concept.
yeah it would
Anyone building something like this for long term use should be aware of one issue. As a rocket stove, steel is fine because it radiates so much heat it keeps the temperatures down. Same with a water jacket. But once you start surrounding the rocket core with insulative materials like clay and sand it can bring the temperatures in the core up significantly. Over time, the steel spalls and fails. This is why refractory materials are typically used in rocket mass heater systems.
I'm a huge advocate of mass heating, my whole home is heated with one. It would probably be a good idea to consider installing a rocket mass heater rather than try and retrofit something like this to a conventional wood burner.
What's the point of heating the sand?
Can it be used other than just sitting there?
Water still seems better to me , Insulated pressurized tanks will stay hot for yonks .
"Patently not" an invention? Punning again, Rob! Good video. Maybe one of your magnesium or zinc salt cements?
yeah they would work mate
Is there any way to turn that heat into electricity. ??? Outher than. Very expensive steam turbines
What if the Egyptian pyramids were a power plant using the desert sand as a battery?