Thermal Storage for Solar Heat
#11
Matt posted about his solar heater and the conversation drifted to adding a storage mass. Thought it best to start a new thread just for that.

If I want to make thermal storage I'll restack that cubic yard of leftover bricks I can't seem to throw out. Lacking that, cement blocks or even rocks could work. Ask around friends and neighbors. I'm not the only one wishing for a better use for all this ballast.
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#12
Try water.
Matt

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
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#13
EatenByLimestone said:


Try water.




Yep. http://www.bdmdialog.com/?p=445
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#14
My biggest challenge in adding thermal mass is where to put it. I have too many toys in my shop(looking over my shoulder for the Mrs. ) to pick a corner to add it to. Short of that would be adding a fixture of sorts outside or in the ground.

I've seen where guys who are heating their homes this way will put in a new septic tank, insulate it well and use that for thermal storage. But most of those are heating water with solar and the tank houses the hot water.

I will say so far I am very pleased with it. Even on bright hazy days it produces heat, no where near what it does on a cloudless day, but just the same its been doing a decent job of warming my shop.
If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
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#15
Look to Israel for info on this. I did a report in the 70's about this and they had a set up for storage it under the building with some type of extraction set up that would actually turn into a cooling system when the time for it came around
Phydeaux said "Loving your enemy and doing good for those that hurt you does not preclude killing them if they make that necessary."


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women have trouble understanding Trump's MAGA theme because they had so little involvement in making America great the first time around.

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#16
My dad built one under his garage to store heat from a wood boiler. He used copper tubing because that was what was available and packed sand around it. It worked fantastic for about 10 years then the acidity of the sand ate the copper. Strange thing is he got the sand from the exact same pit his friend did 30 years earlier and it worked fine. So sand and PEX tubing would be a good way to go. One can always wet the sand for increased thermal mass. At least that way the water is not in liquid form. Above all insulate it well. My dad used 2 layers of 2" rigid foam. His box would stay warm and only drop ~15 degrees in 5 days once it got hot.
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#17
Water does have the advantage of mobility but masonry will never freeze or leak or go bad. Masonry can be really cheap and easy to configure. Easy to reconfigure if you rearrange the space or move to a new shop. It does not require a pump, just stack it with passages and duct the air thru it. Add a damper to bypass it in the morning. For shop heat this seems the way to go, especially if you don't make it to the shop some days. No maintenance, just ignore it.
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#18
yeah, for a while I was really excited about the idea of a pool of water that you slowly turn to ice over the course of a winter, and then melt for a/c over the summer. Not sure it would really be worth it. I stayed for a couple days in a house that was built in the late '70s that had a room full of rocks in the basement. It was heated with solar during the day. Very little heating expense at all, and it was a really comfortable house

A concrete floor can hold a lot of heat. Not sure how you would heat it with air-air solar though
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#19
When I jackhammered up a 13x15 slab at my old house a guy came and hauled a lot of the concrete chunks away. He was going to use them as a thermal mass.
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#20
FWIW, I wired a house back 30 years ago or so that had solar powered water storage tanks.
The guy had a fountain in the front of his home that had a recirculating pump on it. It would pump cold water into the fountain, where the fountain sat in the sun all day long, heating the water & returning it to the massive tanks in his basement.

He had two 10,000 gallon tanks installed when they poured the basement floor, before they built any floors above or anything.
The tanks were insulated, and had temp gauges on them.
The owner heated the water all summer long & used the tanks to feed under floor tubes that heated the house.

Later on, he added solar panels on the roof to keep the temps up in the tanks during the winter.
He saved a ton of money heating his house, but it was a big expense in the beginning.
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