Sand Battery Home Heater for Solar? 

Amazing aluminum welding and milling. Well done.

Nice video! =) I founded the company in Finland that you are talking about. =)

I build 55 gallon drums for our sand batteries that we sell and install here in Massachusetts i have one heating my 3200sqft home and dont use water heater elements its the worst idea use oven elements and exhaust piping for success and hook it all up to solar panels in parallel to a pid unit that feeds ac and dc voltage so in winter if solar is lacking on your property you can heat it with grid power also safely

Love this. A man enjoying and sharing the journey. Im constantly impressed by clever people looking to create clever solutions. Keep the videos coming :)

Loved that you referenced Robert :)

thanks so much for showing us your project

Cool! Maybe instead of puttin half sand put a temperature cutoff in heat sinks. So if you hit set temps it'll cut off & cool down. Then when its low enough it will turn back on? It'll also conserve some energy that can go into your solar batteries while its cooling.

I really like the look of this and hope you get it scaled in. I am building a tiny camper and was looking at different sand batteries for heating it.

Nice job. You need a feed back circuit that modulates the current to the element based on the temperature of the grease.

Hi this looks great, I've got a off grid property in Ontario and have to bring in drinking water in 250 gallon totes well insulated on a trailer. this can safely keep my tanks from freezing in the winter with no maintenance and not touching my camp power. I'm keeping this on hand

You may want to try a DC Immersion Heater, they should last longer.

Bravo..........graphite ...or soap stone ...it can go 1000 degree......run water tubes through......love the stuff......multi heat sources.....cheers

Bury these like septic tanks, to get past potential neighborhood association objections. Easy money.

The tiny device you've built is a toy. My heat storage battery uses 2400 pounds of sand and 10 ea 50 foot coils of 1/2" copper tubing full of 50/50 water/antifreeze that is heated by a solar collector. It took a couple of weeks to heat it but then just a couple days of full sun a week maintain enough heat to warm a one bedroom cabin.

Have you though of maybe doubling the heating elements and Instituting a computerized cyclic power system. So that they are not in constant use ? That may extend the heating elements life span & could probably be done with an arduino uno without too much effort.

Thank you 🙏

You have a lot of good information, but one thing you could really benefit from is making a script so you dont say "umm" so much.

Great setup, great idea!

'Desert sun 02' has also made plenty of these with different ideas and parts. I'd recommend an aluminium pot filled with sand and perhaps a thermostat, but on a cold day who cares right?! I like in your idea the tube being flat as you could use it to heat things on top like a stove. Was also going to say that heat rises, but given you have an aluminium conductor shouldn't be much of a problem reaching the sand. Maybe you could sandwich these to make array's. Nice build.

Nice , thanks for posting !

Nice stuff.

OFF-GRID SURVIVAL MIKE has an alternative ideas using 110 volt AC oven circular elements with maths theories and different iterations

I'm a physicist and engineer, so I thought I'd ask if you have considered using a water vapor system where the vapor can be used to transfer the heat to the sand. That way you won't burn out the heating elements.

I wonder if it’s a better idea to use resistance wires for heating instead of these PTC heaters like other videos show on you tube.

More interesting is how to store summer heat for winter months. At a residential scale. Because winter sun is not enough even to heat water for shower (

Are you selling any of these? I have a 800 sq foot basement storage area that gets cold in the winter. Would be great to add this to keep the water heater heatpump from going resistive.

i cant image this doing much more then 1hour or so . i would think you would need at least 500-1000lbs of sand media to make it worth while and most likely really need at least a 1 ton or more . very cool machining and worksmen ship though . hopefully you plan to scale it up to a decent sand volume . can you put higher voltage and lower the amperage to be less stress on the heating pads ?

Haven't looked into where you are at with this so what I say might be a moot point. What I've noticed in transferring heat is that the least amount of times you can transition the better. So this would be going from electrical into the metal into the sand back into the metal and then finally into the air which is transitioning five times. My recommendation would be to find an electric element like others have said and instead of using any medium use it to heat the air. That would be the most efficient way. If you're looking to delay and diffuse I would allow the heated air from the element to run across a sand filled tube that would retain heat longer. In short, think of a normal electric baseboard heater with a design similar to yours suspended above it that is absorbing the heat until it reaches capacity

Nice job

Excellent

Im new to all of this and getting invested in the whole sand battery idea, how would a water heater element or a stove heating element work in something like that?

I think that the idea isn't terrible but I also think you are adding all sortf of additional losses. Sand batteries are great for storing heat that was caputered by a device designed to capture heat. For example, if you had cooling circuit on the back of your solar panels (some copper tubing on the back running to a small tank with a pump) and route that cooling system through the sand then you'd be storing heat while allowing your solar panels to run more efficiently (colder = better) and thus, for example, charge a battery bank. In your setup, you ignore all the heat the solar panels are receiving anyways, use the already poorly converted electricity the solar panels provide to power heating elements that in turn have to heat the sand. It's not impossible but it feels that by moving funds from electric heating elements to something that actually captures the heat and pumps that around (creating basically a heatpump in the same way the radiator on a car works, instead of dumping the heat into the passing air you dump it into the sand) you'd get much better efficiency and more/better energy storage.

How about sand coated with a little mineral oil? Just a thought

Yeah got to connect those units straight to the aluminium and delete the heatsink

Nice, if you have room, I would use water Solar heated. WAY more efficient.

As a question you have alot of thermal transfer on that, which makes me wonder if that is that the issue? ir the fit isn't tight enough, if it was a tighter fit you'd have better transfer? Just a thought..

You could use one ptc plate 20cm long 220 watts

Looks nice. Why not use bitcoin mining servers? Then you will be using the heat and also getting BTC?

Any new updates ?

nice idea but it looked to me like you've got too much heatsink paste on there, should be a very thin layer for the best heat transfer.

Cool Idea - BUT: When compared with water, sand really isn't a good storage. When you compensate for the Volumetric benefit of sand (higher density than water), you need to heat the sand ~3x as hot as the water to get the same amount of stored energy. But with 200°C you are at a good starting point - from there it's getting better the hotter :)

Insane waste of money. Where are the numbers?

Too many "uh" and "uhm"s