Very old heaters used to contain lots of asbestos. It might have worked well.
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.
bstix@feddit.dk 1 month ago
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 month 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
edent@lemmy.world 1 month ago
These are called “storage heaters”. They’re still available. www.which.co.uk/…/storage-heaters-aokoz3G2Em9L
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month ago
Yep, those look familiar. However for heat pumps I found one manufacturer in Canada plus a few experimental things