I had an interesting discussion about the cooling potential of our heat pump system – in a climate warmer than ours. Recently I’ve shown data for the past heating season, including also passive cooling performance: After the heating season, tank temperature is limited to 10°C as long as possible – the collector is bypassed in…
Tag: Latent Heat
Mr. Bubble Was Confused. A Cliffhanger.
This year we experienced a record-breaking January in Austria – the coldest since 30 years. Our heat pump system produced 14m3 of ice in the underground tank. The volume of ice is measured by Mr. Bubble, the winner of The Ultimate Level Sensor Casting Show run by the Chief Engineer last year: The classic, analog…
Ice Storage Hierarchy of Needs
Data Kraken – the tentacled tangled pieces of software for data analysis – has a secret theoretical sibling, an older one: Before we built our heat source from a cellar, I developed numerical simulations of the future heat pump system. Today this simulation tool comprises e.g. a model of our control system, real-live weather data,…
Earth, Air, Water, and Ice.
In my attempts at Ice Storage Heat Source popularization I have been facing one big challenge: How can you – succinctly, using pictures – answer questions like: How much energy does the collector harvest? or What’s the contribution of ground? or Why do you need a collector if the monthly performance factor just drops a…
Frozen Herbs and Latent Energy Storage
… having studied one subject, we immediately have a great deal of direct and precise knowledge … of another. —Richard Feynman Feynman referred to different phenomena that can be described by equations of the same appearance: Learning how to calculate the distribution of electrical charges gives you the skills to simulate also the flow of…
How Does It Work? (The Heat Pump System, That Is)
Over the holidays I stayed away from social media, read quantum physics textbooks instead, and The Chief Engineer and I mulled over the fundamental questions of life, the universe and everything. Such as: How to explain our heat pump system? An astute reader suggested to create an ‘animation’ of the gradual evolution of the system’s…
Economics of the Solar Air Collector
In the previous post I gave an overview of our recently compiled data for the heat pump system. The figure below, showing the seasonal performance factor and daily energy balances, gave rise to an interesting question: In February the solar collector was off for research purposes, and the performance factor was just a bit lower…
Ice Storage Challenge: High Score!
Released from ice are brook and river By the quickening glance of the gracious Spring; The colors of hope to the valley cling, And weak old Winter himself must shiver, Withdrawn to the mountains, a crownless king. These are the first lines of the English version of a famous German poem on spring, from the…
The Ice Storage Challenge
The more we enjoyed our spring-like winter, the more we were worried if we will ever see much ice in our underground water tank this heating season. So we did what I had announced – we switched off the solar collector completely: Since February 1st our heat pump has been extracting heat energy from the tank…
We Want Ice!
We haven’t seen much of it this winter yet. I am talking both about the ice you would expect in winter and about the one created from extracting heat from a water tank – our heat pump system‘s heat source. This winter does again disappoint; it seems we will not be able to generate Pannonia‘s…
Cistern-Based Heat Pump – Research Done in 1993
One of the most recent search terms on this blog was: ‘cistern for water source heat pump’. I wanted to double-check and searched for this phrase myself. This was the first Google Search result: Cistern-Based Water-Source Heat Pump System Design … a research paper that had been available for download at the website of Iowa…
Controlling the Four Elements. Or: Why Heat Pumps Are Cool.
Despite my attempts to post mainly geeky and weird stuff peppered with (very often not down-to-earth) physics, I got involved in some serious discussions on renewable energy, sustainability, heat pumps, and the pleasures of Building Your Own Stuff. So I will describe what I am actually working on / playing with when I am not…
elkemental Force 