Yay cow corn and feed grade soybeans!

Interested in your calculations for 2kl, do you have a small, highly efficient house? For my house, IIRC I needed something like 3000L (glycol, so a little less capacity than pure water) at 30C to maintain 16C in the house for 12h. That’s calculating losses at average winter night temps of -8C and a relatively efficient adobe house of 150m2, and including estimated losses for a buried tank surrounded by foam installation.

Roughly: 3kw/hr worst case home losses, times 12h is 36kw, 36/0.00114 kWh/L is 31.5k liter-degrees, 31.5k/14 degree temp drop is 2.2kL, so 3kL inclusive losses. Experimentally verified heat loss calcs after installation of the 9kw resistive boiler which used around 30kwh for the coldest 12h winter nights which ends up being about a 50% duty cycle at the medium heat setting of 5kw. Yes my electricity bill was $500/month for two months a year when pulling it all from the grid.

If I was building the house i’d spec a 1m mixed layer slab and run two layers of hydronics through it. The bottom layer is the heat storage side and the top layer is the home comfort side. The waste heat from the storage dumps into the house and you’ve got a ready made heat battery right where you need it. Run your resistive boiler while the sun is shining to get your heat battery toasty and at night use your pumps to move the heat up when home envelope losses are more than the heat battery leaks up through the floor.

Heat pump didn’t make sense in my climate because there is no need for cooling, when heat is needed it’s usually way too cold for heat pumps to be efficient, and we have basically unlimited sun and therefore energy. High desert New Mexico.

I found the book “heating with renewable energy” helpful when designing my system

Will they come and collect it for a refund if you don’t agree with the new TOS?

Yeah I already had the hydronic floors and ran numbers on heating the floors off thermal solar panels, propane, heat pump, and the resistive boiler. The thermal panels made the least sense because they are useless eight months of the year.

The heat pump might have worked but when I really needed it my semi-outdoor closet would be in single digits and full of water supply pipes so the heat pump would be least efficient when I needed it most, and would not help keep the closet warm.

The resistive boiler meant I could add a bunch of panels to run it during the day and get the floors up to 85F, then run all electric appliances with no worries during the day the rest of the year with the extra capacity. So instead of being net positive generation from 10am to 4pm in summer, its now 8 am to 6pm with way more than I can use at peak.

It takes an extremely large volume of any of these materials to store any useful amount of heat to get you through a cold night or something. The volume looks more like a room than a box, unless you can somehow make it molten that is

I looked into one of these thermal systems for my own place but the outlay is just massive for the 11 weeks a year I really need heat, and the rest of the year it’s just a stupidly oversized hot water heater that is cooking my glycol and DC pumps.

I ended up paneling up and putting a dumb 9kw resistive boiler for my hydronic floors. The house slab is the battery and although inefficient in terms of strict energy use, winter sun on my cheap pallet of panels dumps plenty into the slab all day. I do have to light the stove if we get a snow storm for a day or two though

It’s practical for someone with limited space for panels on a small room, but I ran these calculations by moving almost all loads to daytime, sizing the panel array to the (minimum daily usage + efficiency losses) * buffer factor for days long storms or equipment failure.

Start with the comparitively cheap panels if you have the space, move electrical loads to the daytime and design the house for thermal momentum, and size storage to the minimum inclusive efficiency losses times buffer. If you have the roof space the panels are the cheapest part and you should usually way, way over panel.

The most important thing is having thermal mass enough or living in a climate that allows your home to not need thermal input or extraction at night. Heat is expensive and exponentially moreso if you need to produce it from conventional storage.

Our town in New Mexico is producing so much solar power during the day it exports it to neighboring towns. They are completing a battery storage facility and have dropped electricity kwh rates twice in the last 4 years as new solar farms come online.

The bad news is that I can’t get anyone to drill a well for me and there is nobody delivering water any more so we have to pray for rain or we have no water. Municipal fiber though, and also a local wireless high speed option for those far out in the desert. Nice to see the state improving things for families but still dead last in education and structural environmental problems are getting worse.

I’m not the one you originally responded to but pregnancy is something that affects many more women than war affects men, at least in the US.

Until they get pregnant and then women are drafted into the breeding stock army- answer to the state if you don’t take neonatal vitamins, miss doctors appointments, smoke, drink, do anything the state deems risky to it’s prodigy.

I just buy the cheapest piece of garbage possible and expect to replace it every couple of years. I hate the implications for the environment, but in many product categories it is a fools errand to try to buy quality.

Fly to shows in Europe instead. Prices have never been lower for the flights and concert tickets are much, much cheaper over there. You might just break even after it all but at least you got to go to Europe instead of enriching ticketmaster

The good thing about English is that you can puke out the most half broken grammar and pronunciation and still be understood by most. I’m not aware of many other languages like that.

Yeah I’m not french of course but it seems quite positive if the review refrains from starting with “à fuir!” and refrains from ending with “honteux”

Ah French. I have to say the french are the absolute masters of Google reviews because they will knock stars off and complain about everything.

Spaniard review: * * * * * Gente maja, birra buenísima y poca aglomeración

German review: * * * * Das Bar ist super zentral gelegen und gut erreichbar

French review: * A FUIR! Attention si vous venez a plusieurs et que pas tout le monde consomme ceux là ne doivent pas s’assoir sinon vous êtes humilier devant tout le monde vos amis famille etc. En gros vous venez a 4 et que 2 consomme vous allez recevoir les foudres de la patronne bref horrible accueil pas commercial et a la limite de la propreté! Moi ma fille a voulu m’offrir un café juste 5 mn avant que l’école ouvre ben du faite qu’elle ne consommait pas elle a humilier alors que c’est ma fille qui a payé le café et les bonbons pour les 2 petits et tout ça pour 5mn assis HONTEUX !

Yes, a cartoon lesbian couple is highly inappropriate for the grandson of a drug huffing, ho banging gangster.

Russian thistle. These asshole things pop up all over the yard and driveway and I go around and pull them out of the ground with welding gloves. Sometimes I get stabbed even through welding gloves. I can completely understand why someone would blast a cancer causing chemical across their whole yard. I’ve been experimenting with everything else but I’m too worried about my dog to do roundup.

I agree with you. There’s something a little nostalgic about lawnmower noise, but if you live without it for a while it’s so much nicer. I don’t have lawns at any of my house- crushed coral and desert dirt- but it’s been nice to see everyone get irritated with draining gas and fixing carburetors every year and switch to electric mowers which are mutch quieter.

This guy RFPs for the DoD

Oh for sure Europe is maybe worse in this regard. I’m in the south of Europe now but have relatives in Paris and the cold gloom is not something I would like to live with every day. At least along the Mediterranean it’s mostly sunny for the short, cold days of winter!