Threads like these sometimes remind me of The Beverly Hillbilles episodes where the con man was trying to get Jed to invest in his scheme to remove the smog from the LA basin by using a giant fan and boring a hole through the San Gabriel Mountains.
How a sand battery could transform clean energy
- Thread starter oldbrownhat
- Start date
I looked at a house with hot water heated floors in an old farm house. Then I started considering the nightmare of leaking pipes. The house I grew up in had hot water radiators, but the pipes could be accessed easily from the basement for the first floor, and the vertical pipes to the second could be dropped down into the basement and replaced.
Supposedly, there's a city in Germany that has piping under the streets/sidewalks that can act as heat sinks for the local nuke plant. The water running through the pipes is being condensed/cooled for reuse after being run through the turbines, not the reactors.
Supposedly, there's a city in Germany that has piping under the streets/sidewalks that can act as heat sinks for the local nuke plant. The water running through the pipes is being condensed/cooled for reuse after being run through the turbines, not the reactors.
venomballistics
Member
And that's where many of the half baked ideas ultimately end up being parked.
This, however, has more merit than many others in terms of concept.
It's the implementation where things can get goofy
bigwheelzip
Absent Comrade
Reykjavik Iceland has geothermal pipes under the streets and sidewalks, melting snow and supplying domestic hot water heating.
Bruges Belgium pipes beer under the streets, from a brewery to the bottler.
https://www.trafalgar.com/real-word/bruges-beer-pipeline/
Sent from my motorola one 5G using Tapatalk
DWalt
Member
Back sometime in the 1950s my uncle installed an earth-air heat pump in his house. He was an executive with the local electric power company and it was done as a feasibility test project. I remember that it was considered as new technology at that time and it did involve drilling a fairly deep well in his yard. But very little else about it. He was also somehow involved in installing the air conditioning system in the first existing high-rise office building in the State of Ohio to have it. That was sometime in the 1930s. The very first high-rise office building in the US designed specifically for air conditioning was the Milam building here in downtown San Antonio.
Last edited:
OP
Oh, now THAT idea I like!
In fact, I remember going to a pub in Cork, Ireland for a folk music night and the stout (Beamish?) was piped in from the brewery across the street. Doesn't get any fresher than that.And Stockholm is using a massive data centre to heat buildings.
BBC: Your online activity could one day be helping to generate hot water. Erin Biba visits Sweden to see an ambitious – and profitable – green energy project in action.
“The cloud” is a real place. The pictures you post on Instagram, the happy birthday wishes you leave on Facebook pages, and the TV shows you stream on Netflix aren’t living in a nebulous ball of condensation in the sky. They live on a massive series of servers – all connected together in rows and towers in giant warehouses.
Few people have ventured into these data centres. But in the Swedish capital Stockholm, I went inside these information labyrinths, and discovered that they’re not just housing data. All the heat they give off is helping to warm homes in the city of over 900,000 people...
Few people have ventured into these data centres. But in the Swedish capital Stockholm, I went inside these information labyrinths, and discovered that they’re not just housing data. All the heat they give off is helping to warm homes in the city of over 900,000 people...
DWalt
Member
An enormous amount of electricity is used and heat generated by mining cybercurrency. Not a joke.
OP
I 've read about that. Here's an article by a guy who plans to heat his house!
How To Heat Your Home With Bitcoin Mining
This guide walks you through integrating a bitcoin mining rig into your home’s HVAC system, recapturing heat from the process and saving money.
sigp220.45
US Veteran
Nothing will work, until something does. Then the headscratchers will say -Why didn’t I think of that?
Innovation is good.
Innovation is good.
OP
Kind of the technological equivalent of "You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet your prince"
Kind of the technological equivalent of "You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet your prince"
Or one could spend that money on a technology that works, rather than trying to make silk purses out of sow's ears..
ggibson511960
Member
I've been a practicing mechanical engineer in the energy industry since 1972. I have seen or read about practically every crackpot energy scheme dreamed of by the mind of man. Tech journals love to extol the future of the latest perpetual motion energy gadget. My favorite to this day was the idea of a photovoltaic solar collector in orbit or on the moon with a microwave transmitter to beam the free energy to the earth. What could go wrong? The cruel economy has a way of winnowing out the hair-brained schemes. Sadly, our government is gullible as ever to fund these dreams. Heat sink storage is older than dirt, literallly, widely deployed by HVAC systems around the world, but limited by the harsh realities of space, cost and energy density. What enthusiastic futurists fail to realize is that alternative energy generation or storage schemes find a home where nothing else is available or practical.
Last edited:
DWalt
Member
Unfortunately, hard engineering and economic realities when applied to Green Energy are completely ignored and overridden by political rhetoric espoused by politicians who know nothing whatsoever about those realities. Except that Green Energy gets votes from idiots and leads to more governmental control. To them, anything, no matter how impossible, is easily achieved if enough of our money is thrown at it. Do not forget that the election is tomorrow.
Last edited:
