Comment on We should rename Solar to Patriot Power to make it palatable to the right

• CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  See I’ve been skeptical about the gravity battery, too. I’m glad to see it developed, toyed with, but I like very simple ideas with very few, if any, moving parts. Gravity battery? Moving parts, cables. Would be a nightmare to work on if it broke down, possibly dangerous with the stored potential energy.

  Much safer: sand battery. BTUs are expensive, you’re probably heating your water, and depending on the winter climate where you live, you are using electricity to convert to BTUs so you can heat your home/not die. I say skip the middle man!! Convert the extra energy generated from solar/wind/whatever…store it in the fucking sand as heat.

  I also look at the sand battery’s simplicity, serviceability from a post-nuke/EMP/grid-down/post-apocalyptic standpoint. Should I be unfortunate enough to survive. It’s so…practical. Solar panels should only get hit <15% damage from EMP. It gets the electricity. Sent to large copper rods, acting as heating elements. Heat the sand. 🙌🏻 Sand will cost a few thousand & never degrade. Rods, cheap enough, have some spares. Those shitty LiPO batteries play out during the apocalypse, as they literally always do? You’re SOL.

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  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    first, it stores heat only. you can make it work with 1000L or so barrel of water and this gets you supply for days. second, you’d want this thing to service entire small community, because otherwise square-cube law fucks you hard. you need also all the auxiliary devices like heaters, pumps, control hardware that looks the same no matter if you make it work for your house or small village

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    • CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That is correct, it stores heat only. A little bit about my situation: I have a drafty AF, 3200 sq ft farmhouse. Yes, I know I need to fix that…all things cost a lot of money, to do well.

      A hot water tank tie-in would be excellent too, of course.

      Additionally, I’d put the heated sand to work heating a large concrete driveway, a sidewalk in the winter months. While this can be classed as a “luxury”, I view it as an investment in my health & well-being, as well as reducing risk & increasing my reliability. Eventually I’d like to throw up a polebarn style garage, with heated concrete pad, pull on the sand battery to heat that as well. Winter is a big problem where I live!! And a massive pain in my ass.

      Please be kind, I’ve heard talk like this before, but tbh I don’t know what it means: > “because otherwise square-cube law fucks you hard.”

      What does this mean? 🤔 ELI5? TIA, I like these convos. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

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      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Additionally, I’d put the heated sand to work heating a large concrete driveway, a sidewalk in the winter months

        please invest in good winter shoes and shovel. first, you need massive amount of heat to warm up all that concrete and then melt ice, but it’s not enough. you also have to get rid of liquid water entirely because otherwise it’ll just freeze again but now it’s glossy and flat surface of ice

        square-cube law

        when making sand battery, what you’re actually interested in is mass of sand. however you can’t conjure perfectly spherical globe of dirt suspended in vacuum, you have to put it somewhere. you need a tank, and one with hefty insulation. now: mass is proportional to volume, which is proportional to r^3 - cube. price of tank and amount of insulation needed is proportional to its surface - r^2 - square. the bigger you make it, the more sand you get per square meter of tank surface, meaning that storage costs go down with scale. that example from finland serves entire community for example

        square-cube law provides some hard limitations on what is practical and what is not, for example it explains why big animals move slower than smaller ones. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square–cube_law

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• Zippy@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This. Thanks for doing the math. The only way it makes any real sense is if you a have geographical features that can store the energy. Ie right near a mountain and a large body of water high up. And even with that, it often only makes economical sense at exsisting dams where you can pump the water back into the reservoir and the generation systems is already paid for and in place.

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