[lutherquick]

This is a short, but incredible video.
14 Meg.

The concept is this:

You over build hot water solar collector capacity whereby you store the extra heat energy in the ground from the summer months.
Like geothermal, but storing the extra summer heat in the ground soil for use in the winter.
The video is from a Canadian community, consider that a cold Canadian community can cover 90% of it's hot water consumption, that's damn good.

For several years I thought, why not store excess heat from the summer in a conventional (ground loop) geo-thermal systems for use in the winter.
In addition, have a separate field for storing excess cold (negative heat) from the winter to use in the summer for cooling (since the vid is from Canada, cooling would not be so important for them).

Anyway, nice to see this inter-seasonal thermal storage being implemented.
I periodically search for this concept and find ZERO. This is the first I have found.

Sure, this will not solve peak oil, but it could delay it make life sustainable. Transport is a big peak oil issue, but so is home heating...

By the way, why not take ambient air, just heat exchangers, fans, and loops pumping heat into the ground during the summer (for winter use) and in a separate field, pumping heat out during the winter (for summer use), no solar, just heat from ambient air ?

One last thing, there are no compressors here, compressors are inefficient, so this isn't geo-thermal heat pumps, like refrigeration, this is just PUMPING...

Kindly do "Save as..."
http://www.ipenergy.com/data/inter-seas ... torage.wmv

[Doly]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lutherquick', '
')For several years I thought, why not store excess heat from the summer in a conventional (ground loop) geo-thermal systems for use in the winter.

[bobbyald]

Close to where I live (Suburbs of London, UK) there is a park with a brick dome protruding from the ground. There are steps that take you down about 20 feet into an underground room and as a kid I always wondered who build this and why. Recently I learnt that it is a Victorian Ice House and was used to store ice collected from the local lake in winter for use during the summer.

It seems hard to believe that enough would remain as ice to last throughout the summer but apparently it worked well.

[bellebouche]

Thanks for that link - interesting stuff.

I love the concept of the heat-store.. in design it looked to be a massive volume.

It'd be great to see something like this in operation.

[skeptic]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('bobbyald', 'C')lose to where I live (Suburbs of London, UK) there is a park with a brick dome protruding from the ground. There are steps that take you down about 20 feet into an underground room and as a kid I always wondered who build this and why. Recently I learnt that it is a Victorian Ice House and was used to store ice collected from the local lake in winter for use during the summer.

[lutherquick]

Doly,

I'm a software engineer, not mechanical or civil... But the mathematics to calculate heat loss, and other thermodynamic functions are not that complicated. I was asking some civil engineers about 2 or 3 years ago and on the technical side there seamed to be no problems, insulation would be required, but nothing you can't find at Home Depot. The biggest resistance I saw was that of local laws and environmental laws. Having dirt at 80 degrees C (almost boiling point of water) is going to make some strange chemical reactions... I guess the larger the mass, the less temperature change, even though it would store the same amount of energy... A bigger field would be better...

Originally I wanted two pits, separated by 50 meters, the hot pit would be insulated on top, the cold pit would be insulated on the bottom (heat rises, cold [absence of heat] sinks)...

The unfortunate part is that during the summer we try to run away from heat, try to push it away, but in the winter we huddle and burn anything to get it. Therefore, storing and buffering, thus creating INTER SEASONAL storage just seams to be so natural...

Whether it's best to build underground structures, filled with better materials, I don't know... It takes allot of mass to store this heat energy. We need data, and I think making some experiments on a farm (less EPA involvement) might be an answer... I whish I could find a book on this... But if some civil engineer out there made one, the experience would be interesting to know about... And scaling this down, for one home, would give some quick answers...

My bet is that it will work.