The first quarter of the year is over. Soon it will be really warm again, and in some places warmer than we like it. Then we sigh: Oh, how nice it would be if we could take some of the winter's cold into the summer and instead save the summer's excess warmth for the winter!
The fact is, we can, we just have to do it. There is a straightforward way to store heat energy and bring it indoors when needed. You do not need a thermos for this, but a cistern, which contains water and also ice, a so-called ice storage.
Do you think at the latest now, to the first of this month an April Fool's joke is published here?
No, we are serious!
In terms of technical equipment, this system requires a heat pump and properly designed piping. With that, you can heat. The heat pump extracts energy from the cisterns liquid water and "pushes" it as heat into the heating circuit. This goes on until the water turns to ice. So, the storage tank must not ice up completely, we have to make sure that ice also melts again. For this, other heat energy is brought in, i.e. solar heat from the roof, heat from the ground, waste heat from appliances, recovered heat from exhaust air and in summer, for the benefit of comfort, also the excess heat from inside the building. Solar energy is used to drive the pump: heating and cooling only with energy from the environment.
We are currently working on a new building where an ice storage system will be used. Our project sheet for this is already in the digital drawer, we will show it when the architects also address the public, the project is well designed teamwork.