Sand Battery Home Heater for Solar? 

Warren, thank you for watching and for your comments! There are 2 more updates for the heater after this video on our channel it is a work in progress and a final update coming soon.

I am interested to hear how that works! Thanks for watching!

Did it work??

@@RustyShakleford1 Haven't had the chance yet...had some health issues that sidelined me bit working in that direction!

@HergerTheJoyous dam same I got tuberculosis and a blood clot . All my projects sidelined the feeling sucks but acceptance of it helped me just enjoy suffering lol. What issues are you dealing with if you care to share it not I wish you healing and love. All the best man

@@RustyShakleford1I'm sorry brother. I have chronic myeloid leukemia. My spleen was the size of a fat baby! Lol it flattened one of my kidneys and displaced my stomach...so I went from 165 to 125 pretty quickly. I went through chemo about a year ago today and received a stem cell transplant. I'm feeling better but there are good days and bad.

Thank you!

Thanks for watching and commenting Ross!

I really like his channels!

Thank you!!!

I think it would be great for a well insulated camper. For 96 watts it throws some impressive heat but still needs work. Thanks for watching!

That sounds impressive you have anything online so I could look at yours? Thanks, Tim

Thank you for watching!

I tried the buckets it is hard to get meaningful heat unless your are in the desert 😏. It is a good way to test the theory but a bad way to get heat. In my opinion it must be contained so you can control the heat more effectively. By containing it you allow the entire volume of sand which in my case is pure silica which it mostly quarts a very effective heat transfer media, to entirely heat up and transfer that heat to the outside. I have 2 other follow up videos to this one where I have made some considerable modifications to help the heat come out but still get the sand benifits. Thank you for watching and commenting!

I have a friend with a 4ft x 4ft x 4ft well house he wants one badly as soon as I get the details worked out, it should keep it from freezing. Thanks for watching, and commenting!

You can get heating cable it's water proof it's used in greenhouses as well as tanks for snakes etc They're really cheap £20 for 3 m and 12V float it just below the surface and it'd stop it from freazing

Hi, thank you for watching and commenting, there are 2 more videos after this one that show some evolution in my design, I am not opposed to any technolgy that will make it work better but as a rule I do want to keep it as simple as possible. I am not at all familiar with what you proposed but would like to hear more. I do not really like the sound of it though because the key to the silica sand, made up of mostly quarts is that it has to be completely dry to be effective, otherwise the heat is wasted boiling off the moisture. Many people I see experimenting with these just use plain old sand and it is not effective. Quarts is an excellent conductor of heat and I am using as a thermal conductor as much as I am using as a thermal mass. I think you mean adding another type of heat exchanger and that seems to complicated for this.

Cody, thanks for watching and commenting! There are 2 more updates on this heater on my channel. I am not only using the sand for storage but also for a thermal transfer media. The third video kind of shows best what this has evolved to so far.

Not a bad idea, thank you for watching and commenting. I am exploring all options and that is a possible solution

I have heard of people doing that if you look at Robert Murray Smiths Channel in the UK he tried that: www.youtube.com/@ThinkingandTinkering I wanted something low current so I could power it from solar, and you would need quite a lot of solar power to heat with a water heater element.

Im not sure I went to a submersion type heater in video 3 for this heater, I like that a lot better than the PTC elements. Now I just have to install a controller. Thanks for watching!

This is my thought a lot of thermal paste isn't related for temperatures that high so once the thermal paste bakes. There isn't enough thermal transfer to the aluminum before the device bakes

Its hard to say but the fit on the actual thermistor to the flat aluminium tube it is supplied with is quite loose. I thought about removing that flat tube and making the pocket of the heat exchangers fit the thermistor ( or PTC element) more tightly, but to me the issue seems to be trapping too much heat in the enclosure. The sand gets too hot and cannot remove the heat fast enough so the PTC elements overheat. I may remake the heat exchangers to work from the exterior bottom of the unit to see what happens.

Wouldn't the server use a ton of power though, kind of the opposite of what I was going for. Thanks for watching and commenting!

@@mvpmachine Yes, but since you are running this on solar, do you really care how much energy you are using? In fact, I'm looking to accomplish a few things: 1) Setup an energy storage of heat for the winter months. 2) Use solar to feed that storage system. 3) Get paid for doing it but not from pumping it to the electrical grid where I have to sign a contract with my local government. Instead, I want to get paid by a distributed network for mining crypto. So, I was thinking of how to store the energy from the BTC servers while I store the money at the same time, and just pay back the server investment over time by saving on my energy bill and also diversifying my capital investments.

@@jd01665 It sounds like it could work but setup cost is going to be huge and it is not a sure thing as crypto has proven to be a bit risky. I would thing proving the crypto model you are thinking of would be the first step then after that works using the heat could be invested in with the profits. Waste heat is the best use for a sand battery.

Hi the video you commented on was the first of 3, there are 2 more after this one, and one final update coming soon.. Thanks for watching!