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Comment by Moissanite | Hacker News Reader

Resistance heater plus thermal mass as a time-shifting mechanism for heat has existed for decades in the UK - they are referred to as "storage heaters" and have generally been avoided wherever possible because of the high cost of electricity relative to gas.

Operating at large scale like this probably helps, but really the main benefit comes from the district heating part.

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Storage heaters might make comeback if gas prices remain high, because intermittent wind power and smart meters make it possible to use electricity when it's windy and cheap.

Indeed, they are: https://tepeo.com/thezeb

Slightly different, as this seems to hook in to your existing water pipes for moving the heat out from a central location - but an interesting find. Another I'm watching from a distance is microwave-based heating, essentially replacing the gas burner in a combi boiler with a flow-through microwave heater.

Heat pumps feeding into underfloor heating do a very similar thing to this sand battery. They let you feed heat into a thermal mass in order to buffer it.

This has the double impact of a) letting you take advantage of cheaper electricity by modulating your load slightly, b) letting your heat pump run continuously at a lower heat output, maximising efficiency as it extracts heat from the continually replenished outside air.

In my experience the big downside of storage heaters is that after heating up overnight they release all their heat while you’re out at work during the day. Maybe okay if you WFH.

Nowadays heat pumps would be far more efficient, shifting 3-4x the heat for the same energy.

Indeed. In our prefab classroom in winter, sitting on the class storage heater before classes started was the prime real estate.

> district heating

I'm always impressed by how prevalent district heating is in parts of Europe, and wonder if anything like that has ever been done in the states, or if it seems too much like communism.

Also have people done the math on the transmission losses vs the efficiencies of a single heating location?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system

You learn something new everyday, thank you.

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