Quote:
Originally Posted by xelasnave
The basic idea is we build a box in glass, probably clear plastic...old windows..whatever such that we have a compartment, how big not sure yet...in there we lay insulation and lay about rocks, painted black maybe...a pipe of what diameter I am not sure runs to the house ...ideally the box is below the house and the hot air in the box will rise to the house however I expect small solar powered fans would be needed.
So the rocks heat up and warm air pumped into the house.
Now tell me why it won't work...
Alex
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I would imagine that it would be relatively easy to harvest
some warm air that way but the the limiting factors would be how much could you get - i.e. could the system warm cool air fast enough and generate enough flow to be of practical use. Plus it would work much better in the summer - when you don't need any more heat, and fairly poorly in the winter, especially at night, when you do.
The right kind of heat pumps can apparently suck warmth from below the ground -like so
http://www.greencrossaustralia.org/b...eat-pumps.aspx
And the compressor driven systems on reverse cycle aircons do an amazingly good job of extracting some usable heat from cold night air, but they need additional external energy to work.
Maybe if we could build a big enough Newtonian style reflector we could harness reflected sunlight from the moon, add a dash of starlight, and focus the beam on a steam boiler...
Cheers,
Chris