Homebrewed Electricity > Storage

Sand Batteries

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SparWeb:
Anybody heard of them?  Tried to build one?

I just heard about this, and saw a video about building one.  This "battery" is meant to store heat, not electricity.  There are a few examples in commercial use or experiments, and I found a DIY video on Youtube.

DamonHD:
Heard of them.  I have a small non-sand heat battery at home.

Rgds

Damon

Bruce S:
Yes I have  ;D.
I used an old toaster NiChr to build one using a couple tins and cheap play sand.
Worked pretty well to heat the sand, but getting the heat back out of the sand is a lot harder than even I expected.
I'm currently working on redoing it by using a tube-in-tube setup like I did for my bio-diesel heating system.
Below is a link of the vid that I used to model mine from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Icai6OOIh2M

Hope this helps
Bruce S

machinemaker:
Back in the 60s or 70s I used to see articles and ads for plans for sand heat storage. This was before outdoor wood furnaces became as popular. The idea was that you had a wood-fired stove in a small building, the exhaust from the stove went through a system of stove pipe above the stove. All of this was enclosed in a well-insulated small building. The space around the stove and the walls of the building was filled with sand. In the sand, tubing was laid out to heat water or ductwork to heat air. The idea was that the wood stove would burn hot and fast, and the heat transferred to the sand for storage.  I have considered doing something similar to heat a greenhouse, but surround the wood stove with old and patched water heater tanks, plumbed in series or two series. Then fill this well-insulated building,( 2 x 6 walls with 2” bead board on the interior) filled with sand. I figure I can get 8 forty gallon tanks around the wood stove. All the tanks would be non-pressurized and vented.

Bruce S:
machinemaker;
The little "test" units I built convinced me that going the route of tube-in-tube . Might be called heat exchangers.
My old Mercedes had two copper tubes, one inside the other, I plumbed the outside pipe through my coolant system that in-turn warmed up the bio-diesel.
The guy who bought the car was schooled on how it all worked and why I had two separate fuel tanks.
 I'll dig around and see if I still have a pic of the setup.

I found that heating the sand is actually quite easy, but getting the sand to give up the heat was much harder.
So I'm going to rebuild it and use the tube-in-tube heat exchange setup to see if it's a bit better.
I'm thinking of building a heliostat to use the sun directly to heat the sand area rather than rely on diversion dump loads to connected to a NiChr bank heater.

Cheers
Bruce S

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