Imagine the SAME house storing around 12 MILLION Btus of winter cooling to easily provide the 4 MBtu generally used in an entire summer!
Now imagine that this is not very expensive to install (with the house value probably being enormously higher, too!) Even better, most ways of installing this system are TOTALLY INVISIBLE after it is installed, and it is compatible with virtually ANY house style or layout!
This is not even any super-complicated idea! It is essentially storing all that heat or coolness in an insulated "room" hidden completely underneath the house. It is actually OBVIOUS! (We just did a lot of Engineering to maximize the performance, so the home occupants would probably never know that a conventional furnace and A/C were providing their comfort.)
In the combined heating-cooling concept, a separate source of cooling MAY be needed (depending on the climate. For many climates, the massive storage capability can provide enough house air cooling for an entire summer! And for those climates where extra cooling might be needed, our related "Free Air Conditioning" is an excellent choice. In a slightly modified version of this storage, which could only be used for cooling, the external cooling system may be unnecessary.
This is SERIOUS storage! Our normal intention is to
design a storage of at least 30,000,000 Btu of heating capability
(a hundred times more than others even dream about!) Our planning is
usually that
(Actually, in most cases, it will work BETTER than that, and handle
most or even all of the house's heating needs. We choose to use
very conservative values in our designing, specifically, of being
able to get the storage up to just 120°F at the beginning of the winter.
IF then, there is about 60% extra capability, meaning nearly the
whole winter's heating load!)
For most climates, cooling is even easier! The system mentioned
above commonly has around 13,000,000 Btus of cooling capability
at the start of a summer. A 30,000 Btu/hr central air conditioner
needs to run for about 420 hours straight to provide that much cooling.
In many climates, a standard house actually uses around 3 or 4 million
Btus of cooling during an average summer.
This sub-basement room would not be used as a room. It would actually be
painted with a waterproof sealer, really well insulated on all sides, and
entirely filled back in with relatively standard backfill earth materials,
and used as a "heat storage" area. A complex arrangement
of hollow tubes gets buried in the backfill material to provide the
method to get heat into and out of the storage. Once this
sub-basement was made and filled in
(and then properly compacted), a standard basement floor would be poured
on top of it, and the house built normally above it. In other words,
the final house would show absolutely no evidence of the sub-basement
even existing! The house would be absolutely "normal"! That
allows almost infinite flexibility in the architecture and style of the
house's design and construction.
What is the expected house use of cooling? In a climate like Chicago's,
there are commonly around 20 days each summer where a central
air conditioner is used for the six hours of the afternoon. That's
120 actual hours of air conditioning that is needed in a summer.
A modest-sized house such as the above would often have a central air
conditioner rated at 30,000 Btu/hr (2.5 tons). Multiplying these
numbers gives a full summer's air conditioning usage of around
3.6 million Btus of cooling.
Note that for Cooling Only, no insulation would be needed to be installed
inside the walls and floor of the sub-basement chamber.
Since the proposed storage could provide 11.5 million Btus of cooling,
ALL of the 3.6 million Btus of cooling needs would easily be taken
care of! No other air conditioning system would be needed, ever!
The cooling-only version of this storage even replenishes itself,
so its capabilities are actually even greater.
Regarding the heating-cooling
version, if the climate is such that additional summer cooling is
likely to be required, our related Free Air Conditioning system
can simply ahd easily connect into this storage.
Not only would this eliminate the annual summer electricity
usage for air conditioning (forever!) but it would even eliminate
the initial cost of buying and installing the conventional air
conditioning system. That's several thousand dollars of initial
cost that is eliminated, greatly offsetting the cost of the sub-basement.
Bottom line: ALL air conditioning is taken care of, forever, without
the big electricity bills of conventional air conditioning, and without
any Freon refrigerants that might be environmentally bad.
If, in the Autumn, either solar heating or any of a variety of other heat
sources is used to warm up the storage, that stored heat could be used
during the winter for heating the house. Notice that we say WARM
and not HEAT!
This is meant as a very
"low-tech" system. You have certainly noticed that the interior
of a closed car can soon get over 140°F on a sunny summer day. The point is,
getting this massive storage up to, say 120°F, over several weeks is
quite easy without having to resort to any exotic equipment. Many other
heat sources are possible, too, like a woodstove or similar.
When anyone else talks about trying to provide "solar heating"
for domestic hot water or for space heating, they always try to
store the heat at 200°F or above. Yes, that allows a small volume
of storage material to hold a lot of heat, a good thing. However,
it causes enormous heat losses through surrounding insulation
if the heat is to be stored more than three or four hours!
We see great wisdom in minimizing the amount of heat lost through
the insulation. With our design storage temperature of only
120°F, our heat loss rate is less than half that of a 200°F storage!
This is a central reason why our storage can provide heat for a full
house for MONTHS!
Using this very conservative value of 120°F for the top temperature
of the storage, let's do the math. If a desired house temperature is
the usual 70°F, then the storage would have
(120°F - 70°F) * 500,000 or 25 million Btus of heating available for the
house at the beginning of the winter.
In Chicago's fairly nasty climate, our modest-sized house, if reasonably
well insulated, might have an annual heating load of 45 million Btus.
That means that around half of the entire house's winter
heating load could be provided by our massive storage, without turning
on any furnace or using any heating fuel, EVEN IF IT
IS ONLY AT 120°F! (It actually turns out to be almost exactly
half for this example, because several million Btus are lost through the
insulation over those months of storage.)
If the storage could be warmed to 140°F, then the benefits would be
even better. The storage would then contain around 35 million Btus,
representing MOST of the house's heating load for each winter.
That means that, for every following winter, only a small portion
of the usual heating bills would be necessary! Forever!
If this heat storage capability is intended to be maximized, it is
easy to do. If the sub-basement was made 12 feet tall instead of
the 8 feet mentioned above, there would be one and one half times
as much heat storage capabilities. If the storage began in the
Autumn having been heated to 140°F, it's storage of 53 million Btu
should easily be able to entirely heat the whole house for the whole
winter, never having to turn on a furnace at all!
There is also the option of adding additional insulation around
the storage, to reduce even more the amount lost over a period
of months. For most climates, we do not encourage excessive insulation,
to keep expenses down.
Also, please note that the re-sale value of a house that would
NEVER have any air conditioning expenses and would have possibly less than
half the winter heating expenses, would be VERY high. The additional
re-sale value of the house almost certainly would be greater than
the cost of installing this system! Also, do you realize how
quickly such a house would sell?
Actually, even without much planning at all, you can probably see how this
general idea is bound to be helpful, for both heating and cooling of
the house. So, really, you would not even need our help at all!
But, if you're going to do this, you might as well do a little planning
so that it will work really well. You should either do the math
yourself or have us do it (or provide the equations) or just over-estimate
how much storage material you will need, based on the heat capacity
of the material you choose. That is pretty easy to do, and the example
of the moderate sized house near Chicago is a good example. In a normal
Summer, only around 3.6 million Btus of cooling is likely to actually
be needed, but the calculations above show that over 11 million Btus
of cooling is available. This "over-design" is a good idea,
so that it would always provide excellent cooling, even for a record
hot summer. And, as an additional note on the actual air conditioning
usage, it is very rare that the compressor in a conventional central
A/C runs absolutely constantly for the six hours described. It generally
cycles on and off to keep the house temperature at what you set the
wall thermostat at. Therefore, the needed amount of cooling is
generally even less than the season total 3.6 million Btus stated.
The discussion above should have convinced you that almost any version
of this concept will be of benefit, but if you're going to do it,
you might as well get maximum benefit from it! The variables that
have the greatest effects on performance are three: (1) the insulation
R-factor used; (2) the type and condition of the storage medium itself;
and (3) the method of efficiently getting heat into and out of the
storage. In these areas, we have extensive understanding, and
we are confident that we can assure maximum performance of either
version of this system for any house and climate.
If you want our help, we have two possible fees that could be charged.
If this is of interest to you, send us an e-mail (below) and we can send you
our mailing address.
The Earth's Rotation as a Source for Energy
The Physics of Wood as a Heating Fuel
( http://mb-soft.com/public/index.html )
C Johnson, Physicist, Physics Degree from Univ of ChicagoThe Concept
Do you plan a basement for this new house? If so, consider making a
full sub-basement underneath it! That's essentially it! Maybe an extra
thousand dollars of excavation cost, and an extra thousand dollars of
concrete, and labor. There are some additional costs, mostly slab insulation
and our favorite 4quot; PVC thinwall field pipe, but they tend to be
moderate expenses. There are actually two nearly identical storage versions,
one for heating only or heating and cooling, and the other for
cooling only. For the cooling only, for around (possibly) a few thousand
dollars differential in the construction cost of a new house, you could have
completely normal air conditioning without having to dig up the whole
yard (as in our Free Air Conditioning) and without paying for a
conventional central A/C unit (which
generally costs AT LEAST $2,000 that you would save!)
By eliminating the need for the central A/C unit, you might even
be able to cancel out the differential cost of this system!
(These costs are only if the contractors involved are "friendly"
and whom will be kind in their cost additions. Many contractors
dread anything new or unusual, and they might charge ten times that much,
to make sure that they would still make a profit even if unexpected
construction complications occurred!)Why?
What would be the point of this? Imagine a modest-sized house, of
40 feet by 25 feet, or 1,000 square feet floor area. This sub-basement
would then have 1,000 square feet of area and 8 feet in height, or
around 8,000 cubic feet of the earth materials trapped inside it.
At a density of around 100 pounds
per cubic foot, that's around 800,000 pounds of heat storage
materials. Using some standard engineering information, this huge amount
of storage is able to store around 500,000 Btu of heat (or cool) for
each degree of temperature change of the material.Cooling
First, consider cooling. If this house is in a climate similar to
Chicago's, the natural ground temperature is around 53°F. If, in the
Spring, the storage is permitted to revert to its natural deep earth
temperature, then all of the 800,000 pounds of storage would be at
53°F at the beginning of the Summer. If the desired summer house
temperature is the common 76°F, that means that the storage
starts out the summer season containing
around (76°F - 53°F) * 500,000 or 11.5 million Btus of cooling!Heating
There are even wonderful heating benefits from this system!Summary
As mentioned, a taller storage chamber could be built, which would provide
even more heating and cooling storage. In certain climates, that might
be something worth considering. This discussion is making the
main point, that a rather conventional basement structure, a simple
basement, beneath the planned basement, could accomplish a
lot! For a rather moderate initial expense, a conventional air
conditioning system could very certainly be eliminated (saving a good
deal of installation money), ALL future years of air conditioning
electric bills would be essentially eliminated, and a great deal of
the cost of heating would also forever be eliminated! Best of all,
virtually all new construction could easily include this system, which is
entirely invisible once the house is built.
There ARE some Engineering considerations. All of the inner surfaces
of the (concrete) chamber would have to be painted / sealed to seal those
surfaces, such that moisture did not permeate through the concrete,
either inward or outward. Effective, crush-resistant, durable, thermal
insulation (we generally suggest R-30)
must be provided, so the storage does not lose too much of the
stored heat to the surrounding ground (such as what traditionally
had been called blue Styrofoam). Proper selection of the best storage
materials (for both economy and thermal characteristics) is very desirable.
The system needs efficient ways to both get heat into and out of the
storage, for efficient performance. Otherwise, the house temperature could
vary from the desired wall thermostat value! When these considerations
are properly planned, an absolutely standard heating/cooling wall
thermostat can keep the entire house within one degree of the value
you set on that thermostat, for the ultimate in comfort, summer and
winter. It's all automatic, too! Exactly like a standard central furnace
and central air conditioning system performs! No one living in the
house would even have to know that no conventional A/C was in operation
and no conventional furnace was being used!
As to specifics for a particular application, well, that's where we
might earn our keep. We would have liked to include those specifics in
this page, but there are quite a few variables that can affect
the performance of this system. The size and shape of a house, the
climate, and other variables can affect how this system should be
engineered for optimum performance.
This is one of two closely related "gifts" we are presenting
to the American people. This (storage) one is for new construction, (and
it is technically not entirely a gift, since you probably need to send us
one of the two fees mentioned above), while the other one, the Free
Air Conditioning, is an approach for existing or new houses (and that
one really can be installed without ANY payment to us!). It is at:
Free Air Conditioning.
This presentation was first placed on the Internet in March 2002.
Links to energy-related pages in this Domain:
Global Warming Calculated by a Physicist
Global Warming and Climate Change - Possible Physics Solutions
Unlimited Hot Water FOR FREE, while Solving Global Warming!
Heat Your Whole House FOR FREE, while Solving Global Warming!
Current Energy Resources in Existence (Scary!)
Making all (Black) Asphalt Roads, Rooftops and Parking Lots White can help with Global Warming!
Global Warming Issues Regarding HEAT Sent into the Atmosphere
Global warming Issues Regarding Carbon Dioxide, and Sealevels Rising
Hydrogen as an Fuel-source Replacement
A 100%-Solar Home Heating System
Solar Electricity from PV Photovoltaic Cells
Batteries or Hybrids as an Fuel-source Replacement
Wind-Power for Making Electricity
Waste Nuclear Power For Making Electricity And Heat?
The Physics of Efficiency In Electric Power Plants
Individual Ways of Reducing Your Energy Usage
Methods of Storing Energy for Later
How Much Energy Comes From the Sun? And Why is there Global Warming?
How does the Sun create so much energy?
Inventions Which Might Help Deal With Coming Energy Catastrophes
An Invention to Efficiently Make Electricity from Solar
Enormous Heating of the Atmosphere by the Alaska Pipeline
Air Conditioning without Huge Electric Bills and without Freon
A Method of Storing Summer Heat to (Nearly) Entirely Heat a House all Winter
An Extremely Highly-Efficient (and Fast, 200.0 mph) Transportation System for People and Products
The Sophisticated Woodstove I Invented in 1973
Why is the North Pole Heating Faster than the rest of the Earth?
A Possible way to greatly reduce Aerodynamic Drag of Airplanes
Link to the Index of these Public Service Pages
E-mail to: Public1@mb-soft.com