The sand storage is used for district heating. It’s not much of a substitute for single homes that have electrical heating or are off-grid.
It’s a great way to balance the both the electrical and the heating grids so that more electricity from renewables can be used to offset other means of heat production, but it needs to be done by the district heating supplier. I doubt it makes sense for individual houses.
Right, you really need scale for sand batteries to work. It would be difficult for individual people to do, especially in suburban London.
District heating also works better in denser housing. In other words, not suburban London.
Dunno what heat pumps are available in England, but that’s probably the best option here.
you really need scale for sand batteries to work
Not at all. First, (hot) water batteries are excellent for home heat storage. Sand/dirt is even more storage per volume required, and completely complimentary in sending hot water through it (pipes) to make it hotter. No combustion heat means less air exchanges, and a 300C rock/dirt/sand pit has losses that radiate through house.
Suburbs are fine for district heating, but it’s a massive long term investment.
For UK in particular, I also think proper insulation and triple/quadruple window panes are much needed to curb with the increasingly scorching summers and freezing winters. I was surprised to see soo many houses with single paned windows in London.
Oof. If they’re running around with single pane windows, yeah, that’s pretty bad, but also the easiest thing to fix.
IMO, triple pane and onward provide only marginal benefits over double pane. But the jump from single to double is a big one.
AA5B@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
When I was a kid my parents had electric resistance heat with some very effective thermal storage.
Each room had a unit about the size of a typical radiator. The unit was basically an insulated box with a small circulation fan. I’m not sure what was inside but always assumed some form of brick - they weren’t expensive so it couldn’t be anything exotic. At night when electric rates were low, whatever was inside the units was heated up. During the day, the only power usage was a small circulation fan controlled by the thermostat.
I just got a heat pump installed and thought thermal storage would be worth considering, but contractors acted like they never heard of it, and there really didn’t seem to be any consumer units available.
edent@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
These are called “storage heaters”. They’re still available. www.which.co.uk/…/storage-heaters-aokoz3G2Em9L
AA5B@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yep, those look familiar. However for heat pumps I found one manufacturer in Canada plus a few experimental things
While I don’t have timebof use metering, I was looking into solar and it could be really useful for shifting the load so solar does most of the heating
AA5B@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yep, those look familiar. However for heat pumps I found one manufacturer in Canada plus a few experimental things
bstix@feddit.dk 4 weeks ago
Very old heaters used to contain lots of asbestos. It might have worked well.
AA5B@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Not that old, plus I don’t see it.
Asbestos is great at insulating really hot things so was used on boilers , especially ships and industrial to insulate the hot pipes and improve efficiency. However in this case we need something with thermal mass: any sand or rock might do, or water, or oil, or a modern phase change material. That material next to the heater will get hot but the entire mass won’t, so can be insulated with standard materials. There’s no point in something like asbestos
An important part of my point was also that what I assume were cheap materials was enough to take advantage of nightly time of use metering. In upstate NY, a standard “radiator” per room was sufficient, similar to hot water or steam heat