Passive Thermal Battery - IT WORKS!!! - Using Water & Concrete - Super High Efficient Passive Solar

So today I'm going to tell you all about

passive

thermal

mass in a deep winter greenhouse or any

high

efficiency

passive

solar

building. Let's get to it. It's like living in a

solar

oven or something warm in the winter, but also

super

cool in the summer. Behind me are 24 45-gallon drums, which are all full of

water

and that is equivalent to four thousand 800 liters of

water

, which is equivalent to a weight of approximately 10,500 pounds, so I first put these 45-gallon drums in a thin place. conveyor belt so they wouldn't sit well on the black

concrete

that conveyor belt is black the first level of drums and then some five quarter boards and then the next level of drums so this sucker is extremely safe and solid on my floor of flat

concrete

Perfectly level concrete, it is

super

super safe.

Well, one thing I did was when I bought these used barrels. First of all, you get the steel ones. Steel will transfer heat to the water because it is a thinner material. Steel is better heat transfer. than plastic, so if I made black plastic barrels, all of this would last forever or much longer, but it doesn't transfer heat to the water as well as steel. Now the steel is full of water so the condensation stuff from the steel might not last forever and it was very difficult for me to find information on how to store water other than drinking water just for

thermal

mass, there is not much information on this kind of stuff I could find, but what I got was used. barrels and what they had is food grade fish oil now, of course, I looked up, you know, do you know what the different oxidation inhibitors are? what type of oil is a good oxidation inhibitor and it turns out that fish oil is one of the best oxidation inhibitors so in each of these barrels they have some kind of lining on the inside and there is a small amount of fish oil fish in each one now with any type of metal you don't use bleach or chlorine to sterilize anything because that oxidizes and creates rust so all he did was open the lid and fill it with water to within an inch of the lid and that fish oil it's like in water, it's probably covering the inside of the barrel a little bit and it will probably come to the surface because the water and oil don't mix like that on the surface and maybe keep the water from rusting parts of the barrel.

Things like that. Now you don't fill the barrels completely because of expansion and contraction, so when the water heats up it will expand and get bigger, so you need room for expansion and then when it cools down it will become a little bit any smaller and it will shrink, so when I put the lids on the barrels, I just put them on about a quarter turn and they were nice and loose. Actually, when I took these barrels outside, they were in the sun and I unscrewed some of the barrels. I had some barrels that actually concaved and almost exploded and stuff because they were sealed in the sun.

I should have loosened all the uh. The lids were removed but the lid would like to fly off when I was removing them when there was nothing inside so this will expand and contract. Now I put decking boards instead of solid plywood because the top of each barrel has the stopper. that's going to expand and contract and those deck boards, you know it's got air space so it's going to let it breathe as it heats up and cools down and this system is completely passive so there's no moving parts, I filled it with water, it I did correctly. and it will just sit there, there's nothing to mess up, there's no bombs, there's nothing, so today I'm just talking about passive.

Another passive part is just the concrete thermal mass that I painted black, so there is a heat pipe in the floor. there, uh, that goes to a collector, but if I set it up I probably won't even have time to set it up for this winter, but we'll see, maybe I will, but that would be a more active system on the floor. heat pipes because you have an insulated tank for the system and then pumps for the system and that's what you know moving parts that are more of an active system so just the barrels and just the black concrete that will only be exposed on the part coldest of the year, so it's late August right now and the sun is going to hit this black concrete pretty quickly, as it gets colder outside the sun is going to move up and as it gets really cold, will reach the lower barrels. then there are these grates and then in the coldest part of the year, the winter solstice, it's going to hit all those barrels so the sun shines in the winter when it's cold on the black barrels, these have a shiny finish.

I bought a large can of Flat Black Spray Paint. I painted this one matte black because matte black absorbs more sunlight than gloss black, so I cleaned them really well and I think I'll get out my sprayer and spray it all matte black at some point, but it's not a priority, it

works

fine now. either way, now the concrete, so again we poured those four inch thick thickened edges into the floor heat pipe, let it cure for the full 28 days and then what we ended up

using

is a single coat . one part epoxy paint and primer, I think it's called and it turned out great, just apply it nice and thick, the black I did, I think just two coats of black and where the sun hits in the summer, I did white, eh, for a start. with but it looked too much like something hospital type so I did an earthy tone um and I got a nice sandy earth tone and it's a much better feeling here and it does the same thing as white so doing a temperature test there was quite a difference significant between the sun hitting the light colored concrete, the sun hitting the black concrete that is in the sun and no sun hitting this black concrete, so this is in the shadow, you can see the line of the sun is going to start hitting everything the black concrete back here, so this is like you live in a solar oven, like there are little plans to make a solar oven where you can bake things and it's essentially just a glazing angle. the sun and then black inside and the sun is going to like to make an oven, so what I want is that the sun does not reflect the light, but rather absorbs the light in the concrete and does not reflect the light, but absorbs the light where I want it to be now. the white can is not going to absorb the light colored concrete is not going to absorb, so it is not going to get as hot, but it is going to reflect the light and it is curious that, like in the building, only a limited amount of sun enters , but then you control where you want the sun to stay, so I want it to reflect off Paulie, to reflect off the ceiling, even though it's not direct sunlight, to reflect off my light colored can on the wall because I don't want it to my wall and my insulation get hot. above I want my thermal mass inside the insulation to be heated underneath this concrete.

I don't have any insulation, so again in my shop I insulated three inches under the entire deck, so the concrete is a heat sink and doesn't absorb much heat. down or sucked in, so in my tent I lost a little bit of the nature of the heat sink, passive nature of the heat sink, but this greenhouse has 16 inches of insulation around the perimeter underground and then horizontal insulation just below the surface like 8 to 12 feet around the perimeter, so all the clay and gravel that I packed under the concrete and this dirt, all of this is just a heat sink, but the sun is going to hit the concrete to passively heat it, so that there are no air tubes underneath, as if there were no water pumps or movement. parts only the passive concrete is going to absorb the sun heat it during the day and then disperse it again at night the sun is going to hit the water in the barrels heat it during the day disperse it again at night as and when it wants So right now it is a very hot day at the end of August, it's actually over 34 degrees Celsius outside, it's a little cooler in the greenhouse than outside, but in the cold part of the year when it's minus 30 degrees outside and this is literally like a solar oven like maybe I can fry bacon or something here in the winter, I don't know, but now you want all that heat for the barrels I guess, something else here, so I have 50 barrels total, this is a 24 barrel system now I'm waiting for parts for my rainwater tanks but they will be 9000 liters so 9 1000 liter tanks stacked three wide and

high

free come with rainwater only in the summer months so not when it's frozen . outside and it's not getting rainwater, I'll just close it and divert it, but I have to make some kind of filtration system.

Now I don't want the sun to hit me, but it will hit them. the sun so you can get, you know, for 40 bucks or something, you can get an ibc bag protector that prevents the sun from creating algae in your system, but since the sun is just coming from the south and everything else is shaded, I'm just I'd like to put a curtain, uh, probably just a light colored one in front and I might even put some of these tanks after this whole system is set up in front of it. I'll have to think about that because from time to time.

I'll probably have to get into this system to do a little minor maintenance once I get all the kinks worked out, so I don't want to have them in the way, but I think overall once the whole system gets rained on and this thermal mass. So far, it's like over 30,000 pounds of thermal mass of water in the back, so 4,800 liters and then um 9,000 liters. Now my initial thought is forever and ever. I have some pallet racks that I bought and I was going to put up pallet racks. the back of the greenhouse and I was going to put these rainwater tanks in the top corner so the sun wouldn't hit them and then you also have water higher up so you have more pressure, but we deal with water like how much does 30,000 pounds weigh? of water here, I didn't feel like it was a super safe thing, even if I reinforced it to have the heavy water at the highest part of this pallet rack and the loading points right on the legs of the pallet rack like uh, this disperses the weight a little bit better and it's a lot of weight, so I hope you know four or five inches of concrete, uh, super pac gravel, uh, packed virgin clay, that won't sink my deck in the back with all that weight, I think It should be fine because I did it correctly but anyway, again, light colored things reflect the sun so only a limited amount of sun comes into the building, the sun arrives and is absorbed into the barrels or hits this and it is reflected. although this could be in the sun, you can put your hand on it, it won't be hot, just a little hot, that's because the sun will bounce so maybe wherever it hits the can it will bounce and then absorb into the concrete or somewhere else um but my walls are 12 inches thick so that's the wood and it includes the wood framing and the 9 inches of insulation which is our 48 so this is what I'll have barely any heat loss , so I have my structure full of insulation, my vapor barrier, my white can, I don't want the sun to heat my wall, I want it to heat the thermal mass inside the structure, it's that simple, essentially a lot of space is lost in the floor as each of these drums is 23 inches by three feet tall so out of these eight I lost 16 square feet yes 16 square feet for this and this just became part of my wall so now on instead of My wall is a foot thick now it's three feet thick and I lost that floor space, but it's worth it for the passive system like that.

Now it's good to use barrels, not square tanks or something, when the sun comes in at this angle, it hits. the barrel at different angles in a straight line and at different angles, so it's absorbing all that heat from everywhere now and I guess there's something else back here, I'm framing in uh my four-bathroom and a sauna building around the stove of steel firewood and concrete boards and bricks and so on, all uh completely fire, I don't want any risk of fire, that's why I metal everything, concrete, everything, there is no risk that you can have a bonfire in the middle of anyone of my buildings and you know I'm perfectly safe essentially, but this is going to come out, I think it's six and a half or seven feet, so the sun is going to hit the concrete and then it's going to have a wall.

But in the sauna I'm putting in a nice screen door with a hidden screen that opens. I bought it used, so the winter sun will come into the sauna, so during the day that sauna is actually a passive solar sauna, but only in winter, when you want it, and then the rest of the wall that is not a bathroom door or a sauna door, I'm going to put reflective tin again and then something like that, because I don't really do that. I have enough room for a two-foot barrel in there or maybe I'd like a two to be three barrels tall or something, but again, I'm just digging into my floor space, so I only have instead nine feet, I would only have seven. feet for all my potted trees and shelves for trays and things like that, so I could make a pool heater like a three quarter inch or one inch PVC pipe rolled up or one of those vacuum tubes in the wall again where it doesn't there isdoors, uh, for the bathroom or the sauna, so this becomes my passive solar wall and then actually in the sauna I have my wood stove in there and there will be a lot of bricks and dough and things when I frame it, I have some concrete boards, but under one of the sauna benches I will place more drums full of water again under the top sauna bench and that will also be solar mass, so the sun will hit it sometimes the wood stove will heat it up. a little bit, but just having that mass in that dead space will again help even out the greenhouse because again, that's how it's designed in the winter when the sun came out and it was minus 50 degrees Celsius last winter, before I had all this black stuff in here. , it got to plus 35 degrees celsius on a sunny day so it will be very hot, I might even have to release some heat in my tent or actually like opening doors to the outside when it's minus 50 because it can get too hot, but when it's too hot I want all that water to heat up and then when it's minus 50 at night and you don't have sun, all my heat loss or my only heat.

The loss is really on my south and, uh, but if this acts as that heat sink, it will just radiate throughout the night - 50 until the next day when the sun comes out and speeds up the whole thermal mask concept that also

works

in my dressing room. cooler, I like to store a lot of bottled water, just old milk jugs that I bleached, filled with water and lined them in dead space and the back of shelves and things like that. It's the same concept, maybe your grandmother or something has something. I fill milk jugs with water and put them in the freezer, so if there is a power outage, that cold thermal mass will take a long time for the ice to melt and equalize the outside temperature, so if I have a power outage energy. in my walk-in cooler or freezer I have thermal mass water storage in there and it's the same concept that I want heat in the greenhouse and actually in the greenhouse cooling down as well as in the coolest and coolest place because they're shaded.

It's like air conditioning, plus warm in winter but also super cool in summer, very nice, so I would recommend it. This was a bear product from Home Depot. It seems to hold up well in places. I was like dragging something. heavy, I have a small chip or the paint looks like it has worn off, but I have some spare paint to just patch it up. I added a non-slip product to the paint and it feels great on bare feet when the kids are riding their bikes around corners or it's wet or you know, there's a little ramp to the greenhouse.

I didn't want to slip so I added that, but I would recommend it, it was just the cheapest. way super expensive epoxy stain super expensive concrete there's no guarantee you're going to get jet black this I got jet black uh one thing about a black floor is that it shows everything so there are dog hair prints kids' bike tracks, but it is what it is, I can just take the hose when I'm watering and hose it all down and it works great, yeah, again for thermal mass, I painted this door because this door can get hot and you have to go through it, don't you? . a solid part, a flat block, uh, my overhead door that is currently open I also painted it black because I make it absorb heat instead of reflecting it and then passive solar energy doesn't matter because in winter this overhead door is always closed, uh nice to work with, it just makes it brighter for a work area or my butcher shop and whatever I'm doing here, the light colored concrete again because the sun won't hit it so it doesn't matter the thermal mass.

So one other thing about these barrels, they are 23 inches in diameter by 36 inches tall, so for a workbench in a kitchen, your countertop is 36 inches tall, so if you put a slim workbench in or build it like a 2x4 and then plywood and any surface or a piece of stainless steel and turn them into permanent, immobile workbenches. You could also integrate these thermal mass barrels into other parts of the greenhouse, like let's say you wanted a workbench on this back wall or under the sink. I could put a barrel. here and here and on a certain type of day, when the sun is in the morning, it hits this wall and that will work so that these barrels will be anywhere you can stand them as long as it is permanent because once they are full of water they are too heavy to move around and take up a lot of square feet, but when I went upright this only measures 16 feet by two feet, so I'm guessing 32 square feet of floor is what this used, but going up three in height. and the right design for the winter sun to hit them, so if the sun never hits these top barrels, if you didn't design it correctly, then there's not much point in having it, I mean, it's still thermal mass. it just equalizes the temperature, um, but actually here's one more concept to think about: they sell programmable thermostats for your house, so when the kids are at school and everyone's up at work and no one's home , you can program your thermostat to turn down. increase the temperature a little because no one is home and then you can set it an hour before the first person returns to increase the temperature.

By doing so, I think it actually costs more in natural gas, electricity, propane or whatever. use than just leaving it at a constant temperature because when you let the house cool down and then you want to call for heat an hour before someone gets home, that oven is going to run very, very, very much, whereas if I just left it at a constant temperature without a programmable thermostat and I turned it down, but there could be a case like if you were doing a passive solar house or something, just having these barrels, hopefully, you can get the winter sun. to connect with the black thermal mass, but really just having barrels like this inside the warm part of any building, let's say you have a house with a crawl space or something, and you have plastic barrels because you don't need the transfer. of solar heat is just thermal mass and you put barrels in the crawl space and fill them with water which is just mass for the house so once the house or any building is up to temperature the water will also be up to temperature. temperature.

Your house will take longer to freeze or change temperature, so if there is a power outage in the middle of winter, it's minus 50 degrees and you have a building that has no thermal mass whatsoever, is empty, doesn't have any furniture or a house that is full it has thermal mass tanks, even better if it is passive solar, the one that has all that stuff and mass, it will take longer to freeze or change temperature than the house that is full. completely empty, so the rainwater again is its thermal mass, but I'm going to protect it from the sun because I don't want algae in my rainwater.

I want it to reach the sun as much as possible, uh, because this is just the solar mass, so let's leave it like this, uh, I guess, and that well or one more thing that I painted, uh, this part of the door block, like this that all my doors are blocked where the sun is going to hit I just want absorption and reflectance depending on the situation actually one more thing before in one of my other videos I talked about putting solar vacuum tubes inside of the greenhouse. I have an idea why that might not be the best idea, so again I'm Only a limited amount of sun will come in and it will absorb or reflect all the light colored things, so only a limited amount of sun will come in, so on my roof that is outside, I am thinking about the solar evacuation tubes and then the pipes. to connect it to the heating system in the floor, but that is just an additional sun area that is not part of the sun area of ​​the greenhouse because if I am essentially

using

all the sun, I want the plants to take it.

Reflect to help plants and I want it to absorb. I don't like more sun coming in, but what I can do is give it more surface area or get more sun by being outside and plugging it in, so that's my theory. that and those solar evacuation tubes aren't much thermal mass, that's their heat collection, so there's just a little bit of glycol in them, not much, there's a lot of water here, so that's thermal mass and connecting them all together and somehow pipe inside a million different fixtures. I thought it was too much work to be able to get solar evacuation tubes, bring them in, and swoop in here to help heat this up, but I'll just leave this passive when I do the active thing. part of the in-floor heat system, the solar evacuation tubes wrap around the wood stove and the chimney of the wood stove, all tied together with a pump and a large insulated transfer tank for that system, so I'll just use a separate tank and I will probably put it on top of a structurally well built sauna and bath.

That's where I'll put it. Well, I hope it was useful. Information. There isn't much information about things like this. do it properly so that the water fish oil has an inch of headroom with a cap lightly on but enough for expansion and contraction, no plywood, so there is room for the barrel to not collapse and not explode, it can be move with temperature changes, something else, uh. The rust will probably happen on the outside of the drum, not so much on the inside, although it is water and a little fish oil on the inside due to condensation, so for example I filled it from my well and the water from the well It's close to It's very cold, so when I filled these hot barrels with ice water I had a lot of condensation on the outside.

In 24 hours there is no more condensation outside, so it will be interesting to see when the sun comes out. hits it and then at night and it cools down if I'm going to have condensation on the outside of the barrels so I think I'm going to get my flat paint like I did with this one and paint this whole system with another coat of flat paint uh to If there is condensation on the outside that can rust, which will eventually rust and ruin your kegs over and over again, there isn't much information on how long this keg system will last.

I hope many, many, many years, but eventually. It will need to be replaced, but it works better than plastic barrels, so if that information was helpful, hit the like button, it helps the algorithms, leave me a comment. If you have another idea, something to add, or a question, I'll try. to get to it, give me a comment if you're not already subscribed, subscribe, we appreciate it and check out all my other videos. I'm making these videos while I'm slowly building this, uh, this silly one, but getting into some. of the fun stuff, it's really fun because you have to build it first so you can pass the time and do some good gardening and do fun little fun projects, so subscribe, thanks for watching, see you next time. the winter but also super cool in the summer how nice