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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular because the amount of heating you get tomorrow is set today.

I wonder why you say this. Having actually had them, they're insulated and you can open/close vents as you choose. And weather is usually pretty predictable; when it's winter it's cold.

Oh look, the article even says this: "Today's storage heaters have such good insulation that the only heat coming into the room is from air being blown through the hot core by an ultra-quiet low-speed fan the length of the heater with the warm air coming out of the bottousually m of the heater at floor level - even when the core is full charged the outside of the heater is usually barely warm to the touch - and never hotter than a water-heated radiator"

With modern insulation and accurate sizing, heat could be stored longer than one day.

Finland's gigantic commercial "sand battery" stores heat for months. Hopefully their techniques can be adapted for smaller use cases, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520

It seems like with better automatic controls hooked to weather APIs, this would be a lot less annoying?

Indeed, I recently built one for my old storage heater https://github.com/glic3rinu/SmartStorageHeater

Awesome, thanks for making my hypothetical concrete :-) A while back, I made some stepper motor automatic window openers to let in cool night air and try to cool down all the thermal mass in our place based on whether it was going to be hot the following day, and then closing them when it didn't help to have them open anymore, kind of a similar idea.

I like your license :-D

Nice work and writeup!

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