Posted by PaulHoule 1 day ago
Bus sized because that amount of thermal mass is bound to take up a lot of space, but capable of being buried so that it doesn’t actually take up property space.
You can then use a heat pump that's optimized for the expected temperature range and you don't even need to insulate your water storage tank - you actually want the cold in winter to seep out into the surrounding soil, free energy.
In summer you have cold storage for your AC.
A 100m3 (100,000 litres or 26,500 gallons) cylindrical water tank (approx 5x5m) buried and insulated with 50cm of XPS could provide around 4000kWh of deliverable heat throughout winter. Which would be more than enough for heating and domestic hot water for my house.
In the summer you'd use solar thermal to charge it to 85c. In the winter you'd run water through underfloor heating and discharge it to 35c (so you just need a mixer valve and pump).
The structural engineering part of it isn't actually that complicated (with a garden on top, not a house). You can buy plastic water tanks of that size, it just needs to be buried and have XPS foam placed around it.
Because it's volume, it scales up well. An extra one meter in each direction would increase the volume by around 60%, but you have a lower overall heat loss, so the heat capacity would more than double.
The important part of it is the XPS foam though, without this the loses are too great and you don't retain any heat. This is why insulating your foundation and slab is so effective.
• The centigrade is capitalized when used after a number. There is also a singular glyph for the entire degree-centigrade convention: ℃.
• There are also superscript numerical characters to use with volumes, without having to use formatting: m³.
UTF-8 is fun! As is automatic text replacement, once you have the appropriate triggers set up.And being on an alluvial plain, if I filter out all the rocks larger than a pea, a good 90+% of what is dug out can immediately be trucked away.
And being on an alluvial plain, if I filter out all the rocks larger than a pea, a good 90+% of what is dug out can immediately be trucked away.
GFL buying a simple resistive-heated clothes dryer, furnace, or tanked/tankless water heater in 2030.