posted 13 years ago
I love this idea of thermal batteries.
I've been preoccupied with this idea for about a year now. I've been searching videos, articles on rocket mass heaters, building construction using rammed earth, passive cooling -- stuff like that. Sadly, the reality is that I will probably never be able to implement these ideas from the ground up, as we've just purchased a home that was built about 30 years ago. But, I was thinking I could build a couple of heavily insulated sheds each filled with a large thermal mass (concrete, metal, stone, sand, oil, water) which I selectively charge during the off-season -- circulate hot summer air in one shed to be used during the winter and cold winter air in the other shed to be used during the summer (condensate could be collected to supplement water to the garden). If I were particularly zealous, I could boost the effective thermal charge of each shed by engineering a supplemental charging system -- perhaps a network of subterranean cooling tubes for the cold shed or perhaps a top-mounted parabolic solar trough on the hot shed to heat a heat-transfer fluid. I live in the south, so I would probably want to have my cold shed three to four times larger than my hot shed since the summer-time air will contain lots of moisture and my winters will be relatively mild. If I lived near the coast, a river or a stream, I might consider pumping the available water through my cold shed depending on the the water temperature.