Do you think the sand battery has a chance of catching on? Try 14 days for free: aura.com/matt. Thank you to Aura for sponsoring this video! If you liked this video, check out: Why Seaweed Could Be The Future Of Plastic kzread.info/dash/bejne/a2Rlw7N_gpmspJM.html

@faica

Жыл бұрын

Kindly don't forget to review the thermal solar cooling

@Seraphus87

Жыл бұрын

Hey how many heat-related puns did you work in there? I lost count around half a dozen. If people downed a shot to every pun, they'd get hammered 😀

@allreadynotinuse4169

Жыл бұрын

Well sand don’t work because some how we short on that. There more than one type of sand and one we need getting harder to source

@sang3Eta

Жыл бұрын

You can produce Hydrogen with unwanted wind energy and burn that on demand. UK is moving to Hydrogen boilers for winter heat. Thermal batteries have been tried before and failed because the cost was 4x more expensive than renewables. See video "Billion dollar solar failure".

@gamerfortynine

Жыл бұрын

Why not use gravity? Dont have to mess with thermals and special materials. GRANDFATHER CLOCK style. Weight lifting on an industrial scale.

Someone complained that the earth will eventually have sand shortage, but that's only an issue for sand used in construction that needs a certain type of quality. The sand battery can use any type of sand, e.g. desert sand that doesn't qualify for construction.

@TheBooban

Жыл бұрын

When river sand runs out, the sand in demand, they will find a way to process desert sand to become fine like river sand. Just a matter of rolling it around in a cement mixer for a while, I bet.

@timfriday9106

Жыл бұрын

and wait...yeah isn't the world already suffering a massive sand shortage?

@Craneopsss

Жыл бұрын

@@TheBooban I was gonna mention river sand. I live in kansas city missouri and the river barges are constantly running for river sand as far as I know. Imagine having one unit that heated your home and water supply at the same time 😳 that's gonna get somebody on a disappearance conspiracy list 🤔 👀

@odoggow8157

Жыл бұрын

Ur all bloody morons. Electricity storage is just idiocy! Oil gas and nuclear is the only way to meet the world's increasing energy crisis. If ppl want more electric vehicles we need more plants to produce it! Storage and windfarms ain't gonna even come close

@odoggow8157

Жыл бұрын

@@TheBooban yes and that's such an efficient use of limited electricity 🙄 do u ppl have brains in ur heads at all?

The urban farmer basically did this, but with the dirt under his greenhouse, some insulation panels, and pvc pipes. It worked really well at keeping his greenhouse temperature consistent, even throughout Canadian winter.

@-delilahlin-1598

Жыл бұрын

Can you share a link, plz?

@samo4866

Жыл бұрын

@@-delilahlin-1598 this is the timelapse, but he's got other videos describing what he did kzread.info/dash/bejne/amyfpNizaM-8hso.html

@bellamyclemson

Жыл бұрын

Here's a pretty good overview of the urban farmers new setup kzread.info/dash/bejne/qKOimauxcZrbgcY.html

I did this same thing in my shop up here in Alaska, we had to back fill within the confines of a large poured concrete foundation. I bought a semi truck load of blue foam that was being torn off of a high school roofing project and insulated what I call a thermal or dirt battery. as we back filled and compacted with sand and gravel we layered in PEX tubing, in the top strata of the dirt we laid a top grid of potable pex tubes to preheat the water going into my indirect fired water heater. I am currently charging the dirt battery with evacuated tube solar collectors, the whole thing is charged with glycol to keep it from freezing in the winter months. The system works quite well, we have almost 24 hour daylight in the summer and no heat load, so the system stores energy all summer as well as preheating my domestic hot water. The dimensions of the system are 36' x 36' by about 8' thick. by fall the system has been running around 110 to 115 F at its warmest. in addition to preheating my potable water the system can pull heat out with the same Pex that it uses to put it in and heat the shop and house radiant with the low temps. the system has been running almost maintenance free for seven years now and I have plans to double the collectors and have already built a 2,600 gallon tank into the foundation to use as my high temp battery, hoping to run this one around 180 to 200 F. to answer the question I know everyone is asking it has cut by gas consumption in half over the course of a year. almost 100% in the summer and increasing and decreasing amounts in the shoulder seasons.

This is a perfect solution for college campuses or other places where they have a central heating system for multiple buildings!!! It doesn’t need to start with entire cities!! This is one of the most wise and PRACTICAL energy solutions I’ve seen in ages!! If there’s enough sun to make it work in Finland, they can use it almost anywhere!!

@troubleshooter1975

Жыл бұрын

He had a map that showed MN. U of M has/had a huge steam plant; I am going to have to research where in MN that sand storage is...😃

No rare minerals or metals needed for these storage options are honestly the most important part. This is truly a scalable. This along with the Co2 batteries seem like they could work great in tandem.

@odoggow8157

Жыл бұрын

No it is not scalable! Ur all such gullible retards sry not sry

This is yet another reminder that more cities need to invest in district heating networks. This is one of many potential techs out there which would drastically reduce emissions by taking advantage of one….but many of our cities don’t have district heating so they won’t be able to take advantage of it :-(

@SaveMoneySavethePlanet

Жыл бұрын

@Li Heli sure. These systems require upkeep. But paying for that upkeep via taxes is rarely as expensive as when you tally up all the upkeep that us individuals pay on our own little private systems. So we still win as a group overall. But we have to get the messaging right in order to help people realize that deploying something like this may raise your taxes, and that’s actually a good thing.

@billb48843

Жыл бұрын

Detroit HAD district heating from coal fired electric plants. Then we started phasing out the old and dying coal plants and they sold the district heating to Enron. Which raised prices for heat to high cost and for 2+ years a goodly portion of Detroit's central heat district scrambled to convert to gas fired boilers (3 year payback on package boilers vs Enron)(steam was the medium for transfer and Detroit was the "condenser" for the power plants - adsorption cooling for the summer). So, if building managers are going to buyin and this is going to work, it must be regulated and treated as a utility or some structure to avoid the gouging as Enron did to cause a reversal effect.

@DominicFalcon

Жыл бұрын

Given the efficiencies of heat pumps, the power grid has the capability of being a very efficient district heating network.

@eaaeeeea

Жыл бұрын

@@DominicFalcon You suggesting collecting the excess heat from transformers and other power grid equipment and feed that into district heating system?

@Mr_Bartt

Жыл бұрын

@@DominicFalcon The point of the video was, that you still need electricity for it to work (relating to heatpumps) and in current market, there are too few cheap and scaleable options for renewables to store excess energy during the peak production hours and disperse it in form of an electricity. I.e. the problem is that you need more diverse forms of energy exchange rather than straight up electro-chemical batteries for energy storage. Heat pumps are a great solution only if your source of energy is nuclear or hydro (easy to adjust and to throttle).

This is the most promising technology you’ve presented lately….it doesn’t rely on “a miracle occurs here”. Everything needed to make this work exists today.

I have watched only about 20 of your videos, but just love (more than your deep dive into whatever your talking about; which is always just awesome bye the way) that you almost always talk about scale ability of the given subject; just absolutely imperative that it’s incorporated into the feasibility of the tech you talk about. Just material facts as you know them. Great job!!!

Using unrecyclable brown or green glass, powered, for the sand would also create a use for the material instead of sending it to a landfill. Using glass instead of sand would also keep the glass out of the waste stream. And the glass has the same properties for high heat storage as sand.

@JustWasted3HoursHere

Жыл бұрын

Excellent idea! (Also, I don't think a lot of people know that brown and green glass are not recyclable).

@alankohn6709

Жыл бұрын

There is a start-up in New Orleans that is recycling glass back into sand. they pulverise it till it is the size of sand grains. certain coloured glasses blue, red and green they turn into ornamental sand for use in gardens and architectural uses and the rest they use to help restore coastal wetlands with the help of an environmental organisation restoring wetlands around New Orleans to help mitigate damage from hurricanes. So far the results look promising with all testing showing the product is environmentally safe and the local plants happily spreading into the new sand banks.

@RalphH007

Жыл бұрын

@@JustWasted3HoursHere do you have any sources for this? I only know you can not mix brown and green into white, but they are fine if they are not mixed and it is not so much a problem for brown and green. Or is this a local thing because where you live other colours are used for those glasses? Edit: Ok, i also just found out the USA only recycles about 33% of glass while Germany does 84% (we use much green and brown) and Slovenia even 99%. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_recycling

@zapfanzapfan

Жыл бұрын

Why would colored glass not be recyclable? We do. Just use it for something other than clear glass production.

@alankohn6709

Жыл бұрын

@@zapfanzapfan This is the glass that can't be recycled Any glass mixed with other materials. Decorative glass. Mixed-color glass. Dirty glass or glass caked with food waste. Ceramics or dishware. Pyrex and other types of heat-resistant glass. Window glass Mirrors Crystal Light bulbs Computer or television screens Cathode-ray tubes

In Finland we have district heating in every major city and it's absolutely awesome. So cheap and efficient. This sand storage seems super promising due to it's simplicity. I hope those sand heat storage systems get deployed in every Finnish city soon. We could send excess renewable power into those immediately while we simultaneously ramp up electrochemical and mechanical energy storage.

@happylatino

Жыл бұрын

Ahem, we would need at least 50MW of heat per hour minimum in bigger cites. That's a lot of sand of you wanna power the system, let's say for a week.

@AlldaylongRock

Жыл бұрын

@@happylatino Apparently many Finnish cities are looking into smaller scale nuclear power (SMR/MMR) for powering those systems instead of coal or biomass, which are the most common heat sources. This can still be utilized by nuclear Cogen plants. Just store heat when not needed, liberate it when needed. For conversion into electricity its ridiculously inneficient.

@axiom1650

Жыл бұрын

This type of storage is far too low density, 8MWh is what you'd need for a single house to call it seasonal. The government will waste some tax money on it and other useless projects and thus we pave the path to hell with good intentions.

@happylatino

Жыл бұрын

They might be looking into those but smr won't ever happen with current legislation. It's far to strict. And secondly nuclear will not power district heating without electricity conversion first

@asoka7752

Жыл бұрын

It's interesting what Sri lanka can do as here the country is so warm almost everyday, and we have plenty of sun as well. we can use solar panels and store all the heat in these silos, and then use them steadily by connecting them to the grid. our whole power outage problem will go away.

Definitely has a chance of catching on! This could also help greenhouse installations and prevent the need for extra heating with gas during colder seasons. If the materials for this installation are this freely available, silo-builders, now working for farmers that wish to store grains or other crop, could easily diversify to these large batteries!

Just noticed your channel has surpassed 1 million subscribers! Such a great channel more than deserving of those numbers. Keep up the good work.

I'm curious if this could be scaled down to be used for residential batteries / heat storage, and for off grid systems. You could probably remove the inefficiencies of converting power by using fresnel lenses to super heat air during the day / summer. And use it to heat the house during the night... I'm curious what type of insolation and size would be needed to store enough mass to make a difference.

@filipjovanovic8138

Жыл бұрын

That was also my first thought. Would be pretty interesting to see if it can be scaled down to single-home use. Looks mechanically-simple too, so it might even be possible to DIY. Edit: I just realized that this would be amazing for people living in more rural areas. For example, my grandma lives in Serbia, and over there it's still normal to use wood fires to heat your home, at least in the more rural places (which is pretty much everything outside of Belgrade and a few other cities). Her house has water radiators connected to a central furnace in the basement over copper pipes. She used to have to use wood logs, but we've upgraded her to a wooden pellet system a few years ago. Which is great, because now she doesn't have to build a fire and can just press a button. But a sand battery would still be a massive improvement. The pipes are already there, and I am sure there would be a way to connect them to a sand battery, and then she wouldn't have to worry about keeping wood pellets in stock

@hematula1

Жыл бұрын

I'm something like that could be cooked up (with help of thermal pumps). But there are actually better options, as in geothermal pump for heating.. .and run it the other way during summer months (so cool the building and dump the excess heat into the same ground used for heating during colder spells). That has been done in some commercial (office/shopping mall) buildings, and it is not too costly if the foundations require a lot of pile driving anyway (piles make a good thermal mass). Naturally the heating and cooling needs to be designed so that they can be done. Retrofitting such a system might be quite spendy, less so for new builds. Using a higher temp minimized sand thermal battery might be easier to retrofit into existing residential buildings, but there is often a critical mass required when the heat loss is acceptable. Too small, and it won't hold the "heat" to be economically viable.

@shawnr771

Жыл бұрын

I like both the ideas presented here.

@edc1569

Жыл бұрын

there's a number of thermal store products available on the UK market

@DanielBoger

Жыл бұрын

It would be interesting to dump waste heat from other home appliances into a thermal storage unit like this. For example your air conditioner and refrigerator both dump the heat they pull from the area they are cooling into the environment as waste heat. If that hot air could be pushed through a heat battery first it could add energy that would normally be lost. It would probably not be enough heat by itself, but it would just be wasted otherwise.

This seems like a great option for energy storage. However, I see a greater problem in the U.S.A., we are not insulating our homes to be efficient. In my area, they are still building stick homes without an exterior insulation wrap. Better insulation means less heating and cooling in the first place. Cheers

@dlayman101

Жыл бұрын

Exaclty, first thing i ask people, are you warmer when you wrap yourself in a coat, or are you warmer by cutting the coat into strips and stuffing between your ribs. They tend to come to correct conclusion all on their own lmfao

@JamesJones-ql3kr

Жыл бұрын

My son did a science project in the 8th grade, comparing roof construction to solar gain. We found that roofs heat houses thru radiation. Radiant heat barriers prevent 90% of room heating. Radiant heat barriers are cheap and super easy to install during new construction. I asked a friend who is an engineer for large housing projects if they were using radiant heat barriers, he'd never heard of it. My main garage, here in Florida is too hot to work in during the summer. So i'm installing radiant heat barriers, a challenging project in my house with a very low attic, I can barely sit in it under the peak of the roof. So you're 100% correct.

@richardnixon7248

Жыл бұрын

Here in Ireland our houses have good insulation but have no air conditioning, which is a real problem with the summers getting hotter lol

@PipeScholar

Жыл бұрын

This is more an issue of local building codes, but I agree. All new builds here in Ontario have to be wrapped with insulation now

@nicklockard

Жыл бұрын

I agree. The building codes in America are horribly written. They heavily favor developer-friendly, box style "McHomes", not longevity, good living, or comfort. The insulation is grossly inadequate.

Fantastic video unveiling an energy storage method I had not heard of before. Thanks much and keep up the good work!

I made a sand heat store for my wood burning stove. Keeps giving up heat for about 20+ hours after the stove has gone out. Also has water heat store to pump around the radiators when the temp drops too much. This allows me to do a fairly short burn in the evenings. Also I burn it at a much higher temp than I normally would which makes for a much more efficient and complete combustion of the fuel. It will allow for expansion to use solar thermal or pv for heating the water tank to make up for the heating shortfall on cooler days in the summer (I live in the uk). With the energy prices going up so fast here it really is making people think how to make their homes more efficient.

@andrewmayes3271

Жыл бұрын

I'd love to see a video of this if you wouldn't mind please

@zootarootoot

2 ай бұрын

Me too. I'd also like to see.

For heat storage the theory is really simple: Surface area increases by the second power, but volume increases by the third power. So, for example, the surface area of a sphere is 4 * pi *r ^2 while its volume is (4/3) * pi * r^3. The ability for sand or any medium to retain heat is primarily a function of this ratio... the only way to lose the heat in the storage medium is through its surface area. So scale winds up being very important. The bigger the storage medium, the more efficiently it can store heat. The problems are many, though. All heat storage devices have thermal expansion and contraction stresses so a daily cycle can really be quite harsh on the infrastructure. In other-words, maintenance can wind up being a relatively large component of the operating cost. Particularly if major portions of the device are inaccessible (aka sand battery). Liquid (e.g. syrup consistency) based systems are far easier to maintain because no internal structures are required... you just pump the liquid through a loop just like a heat-pump water heater does. Phase-change materials that go between liquid and gas are even better because the energy density is typically far higher. It will be interesting to see how these progress, but it is a fairly tall order to compete against battery technologies which can be produced in GWh volumes and get cheaper and cheaper every year.

@sunworksco

Жыл бұрын

Wrong!

@sonjahudson9597

Жыл бұрын

I wonder if these batteries could be kept underground.

@zazugee

Жыл бұрын

they don't heat it up everyday

@timgurr1876

Жыл бұрын

There is a surface area at which the heat loss (no matter how well insulated) begins to increase, so that is a limiting factor.

@N0xiety

Жыл бұрын

@@timgurr1876 Surface area limiting factor only matters in how small the system can be and still be efficient enough for use, there is literally no limiting factor in how big the system can be, other than the materials used to build the sand holding. The bigger the system, the more efficient in storing the heat.

Matt I just want to say thank you, I’ve been watching your videos for a couple months now and you have completely changed the way I think about sustainability. Your scripts are so well thought out and your articulation makes complex ideas simply to comprehend. Definitely my most anticipated KZread videos I wait to be uploaded, thank you for the effort, time and knowledge you share with us

@UndecidedMF

Жыл бұрын

I appreciate that!

@Dan-Simms

Жыл бұрын

Me too, can't wait to see how you take advantage of it in your home build, so excited to watch those future videos.

@northstar32v8

Жыл бұрын

So sad for you Darren

@odoggow8157

Жыл бұрын

Sorry not sorry but no no no! The problem causing all u kids stupidity these days is getting ur info from idiotz on KZread! But FYI most of this video is completely wrong and false information! The reason ur all so thick in America is because u think Google and KZread are feeding u the facts but they are not!

@odoggow8157

Жыл бұрын

@@northstar32v8 I second this 👌

I have been fascinated with all these various battery solutions ever since I first learned of “gravity batteries” many years ago. Thanks for sharing these new approaches. Interesting stuff.

I watched a bunch of vids on this and did a tad bit of research and...this is easy and actually achievable in most areas..hopefully this tech takes off to help power our future...thumbs up

This reminds me of the off-peak storage heater we had in the UK in the 60s. It used cheap electricity at night to heat up bricks in the heater and then released the energy slowly throughout the day to heat the house. The storage time was clearly quite limit, but it's the same basic principal. The efficiency was 100%. In the future, with an excess of solar energy during the day, it could be used to store energy for use at night when there is clearly no solar energy production.

@TheBooban

Жыл бұрын

Sounds simple and effective. Wonder why it didn’t catch on if was used in the 60’s.

@LongWindedUsername

Жыл бұрын

"The efficiency was 100%." Doubt.

@ShiftyMcGoggles

Жыл бұрын

@@LongWindedUsername Electricity moving through wires generates heat as a byproduct, so as a result, electricity-to-heat conversions are 100% efficient conversions. As such, electricity to heat brick, then brick to heat home is as near-100% efficiency as you can possibly get.

@renaissanceman5847

Жыл бұрын

@@LongWindedUsername exactly... there is not such thing as 100% efficiency... not even in science fiction such as star trek did their engines get 100%

@tomdawson2035

Жыл бұрын

@@TheBooban This system is still used today - mostly in flats I would think, but I bought a house just a few years ago that only had this system of storage radiators plus one coal fire. I also have two flats that use this system. It is very much alive in Britain.

6:00 Small note on this point. Russian gas has NEVER played a big role in heating Finnish homes. In 2020 natural gas had 6% share of total energy consumption in Finland. In 2020 renewables also surpassed fossil fuels in the total energy consumption.

@Giblet535

Жыл бұрын

How did their renewable systems pop into existence? Manual labor, or was fossil fuel energy involved? You have to count the fossil inputs (mining, smelting, manufacture, transport, installation, maintenance, etc. of the "renewable" system) else "sustainable" is just a marketing trick wave breaking against a sea wall of sluggish minds. There's a point where *some* renewable systems break even, then start producing a net gain. Some. Most break before they ever get to that elusive zero-point. After that point, yay! But, it's unlikely (m)any of your renewable systems have broken even yet, and until that point, you'd have been better off burning the dino squeezins, or saving them for fertilizers, pesticides, tires, pharmaceuticals, and surgical tubing. It's difficult to do, but one must count every joule of Flintstones energy input, and subtract it from the purple-hair-new-age output before a truly legit smug can ensue. It does occasionally happen, but it's never a given as so many ignorant people presume. Confidence games are complex on purpose, and con game victims are always incredibly lazy (or emotional) thinkers. Be the skeptic/scientist instead.

Man Matt puts out so much info on so many different types of batteries, im lost. I guess thats a great problem to have. A abundance of choices for the future

I love this. Glad someone started to make it. I wonder if you could use this to capture lightning and converting it into heat storage.

Wouldn't the square-cube-law work in our favour here? Just scale it up massively and have lots of storage volume for not a lot of surface area over which heat can escape by comparison. Or what is the limiting factor?

@mtnbkr5478

Жыл бұрын

The limiting factor would be the size of the area of that usable thermal energy. This works great in the narrow example of areas that will intermittently produce excess heat and alternately need more heat than they're producing on site over a span of less than a few months, but once you need to move that heat offsite over any appreciable distance, the lack of capable enough insulation compounded over distance would cause massive losses in energy in the piping; this is why you probably have your own water heater and don't pay for a hot water line from across town.

@pohjoinenkala9301

Жыл бұрын

@@mtnbkr5478 In fact, our district heating works like that - there is cold water supply to the houses, part of the fresh water is heated in a heat exchanger - so yes, we buy hot water from across town, sort of :-)

@mtnbkr5478

Жыл бұрын

@@pohjoinenkala9301 I knew that there are some areas where that's a thing, but I'm not very familiar with it. How large of an area can they handle?

@pohjoinenkala9301

Жыл бұрын

@@mtnbkr5478 In Helsinki, the whole town is covered by DH, the length of the piping is some 1300 kms. They offer heating and cooling too :-)

@mtnbkr5478

Жыл бұрын

@@pohjoinenkala9301 That's pretty impressive. I was originally thinking that there would be a lot of energy lost in moving heat over a large area like that, but if the system is constant and well insulated it would make sense that those losses would be minimized. Thank you!

This is a genius idea. Even if it can be used only for heating direcly, it still *indirectly* saves electricity that otherwise would be used for heating.

@billb48843

Жыл бұрын

Tried before with super insulated underground "septic" tanks and water as a medium back in the 70's.

@fjalics

Жыл бұрын

Dunkelflaute will be easier to deal with if they have these.

@FrancisKoczur

Жыл бұрын

I think it's dead on arrival, they might get one or two built. Resistance heating has low capital cost but otherwise it's a waste.

@fjalics

Жыл бұрын

@@FrancisKoczur The hottest achieved with a heat pump is 356 F. The key to this is thinking about what you are trying to optimize. In this case, capacity and capital costs to handle dunkelflaute. You may not need to cycle this thing much. Also, hopefully, the resistive heater is very cheap, so you can use overproduction, or at least cheap power. This will never displace batteries, but batteries are expensive for occasionally used capacity.

@peterlovisek9210

Жыл бұрын

@@FrancisKoczur Resistance heating is simple, proven, and reliable, with very low TCO.

The issue with using hot air heating instead of steam heating, is that the specific heat of Steam is 1.996 kJ/kgK while the specific heat of Air is between 1 and 1.2 kJ/kgK. That means that Steam carries at least twice the energy per unit (mass temp) than air, and some sources say that it can be up to 4 times. That's not even taking into account the heat transfer coefficients of steam vs. air. Air is a decent insulator, that means it's not nearly as good at transferring heat as other substances; meaning that you're either going to have to push more hot air through the system to get the same heating effect as with steam, or the heating will be less. Either way, it's not nearly as efficient as the steam it would be replacing.

This is a brilliant Vlog. Well researched and presented.

WOW! :D Amazing video Matt! Thanks! We are planning to make a trigeneration product where we could turn heat back to electricity in places where there is large heat consumption also, like DH network. Then it doesn't matter if electrical efficiency is 25% because you can but the rest to DH network from the turbine condenser. Actually that also is basic stuff here with "combined heat and power" CHP plants.

I would be interested in you covering some of the older more localized heat storage systems. In the uk as a kid we had large boxes in many homes that were full of bricks. The bricks would get heated during off peak electrical usage. I also recall an air conditioning system that froze a cube of water off peak and then used that block of ice to help cool during peak heat.

@orroz1

Жыл бұрын

In the old days there were also the heat magazine stove(or however it translates to English.). It had a huge core of iron that was kept heated all day with electricity and when the need came for cooking you could use up all that stored heat. It was in the time when electricity was metered by the line capacity and not the energy usage and so it was most economical for households to have a constant electricity use throughout the day.

@jillphilips3788

Жыл бұрын

YES AWESOME

Good Job Sir. Alot of great information, good video

Dear @Matt thank you for a great video. I would like to add, that there are many "sand" and material times currently rated as a waste which we consider to be highly applicable as well

You and Dave from Just Have a Think are overlapping on quite a few videos recently. Both doing a great job nevertheless...! Keep it up!

@UndecidedMF

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, we tend to cross paths a lot on these topics. Same with TwoBitDavinci ... I believe he's going to be covering this topic too very soon.

@maximianocoelho4496

Жыл бұрын

Sure, it is nice to see different points of view in the new technologies, Matt with the USA market and Dave with the British/Europe side of thing...but it would be nice to have somebody covering in every continent, specially in Africa or South America and see how such technologies would shape a less developed environment.

@kozmizm

Жыл бұрын

@@UndecidedMF "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," but I saw it here first. Good job! I'm a long-time subscriber. I think I could save a lot of electricity if I try to implement something like this for my home heating in the winter and maybe my water heating year round. No electricity needed probably if I heat with lots of mirrors during the warmest part the day on a high-heat absorbant surface of the tank and then insulate that whole thing during the night, and I have all the sand I need in my immediate area. I just need to build an insulated tank with a thermally conductive section that I can seal up easily

I love this. Sand is so plentiful. I know stones were used as heat storage in earth buried ovens thousands of years ago. I personally have dug stones days later from a large fire pit only to find they are still very very warm. I wonder if you can skip the above ground storage and just dig deep enough where there is natural insulation, or would that be too much direct thermal conduction with the surrounding earth?

@ClAddict

4 ай бұрын

You would still want to insulate it, but it would be a good idea for particularly chilly climates. Going down just a handful of feet the ground evens out the temperature evens out to ~50°F, a trick used by geothermal heat pumps. A air heat pump can work to heat one’s house in negative temperatures, but it’s more efficient at higher temperatures, same goes for insulation.

Good job Matt. Thank for what you doing. God bless you buddy.

I did not realize that sand Towers like that could hold so much heat. I would think the heat would dissipate after a few months. Love to see more info on it. Good idea

@renviluan2842

Жыл бұрын

That's so true. I live in the tropics and during the day you can barely step on it. Especially our sand which mostly has a lot of iron. I wonder how iron rich sand works.

@BotchedGod

Жыл бұрын

@@renviluan2842 probably works best ferrous metals hold heat best right?

Another thing to consider, there are already ground based heat pumps for heating houses, which is similar to this in concept (except for the heat pump). In these systems, though the ground isn't insulated from the neighbouring ground, it is mostly a thermal reservoir as the heat moves so slowly.

@billyjones9045

Жыл бұрын

I used to do a lot of solar type home construction.we would put copper tubing running all over the floor and cover it with sand and brick it or put the coper in the foundation. They would run hot water through it to heat the home. They also have this thing called Bombay wall. It's basically like an adobe wall exposed to the sun behind glass. Apparently it's stored a lot of heat as well.. also a lot of times I would spray polyurethane foam over adobe walls then they would wrap it with chicken wire or large and go with stucco over that.

Nice summary of the technology - like many great ideas, it's impressively simple. Couple of points: 1) Resistive heating is a good thing to start with, since it's cheap and simple. But 100% efficient is actually not that good! Heat pumps can get >300% efficiency for heating. But they're more expensive, more complicated, and I'm not sure if they can reach anywhere near the temperatures needed. 2) Water can be used at much greater than 100°C as superheated steam, under high pressure. That's the technology all big fossil fuel and nuclear power stations use to move heat around and to drive the turbine. It's also what this company is using to transfer heat out of the sand. And why it's all off-the-shelf parts.

@vygag

Жыл бұрын

300% efficiency...congrats bro, you just invented eternal engine

@markmuir7338

Жыл бұрын

@@vygag Welcome to the interesting world of thermodynamics: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump "With 1 kWh of electricity, they can transfer 3 to 6 kWh of thermal energy into a building"

@vygag

Жыл бұрын

@@markmuir7338 damn, thats really eternal engine, pair it with steam turbine, a billions worth idea

@markmuir7338

Жыл бұрын

@@vygag It's a 200 year old idea, and is already a multi-billion dollar industry. All refrigerators and air conditioners use this concept. The key point is that a heat pump doesn't create heat - it simply moves it from one place to another. So it's not really >100% efficient - it's just cheating by solving a different problem. But happily for most uses of heat, we don't care if the heat was created or simply moved from somewhere else.

Matt well said, it would be useful where the piping already exists. Well done. I often say that too, right tool for the job.

Bravo!! Brilliantly explained

I think it's a brilliant idea...when attending the University of Toronti, I discovered that all the buildings on the main campus were heated by steam piped from a single heat-producing building - it would certainly make sense to convert that system to this sand- battery technology. Thank you Matt for continually sharing these important ideas!

Yes, I believe sand batteries can be a good heat storage medium. Even if a tower collapsed (ex. in an earthquake) there's no real environmental damage; just wait for the sand to cool and rebuild the tower. . One minor correction: water "can" exceed 212F/100C, when under pressure (albeit not by a lot). That's how a pressure canner works. At 15psi, a pressure canner gets water up to 240F/116C.

One thing I wanna highlight about this kind of tech, which is the scalability of heat batteries. The amount of thermal energy depends on the material, and also very importantly, its mass. Mass is a result of volume. On the other hand the heat lost to surrounding is based on the temperature difference and the surface area. As you make the battery bigger, the mass goes up by dimension cubed while the surface area expands only by dimension squared. The bigger the battery is, the more efficient it becomes. And when going big, its worth it to find cheap but dense materials. No limitations on specific elements, no limitations of geography, just dump as much stuff into the tank and time to go

@ntblb89

Жыл бұрын

same idea on engei running on petrol and diesel , as much biger you get as much efficient you will be .

We have known about it for a long time my friend, congratulations on the documentary

Congratulations Matt on your 1 million subscribers 👏

@UndecidedMF

Жыл бұрын

Thanks! 😃

I love these energy storage solutions that have simple off the shelf technologies.

I got excited and crimped some nichrome wire to an XT60 connector and put it in a box of playground sand and plugged that in to my 100W solar panel. The nichrome worked great, I even got a little burn on my finger. The playground sand has two issues though... it doesn't conduct the heat to the rest of the sand from around the heating element... and it doesn't retain that heat (I checked it one hour after the solar panel was shaded.) I see from other comments that quartz sand is preferred.... will try this. I'd love to have a place where my cat can sit outside during the winter.

What happened about the copper heat storage we heard about some months ago? It consisted of a couple of gigantic graphite blocks with a few tons of copper sealed within each. The copper was heated to melting point with the excess power and then this was later used to vaporise water for a steam turbine to recover the power when needed. It seemed like a great way to store energy since it could be installed in redundant coal fired generation sites.

Small correction around the 9:30 mark - Water can be heated above 100C, and is often heated beyond that. High pressure can raise the boiling point of water to a fairly high amount. You probably don’t want to pipe high pressure hot water beyond a facility, as high temperature steam is scary stuff, but for energy storage as long as you have a pressure vessel (ie boiler) you can heat water beyond 100C without it boiling.

@thenson509

Жыл бұрын

Thank you. I was going to make a similar remark since we already have systems above that threshold.

@GulfCoast98

8 ай бұрын

Yes water can be heated above the boiling point under pressure, but that would greatly add to the complexity and cost of energy storage.

I think you could use this to heat your home. You wouldn't need a large scale application for a single family home. A solar furnace isn't that difficult to build. The heated sand would allow for a longer period of heating after the sun sets.

@onestoptechnologies7305

Жыл бұрын

Agreed... We need to de-centralize most services water, sanitation, electricity, heating, etc., giving people independence. Also, when there is a system failure it only effects 1 household not thousands!

@otsokivivuori7726

Жыл бұрын

@@onestoptechnologies7305 i have to disagree. The scale associated with centralizing energy systems brings huge efficiency gains compared to home scale systems (internal combustion generator ~30%, gas or coal power plant ~40-50%). In addition, the investment costs divided by the amout of people that are served are much lower with industrial scale power. And as for reliability, much of it is down to a proper funding scheme either not funneling money to corporate or municipal operators not skimping on costs. I have lived in a district heated home my whole life, and so does half of the population of finland, my home country, in both single family homes and units. There has never been an outage that has affected my life and as long as i have followed the news has there never been a story about a district heating outage. And as far as electrical power, there has never in my life been an outage in the cities. Rural areas sometimes see some homes go without for a few hours if a tree falls on the line, but cities have roughly 100% underground electrical power lines. Never any system wide failures like in texas 2021 either, and our grid has more wind than texas and has a colder climate. In short, if the central system is not reliable, one should rather invest into if and fund it well rather than abandon it in favour of small scale power.

@onestoptechnologies7305

Жыл бұрын

@@otsokivivuori7726 I can understand why one might think it would be "better." However, efficiency is not the "be-all and end-all." Unfortunately, I have seen power outages cause deaths. In the last 2 years alone, almost 1,000 people died in just the State of Texas. Finland is 29 times smaller than the USA and only 720 miles long, so transmission loss is less of a factor. 97% of the USA is considered "Rural," yet still contains nearly 20% of the population (60 million.... 12x the population of Finland). It's not uncommon to be able to drive for hours without seeing a stop sign while passing many homes. In the USA, we have transmission lines that were installed for the purpose of transporting electricity more than 1,200 miles from hydroelectric sources in the North to population centers in the hot areas of the South. Interestingly, you comment about Finland being "colder" that Texas... power transmission is better in cold conditions than hot. Computer systems migrated from the "Centralized Computing Model" to the "De-Centralized Computing Model" we have today. Most systems today are designed the concept of "Lots of Little." Distributed versus Centralized. Even the "centralized" systems you are lauding, are not truly centralized... (One single power generator for the entire country.) They still have de-centralized power generators throughout the country, so the real question is just about where to draw the line... Country?, City?, Neighborhood?, Home? Most "Life and Safety" systems are required to be localized and independent because they are so important. It might be more efficient to centralize all food preparation and eliminate all kitchens in homes; no cooking fires, no untrained people preparing food, less food illness, but would that really be better? Governments throughout history have implemented many "efficient" solutions but rarely are they the better for the people. I've never heard someone describe any government led venture as monetarily "efficient." Governments do not have their own money... they just take money from the people and spend it. I can assure you that individuals will spend their own money in more effective and judicious ways than ANY bureaucracy. The USA was built upon self-reliance and self-sufficiency, coupled with concern for our fellow man. Individual States that are United! I think we are better versions of ourselves when we grow from children who are helpless and dependent, to adults that are knowledgeable and independent. Small solar systems augmented with an additional diversified source and local storage encourages people to be more mindful of their energy usage, very scalable with demand and eliminates massive transmission losses. If your neighbor loses power, you can go help them or invite them into your home until it's fixed... instead of freezing to death right next door.

I like it! I do wonder why the heating element aren't embedded in the sand itself. I can see the advantage of keeping this above-ground as it makes installation trivial. But this could also be stored underground, and reduce the need for insulation.

Wow! Wonderful! Thanks for sharing.

How well does desert sand compare to refuse construction sand from an insulator perspective? More dense, more insulation?

@ryanchurchill539

Жыл бұрын

ive pondered the same question for months now. after hearing matts explanation on the topic i think contruction sand maybe more energy dense if they are choosing leftover construction material over its cheaper and more abundant desert counter part. but equaly it could be minimal and a choice made for waste reduction.

@thewatersavior

Жыл бұрын

Awesome, appreciate the thoughts! Certainly agree going local makes sense - kinda thinking through what materials have no current market around the world and where solar plants are located. Could see this being ported for solar plants, seems cheaper that molten salts. Assuming temps are not high enough to drive turbines?

I really really wish you would have investigated the claims that they can keep the sand "hot" for months. There's both convection and radiative losses. Both of which cannot be well insulated if from the outside of the building FLIR lights up the screen as shown in their promotional video. Simple Heat loss thru conduction insulation should show why this is a bad idea. The justification is probably based around ceramic which hold heat for a long time and promises that they'll run studies while having yet to evidence their claims. I would love to be proven wrong, but this looks like a short term heat storage at best. Generally, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

@jhonatancock2302

Жыл бұрын

Welcome to Matt's channel, techno fluff for the masses that believe every green tech is "revolutionary", reality be damned.

@Embassy_of_Jupiter

Жыл бұрын

Yeah the 99% efficiency probably refers to the case when the heat is being used the moment it gets pumped in.

@kkarllwt

Жыл бұрын

Build them bigger. Cluster them so most of the loss is to the ones next to them. If there is volcanic pumice or steel mill slag nearby, bury them in 20 feet of material ( R 1.5 an inch.)

@Hgdhgfdssxvbbnjoo

Жыл бұрын

I highly highly doubt it can store heat much more than a few days. When temps hit -40 it’s gunna cool things off pretty damn fast

@buckshott00

Жыл бұрын

@@kkarllwt I know you think that sounds like a good idea or an easy way to write off a detractor, but it doesn't work like that. You're correct that increasing the mass to surface area ratio via size and clustering does have benefit. There are still conductive, convective, and radiative losses. You could have an R-Value of near perfect vacuum like Spacetherm and you would still have significant radiant heat losses, while you're trying to pull useable heat energy from it.

Amazing content. Keep the work up

I here for your background soundtrack _ I love this track

Honestly, I find it hard to believe that a steel cylinder storage container can retain the heat of the hot sand of 600°C for 6 months until the winter arrives.

@leonardschoyen

Жыл бұрын

I live close to a outdoor skiing area. During the late winter, snow is gathered and created during the last cold weeks into a huge pile of snow maybe a 100m long and 20m tall. It is covered in wood chips and left there for the whole summer season, to be used to kickstart the next season of skiing. The snow holds surprisingly well and a reduction in size of the covered snow pile is not really noticable. The thermal mass of these big dense storages is not too be underestimated when the surface area is so small.

@StormyMusic9

Жыл бұрын

@@leonardschoyen oh wow I didnt know that! Thats interesting! But whats your usual temperature there? See if snow is around 0°C and the ambient temperature is around 25°C then the difference is 25 and that affects the rate of heat transfer. Here it seems like the difference would be around 600-25=575°C which means the rate of heat transfer is much higher. If i recall correctly from high school physics that is, the higher the difference in temperature the faster the rate of change.

@leonardschoyen

Жыл бұрын

@@StormyMusic9 It's true that the heat transfer is proportional to the difference in heat, but it is also only proportional to the surface area of the shape (the square of the length). The heat carrying capacity is proportional with the cube of the length of the shape. A doubling of size results in 8 factor increase in carrying capacity, but only 4 factor increase in heat transfer, meaning the relative heat lost is halved, and allowing for twice the temperature differential with the same efficiency. The system showed in the video essentially amounts to a prototype, with its small size.

Interesting concept. I like that it doesn't use lithium batteries because it's tailored to a specific purpose where batteries are not necessary. But as an HVAC engineer I can't help but wonder how they insulate the tanks! It doesn't matter that much what the temperature is outside; if it's 1000°F in the tank, the difference between 90° and 40° ambient isn't much - I would expect them to be hemorrhaging heat year round. Since we're talking about storage at a seasonal level I would love to know how they address it!

@scottjoyce85

Жыл бұрын

That's on my mind also. I guess it doesn't much matter how much heat it loses because it's utilizing excess energy. I'd love to see the simplicity of this sand battery compared to the 5th generation cold district heating that utilizes heat pumps to extract and reject heat from a near ambient loop. My big holdup with this sand battery is the resistant heating, why go for 100% efficiency if you can have 400% efficiency in both summer and winter with heat pumps. And while it might not be as simple as sand, a massive tank of water isn't exactly much more complicated, especially when you can use it for both heating and cooling and it's already the medium being used to transport the energy throughout the heating district.

@TheAnnoyingBoss

Жыл бұрын

Man, I don't know why why don't put solar panels Infront of the sun like we did that telescope recently to get those photographs. The. We have solar 24/7 in one fat array and we can then lazerbeam the photons back to panels on earth to solar panels all over during nighttime by bouncing the photons off big mirrors all the way around to the dark side. Wouldn't have to hit every panel on every house. Could just hit the big huge powerplant arrays to make a large amount of solar 24/7 instead of just during the day. Sounds kinda crazy but doesn't sound kinda crazy man idk. people doing some crazy things these days

Thank you for the video. It sounds like there’s so much promising you technology I just wish they would hurry up and get it to market.

I love that there are companies and people constantly trying to change and utilize nature to get more renewable sources of energy.

Finally, countries with a lot of sand will have an energy option. ....oh wait a sec.

@loumonte658

Жыл бұрын

Good one.

I really like this option, it's supper simple with almost no environmental risk from failure or end of life deconstruction. The only issue I can see is retrofitting it into existing infrastructure; you named a few cities in the US which have community heating systems, and a lot of further eastern European and Russian cities have that too, but in Western Europe and the UK especially there's nothing like that, so the system would have to be made from the ground up in already hugely congested underground urban environments.

@nadheem420

Жыл бұрын

It would be good to build it from scratch cause underground systems could provide water,sewage,electricity,network and heat all in the same system

@PipeScholar

Жыл бұрын

Good point

Thank you for the new video. I love the sand battery! It has an elegance to it, thanks to the design. It's big, simple, and efficient - which is just what we need for huge energy storage systems. The problem of course is like you said, it stores heat and not electricity. To make proper use of it we'd need to build new heat transport architecture in our cities, and no doubt there's a limit to how far you can run hot air through pipes before losing too much of the heat. So it's probably not feasible to use an existing downtown facility and run pipes to the suburbs. But, again like you said in the video, it could find practical use in industrial settings. When you've already got a multi-billion dollar steel plant it doesn't sound quite so crazy to build a huge sand battery next to it and decarbonize by tapping renewable energy as heat.

@markhathaway9456

Жыл бұрын

You've hit on a key issue for all energy generation, distribution and use. How much do we lose along the way? It's a huge issue and the answers vary according to whether it's electricity or heat.

Not sure about the rest of the world but in the UK we often have hot water storage tanks in our homes. The water is heated at night when the electricity is cheaper and can be topped up as needed throughout the day if more is needed. I think it would be great if these tanks had a sand ‘jacket’ that was heated using solar panels on the building. It would be a great way of storing green energy for your own home without the expensive need to attach your panels to the grid. Especially as you get very little back from the supplier for each watt you supply. You wouldn’t even need to change the hot water tank or attached heating system much as the existing system will only heat the water if it needs to. If the sand jacket was sufficient to heat the water to say 40 degrees Celsius, much less energy would be required to top it up.

There’s this other method that’s pretty good at producing a lot of very green energy: Nuclear power

@Timroin

Жыл бұрын

HELL YA

Heating the sand could be made even more efficient with a heat pump, instead of using a resistive heating element. Yes, you can have greater than 100% efficiency. The main benefit I could see of using a resistive heating element, is lower maintenance and production costs, as well as a longer lifespan. But figuring out which heating method is better in this application is more complicated math than I can do. I think this kind of battery would be useful in key locations where a facility of some kind produces a lot of waste heat, and happens to be close to an area that heating is in demand. Perhaps a mid-scale bakery could store waste heat in such a battery during operational hours, to be used during the entire day and night, acting as a capacitor for heat. If this sand battery is kept small enough in scale, it could potentially be combined with more of itself by hooking them up in series. That way, if the attached facility is decommissioned, the sand batteries can be salvaged and moved somewhere else, allowing them to be reused.

@manveroo1340

Жыл бұрын

Exactly! Why not use a heat pump to put the heat in? If the point is to use it in the summer, then it will be helped by the higher outside temperature.

@World_Theory

Жыл бұрын

@@manveroo1340 Ah! Thanks to you calling it a heat pump, I realized I called it the wrong thing. I used accidentally used heat exchanger instead of heat pump. (A heat exchanger may be a part of a heat pump, but it doesn't actually concentrate heat, it facilitates the flow of concentrated heat to an area of less concentrated heat, in a manner planned for by the engineer.) I'll edit it. And yes, the heat pump would be good in relatively warm environments. Environments like Earth. Because even the coldest biomes on Earth are a good deal warmer than absolute zero. Assuming you are concentrating heat from the environment, then the closer the ambient heat is to your target temperature, the more efficient the heat pump will be. A resistive heating element may still be useful at the very upper end of the heat range for what the sand battery is capable of holding. I'm not sure if a heat pump can operate at the same upper temperature limits as a heating element.

@GunniGST

Жыл бұрын

@@World_Theory You won´t get the same temps as resistive heating, if heat pumps could pump out 600°C temperature all our problems would be solved instantly. What heat pumps would need is a different gas to compress and decompress

@World_Theory

Жыл бұрын

@@GunniGST Mmm, okay. That answers a question I had on my mind.

Grats on 1 mill subs btw.

Always the most interesting videos!

As cool as this is, as is, I believe that the technology required to make this a real gamechanger has yet to be developed. I see this thermal battery as merely a peice of a much larger potential system. If the engineers could figure out how to heat the sand using heatpumps instead of resistance heaters. This would be a saving grace technology.

I have a lot of respect for the amount of hard work & research Matt puts into his videos .. but I wish he'd cover less vaporware and more real scalable , available , deployable , IRL existing energy innovation

@manup1931

Жыл бұрын

But this is working in real life right now. Using sand to store heat is also a thing which humans did more than 1000 years ago. Sand is available and scalable.

@r3d0c

Жыл бұрын

it's not vaporware if an actual working implementation of it exists..

@stevenwebbmusic

Жыл бұрын

then he'd run out of topics in like 2 months lol

@UndecidedMF

Жыл бұрын

Appreciate the feedback, but I'm not sure how this is vaporware. It's a real technology/technique that's in use today.

@lukebliss608

Жыл бұрын

@@UndecidedMF Maybe I'm not following the math or wording but if it doesn't exist it is close to vaporwear. Also, how is this economical at either the generation cost of $10/KWHr (kzread.info/dash/bejne/eWqO1K9meb3ShKg.html) which is ~50x current cost of energy delivered (in CA its $0.20/KWHr) and that assumes being able to scale x100 energy production at 20x the cost of producing the 'battery' (so no scale model currently exists?). And that appears to use 'free' electrcity from unused solar power (which isn't reasonable as there would be distribution costs to bring the energy in which could be significant. Also kzread.info/dash/bejne/eWqO1K9meb3ShKg.html mentions Thermal energy storage cost of $15/kWhth (which by the name doesn't appear to cover generation or even distribution of the stored energy), and this energy would only be useful to industry year round or for district heating only ~8 months of the year depending on location.

I'd love to explore building one for home use. I wonder what element would work and also how best to use the heat to heat some thermal mass - perhaps underfloor heating?

I love these kind of technology, simple, cheap, sustainable, environmentally friendly and no waste.

The only thing that bothers me about this is that resistive heating is terribly inefficient

@gillo100

Жыл бұрын

Resistive Heating is 100% efficient. 100% of the energy gets converted to heat.

@TexasScout

Жыл бұрын

@@gillo100 I’m talking about overall efficiency, when you compare natural gas heating to resistive temperature eating there’s no contest.

@firstbigbarney

Жыл бұрын

Actually resistive heating is 100% efficient,especially when using surplus electricity as your energy source. One KWHr of electric produces 3412 btu's of heat energy. Better would be using a heatpump to extract heat from the air at~5x efficiency,but high temperature heatpumps are not ready yet.More work needs to be done on this.

@troubleshooter1975

Жыл бұрын

@@TexasScout The purpose was to store excess renewable electrical energy, not use more fossil fuels to create energy not need at that moment...

@TexasScout

Жыл бұрын

@@troubleshooter1975 understood I just didn’t think that was the most efficient way to do it, but I’m not a scientist.

Love your show Matt & love sand batteries but thinking personal small scale for cooking & heating.

Merci from Montreal, Canada.

Anakin don't approve 🏜

Yes, yes you did butcher those names... :)

Its nice that you show something normal people can understand again

YES! this is fantastic. even for home use

My smallholding has sand and gravel beneathe the topsoil.....LOTS of it. I'm going to dig an area out, heavily insulate the void, return the dried sand with internal heat deposit and retrieval infrastructure, then use a dedicated PV system to run it. A game changer that uses what I already have!

here in new england almost all colleges have singular large heat plant to feed all the buildings, typically steam is used. I could see this as a huge market for this technology. Also a huge heat / energy loss is heated walkways / stairs to avoid shoveling after snow and could use the stored heat for that as well.

Similar to some of my other comments on your excellent videos, biochar and pyrolysed hydrochar (650-800 deg C) could be used instead of sand and store a lot more energy. The char can also be doped or modified for storage and conductance, with the pyrolysis process generating plenty of heat. Some of the hydrochar (biocoal) and biochar could be used in natural gas broilers, which would also decarbonise steel and cement industries. The char would last longer, and when it needs to be replaced, the spent char could go into soils or concrete for carbon sequestration depending on the contaminant level.

I love the idea of harvesting energy and using it in the same form, rather than converting it multiple times, it just makes sense and i hope we will see more of that kind of thinking in the energy industry and for all the engineering challenges that we are facing today.

@galev3955

7 ай бұрын

Literally storing the sun's summer heat for winter is a great idea. I dont know why we havent thought of it sooner.

Could these sand batteries even be used as thermal storage in a chimney updraft system? I.E. an acre of these tanks surrounded by 100-150 foot updraft structure. Wind turbines at bottom vents or top. Stored heat generated from solar panels with updraft heat released continuously or at night.

This is cool. I wonder if it could be scaled down for off grid house and shop or ranch and farm heating during winter months in rural areas. I can see solar and wind powering the electric needs when combined with battery storage and heating provided by this set up. Very interesting. Thank you. Be safe and be kind.

How many metafor castles can you make from sand :) Love your video's Matt, keep them coming.

Didn’t know about sand (heat storage) batteries, thanks for the education. Reminds me of going to the beach on a cool evening and wondering why the sand is still so warm. Like liquid earth.

Thank you. Very interesting

The biggest question i have about this technology was barely touched on How can they insulate that sand tank ? Keeping sand at 600°C for months ? This seems unfeasible to me

Wow I love it. This is such a cool technology

I wonder how big one needs to be to do a home. Would a couple of small solar panels heat that sand up during the day and then keep a house warm at night? Say in a sate like Wisconsin. Or the Upper Pen in Michigan?

All of the temperature puns. And you never crack a smile at your own jokes. Keep up the good work.

@UndecidedMF

Жыл бұрын

😂

This is a neat idea, it's crossed my mind but I always wondered about the best way to heat the sand. My train of thought was to use elements embedded in the sand but that makes maintenance very hard, never thought that you could actually use air as a transfer medium but guess why not, it doesn't really have a max temp so it will work better than even water. I guess the challenge is finding a fan that can withstand those temps though. A turbo charger for a car maybe? I'll have to experiment with this on my off grid homestead. Could also set it up so I can use fire to generate heat when solar is not producing enough.

@ronchappel4812

Жыл бұрын

Interesting thoughts there.Obviously you have a non-electric heat source? Sand filters for water have no (or very few) internal pipes, so doing the same with air should be easy.I do wonder how much energy you'd lose from pumping through sand though. Anyways back to the original question- surely it's easy to replace pipes in sand?

@kerrryschultz2904

2 ай бұрын

A lot of rural people if they have access to cheap firewood , utilize an outdoor wood boiler. Most wood boiler don't achieve a very high efficiency because the combustion temperature is too low. Even wood gasification units if idle have reduced efficiency. If the firebox is surrounded with sand and the chimney gases are allowed to travel many feet through the sand you would get near complete combustion. If that said chimney spiralled downward it could even get to the point that the water would condense releasing a lot of heat. The last lengths would probably have to be stainless because of the corrosive nature of the condensates. I'm thinking more of a rocket stove that provides the enviroment more suitable to burning wood efficiently and the 1800 degree gases heating the sand. Would have to be careful to keep the temperatures within the working limits of the material used.

I'm liking the Sunday punn-day 😄

WONDERFULL !!! Gravity / inertia is the best storage (with next to zero friction).

Sounds good and great video.

District heating (kaukolämpö) is quite common in Finnish cities, so in Finland at least could be widely used.

Thanks for sharing. I wonder if this would work in the desert by cooling the sand during the day and get cooled air in the night, should probably be underground instead of overground. I might try it.

Yes sounds like a great idea... How far r they to building the sand batterey, in how mant states n or citys so far???