How a Sand Battery Could Revolutionize Home Energy Storage
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- Опубликовано: 25 мар 2024
- How a Sand Battery Could Revolutionize Home Energy Storage. Use code UNDECIDED50 to get 50% OFF First Box and free wellness shots for life with any active subscription at bit.ly/3TiVmO8! Sand. It’s coarse, it's rough, and it can make for a great sand battery. And as weird as that might sound, it’s just one example of the many earthy materials currently used for thermal energy storage (or TES). A while back, we covered the debut of the world’s first commercial sand battery, which is big enough to supply power for about 10,000 people. Now, sand-based energy storage has reached a new frontier: individual homes. Companies like Batsand are currently offering heat batteries that bring hot and fresh sand directly to your door. Seems you can get just about anything delivered these days.
But what’s stopped us from experimenting with residential TES before? How will heat storage impact our lives in our homes? And where exactly are homeowners supposed to put this stuff?
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My main concern would be giant sandworms, we have seen what they have done to Arrakis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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).
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
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.