William Bronson wrote: What is the power source?
Solar or wood?
Are you storing heat for space heating,cooking,bathing and or cleaning?
I hope to see what you do with these materials.
I have often imagined laminating refractory cement with rockwool, ceramic insulation, fiberglass welding blankets, or carbon felt, to make up the riser, bells or fireboxes of a rocket stove.
You probably have the wherewithal to test ideas like this.
Right now it sounds like a hyper insulated oven.
Maybe take a look at Vela Creations on Instructibles.
https://www.instructables.com/search?q=velacreations+&projects=all
They have used cloth, wire and cement to build everything from water tanks, to roofs to something they call rapidobe, which is very much like what you described.
They tend to add latex to their mix to enhance bonding beween layers and sections and for waterproofing.
They refer to their overall technique as latex concrete.
Thinkenstein is another maker in this space.
He calls his technique nylon-cement:
https://www.instructables.com/search?q=thinkenstein+nylon-cement&projects=all
John Annesley offers his technique for burlap-crete here:
https://annesley.wordpress.com/burlap-crete-explained/
Petrified Hessian is an old name for these ideas, flying concrete is a newer name given to this technique.
>> What is the power source?
As o now I have a single heating element running off 3 260 watt solar panels ( really each puts out 220 watts )
I wish to upgrade this to use 4,000 watts of solar... I have wired and tested my 240 V hot plates with direct to PV with good success... But as I thought about it I was thinking of snagging a heating element out of a stove for the oven, or use one out of a dish washer...... I was thinking something in the likes of putting the hot plates on the bottom of the 55 gal barrel laying on it's side like a rocket oven, only super insulated with the sand....
As I think about it, I could put the solo stove in this setup and use it as a black oven like the one I have on my porch, I could multi function this as a black oven / solar powered oven or thermal storage.
>> Solar or wood?
Might do both... the solo stove I am using now works awesome with no chimney in my version of my rocket oven..
>> Are you storing heat for space heating,cooking,bathing and or cleaning?
Good question..... Since I don't know the temps this will generate with the super insulation I am not sure what my target will be.... I was thinking in the lines of a sand cob oven, I have a friend who built one of this design and it works great for him......
I already am using a portion of my solar for hot water heating and it is done in about 4 hours on a sunny day.... I just have tons of solar and I have been looking for better ways of using it, thermal storage seemed like a good direction to go so I have been making proto types to see what is possible. Since the hot plate has been heating up to over 600 deg for months with my present setup, I have decided to get rid of the fiberglass insulation and switch to using 2 - 3 feet of sand for insulation as I have more sand than I need here in Florida, and sand can handle the heat with no problems. After I switch to the new setup, I can then get temp ranges and adjust as needed.
I have been watching tech ingredients and he was using ice melt chemical as a liquid dehumidifier in his AC system..... Only thing was he was using heat to remove the moisture from the liquid desicant he was playing with....... I was thinking why not use this setup to make a dehumidfier for the first stage, then the second stage combine with evaportive cooling for a AC unit...... as he was doing.... A de humidifier sure would be handy here in Florida, and if I could combine that with evap cooling for AC it would be even better, but this as I think about it is risky, as I don't know if the time, money, energy I would put into such a system is worth it........ But my mind likes an EMP proof AC unit idea for backup.....
A more reasonable approach is to take the excess dc, and buy a mini split that runs directly off DC, but that may not be EMP proof.... sigh...
Why am I storing heat? Mainly because I have all of this excess energy after my batteries are fully charged and I hate to see it do zero for me. I could buy more battery storage ( which I should consider before buying a mini split ) but storing energy in thermal mass is cheap, I have the materials and if the sand insulation idea works, I could scale up even bigger... A trip to Salvation army would get me many bed sheets for my experiments.....
Thank you for the links I will check them out..
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