solar heat for primary heating?

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  • peakbagger
    replied
    First thing, its extremely hard to find a heating technology with less health effects than natural gas, I don't know where you get your info but I would really spend some time determining the validity.

    There were attempts to install air based thermal storage 25 years ago on solar hot air systems, it can work but the size of the storage banks that were used were huge. There were also attempts to use phase change materials with not much success. The most successful is passive design where the space to be heated is very well insulated and then thermal mass is installed to heat up during the day and release the heat at night. There are passive homes in new England that are entirely heated this way, but the amount of air sealing and insulation is well above that used in conventional construction. The low budget way that some folks use with greenhouses is to fill a 55 gallons drum painted black and locate it where the sun is on it all day. When the sun goes down the tank will slowly give off heat and heat the room.

    About the best option is PV with net metering and a low temperature minisplit heat pump. I build up a surplus of power in the summer and heat my house in the winter with it. Of course it only sounds green as the utility still needs to generate power in the winter to make up for my net metering.

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  • jasonsolar
    started a topic solar heat for primary heating?

    solar heat for primary heating?

    I have nat gas for my primary heating source, but have just recently became concerned with health risks it may pose. I ordered an indoor solar spcae heater that sits on the window sill which will help, but it will not work when the sun goes down (will this work at night if it sits under a table lamp or something?). Do they make any kind of system that can store the heat and use it at night?
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