strange idea to use water filled barrels

[ttamoneypit]

from reading about soapstone and how it retains heat and gives it off after the fire dies and I read in a magazine about people using 1 gallon milk jugs painted black in their sunroom/greenhouse to absorb heat during the day and then gives the heat off at night


I think i could fit 3 or 4 water filled 55 gallon drums around my wood burner so is this a crazy idea or could it work out very well for my small house--i just need to figure out how to avoid leaks--maybe plastic barrels would be better but they might melt

 

[rkymtnoffgrid]

I believe water actually retains heats better than stone, even soapstone, google something along the lines of "thermal mass water stone" and weed through the results...if I'm not mistaken, water is one of the best thermal storage systems...

 

[rkymtnoffgrid]

"Water, as you probably know, absorbs more heat per unit volume than concrete or other masonry mass." Quoted Dan Chiras in responce to a similar question, Dan is one of my favorite authors of several books on the subject of passive solar heating. So if you're one of the few of us that prefer function over form, 55 gallon tanks stored around your stove makes excellent sence. Get the food grade ones and with rationing, you may also be one of the only survivors when the world ends...

 

[EatenByLimestone]

Great way to store heat, but make sure that the floor will hold a few drums full of water. They be heavy!

Matt

 

[logger]

I see it now.. water-stoves will be here soon.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

This could be the ultimate in that idea....

http://www.snorkel.com/


It's almost a green idea... Reduce, reuse , recycle! Really, I'm interested only in the thermal mass. Too bad there isn't an add on pizza oven.

Matt

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Storing heat in water will work, at least in a greenhouse but to heat a home would probably take a full basement of it.

As an experiment, test your shower water and you'll no doubt find that it is over 100 degrees. Take it up to where it feels uncomfortable on your skin and you will probably find 110 starts to feel pretty darned hot.

Taking those temperatures, now think about how much heat has to come from a stove to heat your home. Most folks find that they need 500 or more in winter to heat the house. Now, how long do you think it would take to get water to 500 degrees?

But let's go back. Let's say you heated water to 120 degrees (most folks settings on water heaters). Do you really think that would heat your home? Remember that the water would be inside a container and the heat on the outside of the container would be lower than the water temperature.

Perhaps it might work, but I have doubts, or should I say it might help....just a little bit. I would not want a bunch of barrels sitting around the house either.

Another try: when I was young a lot of people took water bottles to bed to keep warm or at least help for a bit. They did not stay warm very long and then you were kicking them out of the way because they would make your feet cold.

 

[Battenkiller]

So then hot water heat baseboards and radiators don't work? News to me.

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Hot water baseboards and radiators are totally different from storing water in a barrel.

 

[jfournier]

I believe that's the principle by which the earth regulates its temperature...the oceans absorb heat in the day time, and release it at night, keeping temps from swinging too much day/night.

However, getting enough thermal energy to warm that mass would just be taking heat away from your house in the short term, though if your stove has you opening windows from time to time, maybe something like this would help to even things out...holding some of that extra heat until later on when the stove cools down.

Also, I would hope you could never get the water to 500 degrees, as it boils at 212 and becomes steam, so if you're heating steam to 500 degrees then I hope you have a nice burial plot picked out.

 

[Backwoods Savage]

Exactly

 

[DanCorcoran]

Let's not forget that in order to heat the water in the barrels, there'll be less heat radiated elsewhere (in the house, for example) during that time period. In essence, what you are doing is averaging your highs and lows...during the high-firing times, the room will be cooler than otherwise, and during the low-firing times, warmer than otherwise. You'll never get more out than you put in. The important question is how much of a difference will it make.

Seems to me that you'd need to pipe the heat through radiators submersed in the water to get significant heat transfer. The outside of a sphere (which is roughly what a barrel is) has the least surface area for the volume contained. To get large heat transfer, you want maximum surface area for the volume of water.

 

[savageactor7]

I pretty much agree with what ttamoneypit says about water and heat but the wife doesn't want any part of storing water. Our 1st house had baseboard hot water heat and it stayed warm for a long time.

 

[Battenkiller]

Hot water baseboards and radiators are totally different from storing water in a barrel.

I know that, but a 190º HW baseboard throws out enough heat to warm a room is all I meant. Doesn't need to get up to stove temps like 500º to work.

All in all, I think it's a silly idea. A barrel would take forever to heat and then forever to give back the stored heat. It lacks both the circulation and the high surface area/volume ratio needed for efficient heat transfer. I have about 3000 lbs of centrally located cement block behind my stove. Just for giggles, I scanned its with my IR and it averages 120º over its entire surface, with the hottest spots getting up to about 160º or so. Plus, I have several 4' x 4' pieces of sheet steel stored inches away from the stove to act as a heat shield for my woodworking wood and tools. They average about 200º when the stove is going full tilt. All combined it helps some, but I don't think 55 gallons of water (less than 500 lbs) would be noticed in a room, even if it was boiling hot.

 

[quads]

from reading about soapstone and how it retains heat and gives it off after the fire dies and I read in a magazine about people using 1 gallon milk jugs painted black in their sunroom/greenhouse to absorb heat during the day and then gives the heat off at night


I think i could fit 3 or 4 water filled 55 gallon drums around my wood burner so is this a crazy idea or could it work out very well for my small house--i just need to figure out how to avoid leaks--maybe plastic barrels would be better but they might melt

I think what we're missing here is that if you are married, ask your wife what she thinks about the idea. In my small house, if my wife had to look over and around three or four 55 gallon drums to watch Wheel of Fortune, me and the barrels would be mighty cold by nightfall.

 

[cycloxer]

The hardest part is going to be heating the water. It will take A LOT of heat and A LOT of time.

Have you ever seen those back-county hot tubs they build in VT where you literally pipe the water around a big old wood stove? It works, but it takes a long time to heat up that water and you have to feed that stove a lot of wood.

 

[KB007]

Makes you wonder tho if there wouldn't be some way to run some small dia. pipe in contact with the firebox to pickup heat to use for an underfloor water heated loop. Hmmm.... Kind of a Wood stive / bolier all in one.

 

[cycloxer]

...well at some point you might as well just buy a wood fired boiler...i mean that is the direction this is going

 

[lexybird]

the way i understand it is :
its easier to heat air than water * but * water stores the heat alot better and longer than air does

 

[woodjack]

I always thought that someone who had the right set-up could boil a tank of water above the fire and have a pump circulating the water through pipes around the room.

 

[LLigetfa]

I think the OWB guys talk about water storage in much larger volumes, like 500 or 1000 gallons. They also don't litter their living room with tanks.

I wouldn't mind somewhere to send my surplus heat when it is too mild out to keep a fire going without having a window open. A heat pump could extract more useful heat from stored water. A Stirling engine powered by the stove could run the heat pump.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine

 

[Battenkiller]

I always thought that someone who had the right set-up could boil a tank of water above the fire and have a pump circulating the water through pipes around the room.

I think that someone was named Rube Goldberg.

 

[grateful]

Last winter I heated our 1700SF rancher with a wood stove in the partial basement. I used a 16" fan to blow the heat away from the stove and into the crawl space (2 to 3 feet from ground to joists)- I stapled plastic down the center of the crawl space so the heated air would go the length of the house, take a right turn and flow toward the stove. All of the floors were nice and warm and the house would be around 65 degrees inside when it was 20 degrees outside. The house is built on solid basalt and the partial basement is concrete. The house will stay warm for 2 days without a fire and it takes 2 days to get the whole mass warm again. This year I put in some 8" duct with a fan and the house is 65 to 70 degrees when its 20 outside. I still blow air in the crawl space just for the warm floor effect. In my situation heating the mass is a byproduct of having the stove in the basement. I love it, the bath tub is always warm.
My brother lived in Tucson, he painted a 55 gallon barrel black thinking the water would warm from the sun. On a 100 degree day the water would get up to 70. I think night time temps were down to 40. I'm sure there is a formula for heat transfer...

 

[Danno77]

all i'm reading is a lot of blah, blah, blah......just do it already and take pictures.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

When I kept aquariums, I noticed that the temp of my house had less fluctuation. In a 14X25 room I had a 125 gallon tank, an 80 and a 55. That's not a huge amount of water, but it did make a difference. I think any amount of thermal mass will make a difference. Maybe not a huge amount, but some.

Matt