Harbor Freight electronic calipers warning

Not a big problem except for making it cost effective. Phase change material can store the heat until needed.

Dan

Not a big problem except for making it cost effective. Phase change material can store the heat until needed.

Dan

IIRC around here the advice is that 5 acres of carefully managed "collectors" will keep your house warm, up to 20 if you just take whatever falls on the ground. The collectors are cheap and mostly maintain themselves but property taxes can be a killer.

jsw

I doubled the attic insulation and sealed the doors and windows and use the house itself for thermal mass. After the fire dies out around midnight it cools 2-3% of the in-out temperature difference per hour, maybe 5F over a very cold winter night.

MITRE dug up a parking lot and installed a large underground cold water storage system that significantly reduces air conditioning cost in the summer.

I haven't found a cheap and plentiful supply of used stainless steel tanks and plumbing to build a cost-effective home energy storage system. Enameled steel water heater tanks rust through, the old copper and Monel (the best) ones are rare and unaffordable, fiberglass and polyethylene don't transfer heat well enough. Fiberglass water softener tanks will at least hold pressure. Plastic 55 gallon drums bulge enough to tip over at 5 PSI.

I think Glauber's salt is the secret of this miracle:

AFAIK the ancients obtained sodium sulphate from natural deposits. jsw

(...)

Excellent!

Cool!

You might not need to store so much of the PCM to see a significant benefit. See below at 'One possibility...'.

Glauber's salt (sodium sulfate) was demonstrated as a heat storage medium by Maria Telkes in 1948 but it's salts can irretrievably separate over time and become useless for heat storage. It's been replaced by commercial products:

etc.

One possibility is to place a flat aluminum tub of paraffin wax behind each space-heat solar collector to extend the amount of time that heated air can be extracted from it. The stuff is about 10% lighter than an equivalent amount of water.

One would want to size the tub so that the expanding wax didn't escape. :)

Yeahbut: "(...) However, these explanations run into technical difficulties, such as the variability of the phenomenon and its being unrelated to ambient temperature"

Luckily, we have better materials available now.

--Winston

I use large pieces of cast iron to store heat.

jsw

You could triple your heat storage capacity by using a phase change material.

Cast iron has a specific heat of 0.46 kJ/kg K. Wallboard made with 30% PCM measures 1.467 kJ/kg K.

Ya. I know. The CI is paid for. :)

--Winston

Try cutting a thread with wallboard.

jsw

(...)

It's as good as 'cast iron wallpaper'.

:)

--Winston

I always knew CA had strange and mysterious building practices and codes, but...

-- Silence is more musical than any song. -- Christina Rossetti

You ain't seen nothin.

Here, some *people* have shingles.

--Winston

Some of them even have a metal roof-over. ;-)

And some need muffling. I knew Joor personally.

-- Silence is more musical than any song. -- Christina Rossetti