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Giant 'sand battery' holds a week's heat for a whole town

newatlas.com

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Re: Giant 'sand battery' holds a week's heat for a whole town

#3

Post by gorpy7 »

This is great technology, simple and effective. I’ve spent many hours reverse engineering to see how effective and expensive it might be. I’ve found it’s very cost effective but heat can be hard to calculate. i like that they did a prototype. i think i’ll do one at some point. for an individual house it makes more sense to improve my insulation but i think ill still build a small version for fun.

Re: Giant 'sand battery' holds a week's heat for a whole town

#4

Post by dragontamer »

gorpy7 wrote: post #3

This is great technology, simple and effective. I’ve spent many hours reverse engineering to see how effective and expensive it might be. I’ve found it’s very cost effective but heat can be hard to calculate. i like that they did a prototype. i think i’ll do one at some point. for an individual house it makes more sense to improve my insulation but i think ill still build a small version for fun.

IceBear went out of business with the opposite tech: tanks of water storing the cold generated from excess AC cycles.

Cheap electricity can make cold, and then a fan can convert the cold water into cold air during peak hours when electricity was costlier.

Fans still took electricity to run, but it'd only be a few hundred watts to run air-conditioning rather than kilowatts of power.

Re: Giant 'sand battery' holds a week's heat for a whole town

#6

Post by dragontamer »

photonbucket wrote: post #5

I'm curious about "why sand", is it better at holding heat than say water?

Probably not.

But sand doesn't freeze (or perhaps, sand doesn't melt) under normal temperatures. That's probably more important for an icy region.

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