Energy storage that isn't batteries

I'm so late to this conversation, but have you tried using a whole house fan? Definitely worth the investment. When conditions are right, we open the windows at night, turn on the whole house fan allowing it to cool the entire house down with fresh air, then turn the fan off right around sunrise, close the windows, and we're pretty much set for the rest of the day. This uses far less energy than an AC unit. The white noise from the fan also helps with sleeping.

We have one of those "water batteries" here in Michigan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant https://www.consumersenergy.com/company/electric-generation/renewables/hydroelectric/pumped-storage-hydro-electricity

Donald J Arndt

"Heat Pump coming soon" - I caught that. A video detailing the differences between your super efficient mini-split system, and the standard big dumb central HVAC heat pump systems would be great. Don't forget the reversing valve - a common point of failure.

Rich Mazzeo

Around minute 15 you're talking about utilities proactively increasing usage before they need to scale back. This is exactly what my utility (CoServ, Texas) does to my nest thermostat early in the afternoon, pre-peak, (before reducing load again later in the afternoon), because of the rebate program I opted in to.

Mo Cassidy

A "power outrage?" I'm sorry. I'll stop.

Stephen Gillie

The "battery is a collection of cells" works with military usage too.

Stephen Gillie

I'm mostly thrilled to learn that I can call up my electricity provider and have a fantastic excuse for running the A/C way colder at night, which I'd like to do anyway :)

Very likely that was the case. But I think it would be nice if they decide to add insulation after it's been built.

I think your video might feel a little tone deaf to the Texans unless you address the insane bills they got. Their story scared me to a point where I'm not going to do a time of use plan any time soon. I'd rather just buy a bigger electric battery, add more solar panels and improve efficiency.

Is it possible that builders considered insulation only as a way to keep heat in, and not as a way to keep heat out? From that perspective, insulation would be as optional in CA 20 years ago, as A/C was 20 years ago in WA State.

Stephen Gillie

It was indeed an "outrage" 😊

Interestingly I find no insulation in my apartment in Southern California built only 20 years ago. I tried pre-chilling the home but it quickly heated up again in a few hours.

Yeah. Unfortunately, the invasiveness of traditional hydroelectricity (although minimally invasive hydroelectricity IS a thing) is a huge downside.

I wasn't imagining compulsory -- more folks who want to "do the right thing" by opting in but want to set bounds. I'll have to look into how companies have done this in practice. That's a great point that the Texas cases are still a failure case. Thanks for clarifying!

illves

"So forking humid," another The Good Place fan? 😁

I would imagine schemes like this would allow you to limit the adjustments in some way. I also don't imagine these would become compulsory, plus there are the ways I mentioned at the end that allow complete control but which require new kinds of infrastructure (like ice storage air conditioning). And I want to stress that what was happening in Texas - the articles I was mentioning - was exactly the sort of thing I *don't* want to see. Reacting too late is what caused the outrage. If this is properly done, even the more temperature-sensitive folks would be able to participate.

Technology Connections

I'm not clear on the bounds for the remote thermostat adjustments -- can you limit it to a few degrees? Allowing for arbitrary swings seems like a recipe for triggering medical issues (myself included). That said, I can deal with a few degrees variance so hopefully I'm not in "couldn't be friends". Glad you got to put this together! It's a good idea and definitely close to how I'd like to manage things more. Gotta hold off until I'm a homeowner and escape ridiculously bad insulation and A/C...

illves

Cool pirate hair. Cool energy utilization.

Magnus Köhler

In WA State we're just starting to need A/C, and many houses in the PNW weren't built for it. When I was a kid, it only got above 90/32 for a week a year, and might snow for a week a year too. I rented in a 1920s apartment in Seattle with radiator-style heat that always ran - I think the boiler might have also fed the hot water. It was always 80f in there, because there was only 1 thermostat for the entire building - and it was in an upstairs corner unit rented by a guy from Eastern WA who would leave the windows open for weeks at a time. No idea how the landlords afforded all that heating oil, but having a century-old building with 36 units at Seattle rates probably makes a fair bit of revenue. And yet destroying these and building more efficient structures - or even retrofitting these to be more modern - is so expensive that current residents are definitely priced out, on top of being kicked out. This is the primary source of homelessness. Urban planning is so difficult.

Stephen Gillie

Your timing is impeccable! :) 'The Met Office also said there could be an increased risk of wildfires as well as damage to heat-sensitive equipment and potential power cuts.' (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/19/met-office-issues-first-ever-extreme-heat-warning-uk ) - the big inland thermal power stations burning coal and gas have to reduce capacity as the rivers they use to cool the condensers dwindle and warm; and even the big coastal stations might struggle if water gets warm - and sometimes they have problems with things like jellyfish blooms blocking water intakes. A couple of years ago, a part of the French and German nuclear fleet was either offline or running at reduced capacity because river water was too warm to reject heat (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwave-idUSKCN1UK0HR).

Mike Richards

Same here but with Ireland's equivalent ad for the Night Saver tariff. Every time I hear the Israelites song, I get flashbacks to that 80s ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nagdcULlAk

Seán Byrne

One thing with our grid is that it's not only outdated, but also old

Must be nice. Here, we get the worst of both worlds! And it gets humid.

I do get where you're coming from and I understand that this is probably a good idea in many respects. I'm definitely not anti-smarthome, but I AM very privacy conscious and very aware of the privacy, security, and long-term maintenance issues with IoT stuff. To that end, I have a lot of smart stuff in my house, much of which is running the open-source Tasmota firmware and being controlled by a local instance of Home Assistant. When it comes to temperature in particular, I don't have a smart thermostat. In fact, I replaced my old-style programmable one with an older-style Honeywell with a mercury switch because: 1) My wife doesn't work, so there's never a time when someone isn't home, and 2) RELIABILITY. Those things just WORK. But my wife and I are also both just very sensitive to our environment and when things are off just a few degrees it really affects us. I realize some people will write us off as some overly-sensitive babies or whatever, but I'm not really concerned what other people think about it - I'm worried about keeping myself and my wife comfortable and happy. We DO have the technology to have near-absolute control over the temperature in our living environment and I intend to use it. Of course, much of this is moot anyway - our utility company doesn't offer per-hour pricing, and rolling blackouts aren't a thing here (Massachusetts). And if they were, well, I also had a whole-house generator installed earlier this year. It's truly a thing of beauty!

Circuitmike

Well, then that means there's waste happening. If it's maintaining a constant temp when no one is around to take advantage of it, heat's being produced that doesn't need to. The system could reduce output, and I don't know why you wouldn't want that. In the case of apartments - shared billing like that can be done here. It was where I used to live in that the building had one combined gas bill but each unit had its own furnace. We collectively paid for the energy we used, largely because the units were all the same so unless somebody left a window open variation was small.

Technology Connections

about the thermostats - in Finland we don't have the on/off type of thermostat. There are temperature sensors inside the house and outside the house and the temperature of the water circulated to heat the house (underfloor or in radiators) is steplessly adjusted inversely related to the outside temp. So the system doesn't turn on/off to regulate the heat. The water circulates 24/7 365days/year and the colder outside the hotter the heating water gets. I have not seen the conventional on/off type of heating in Finland either in houses or apartment blocks. Apartment blocks are normally connected to district heating (normally from CHP) with some machinery in the basement serving all apartments and the heating cost is charged per square metre of apartment - it's not related to how much you use. All the apartments have similar windows/walls so nobody considers the need for individual charging.

Richard Bevan

I'm all onboard for requiring heat recover ventilators, but I don't think they're going to solve the humidity issues many of us in the US experience. Ambient humidity is often 70% or greater where I live in the summer, and the Midwest is certainly not as bad is it can get. A cool space like a basement, then, becomes damp unless you can actively get rid of this moisture. I run my dehumidifier less for comfort and more to prevent damage to the structure. Rolling blackouts have been a thing for a very long time here, but it's not *everywhere.* For example I can't think of a time they've ever been needed where I live. But out West they often are. Also - you do have thermostats, right? You have heating systems? Heat is being lost. Insulation doesn't stop that from happening, it just slows it down. Our homes are insulated, too. I wouldn't be able to use the cooling system the way I do if they weren't. And I'm sure your heating systems come on periodically to fight that heat loss. If you don't use programmable thermostats, you end up using heat energy when nobody is home because the heating system works equally as much as it does when occupied. That's the point of programmable thermostats. If you have an entirely renewable energy source and/or it's really cheap to use, then sure - just leave it set to whatever when you're not home. But many people are interested in reducing their cost for heating, so they reduce the temperature when nobody's at home. My point is, the US has a lot of things we should be doing better. But things are more complex than you're imagining them to be.

Technology Connections

I'm a brit living in Finland and I think locals here would have trouble understanding a lot of the things mentioned in this video. "rolling blackouts" - perhaps in South Africa but it's hard to believe they happen in a country like the USA - what are you doing with your grid? (and Texas deserves all it gets for not connecting to any out of state grids). "programmable/smart thermostats" - nobody has them in Finland, our houses are insulated so the heat isn't lost.. even people who go out to work during the day have the house at the same temperature all day and night. And the need for the dehumidifer - it points out to the lack of ventilation in the house and by law all new houses here must have a heat recovery ventilation system.

Richard Bevan

I respect people who might be leery of the system infrastructure being insecure or whatever, so if that was why you didn't want to sign up for it I could understand (though, for what it's worth, I myself find concerns around that to be... wildly overblown. Nobody who's anti-smart home, for example, seems interested in asking the folks like me who have had literally no issues with my smart thermostat or switches.) The comment was more about the physical reality of having the temperature modulated somewhat. I didn't go this far in the script, but I think expecting that we can have absolute control over the temperature of our living environment is a bit much, and a large part of why we're in this mess.

Technology Connections

I still think we could be pretty good friends despite the fact that I'm not likely to ever sign on to a scheme like this. I've long been interested in phase-change materials for heat / cool storage. They work just like those ice systems you mentioned, except with a much higher energy density, and subsequent reduction in the size of the tank needed.

Circuitmike

"A smart way to a cool home (and a cool use of a smart home)"

Armin von Werner

I wish we had hourly pricing that I could take advantage of... but since the utility in this area is a consistent ~$0.12 per KWh, not ~$0.05 per KWh, I don't plan to connect my house to the grid until I buy an electric vehicle. (At that point, okay, fine, it's still cheaper than buying gasoline... and I'm not sure my 1 acre lawn has enough room for enough PV panels to charge an EV as much as I drive daily... :/ )

I wish hourly pricing was a thing around here because I would definitely sign up for it considering how well defined and pretty much unchanged the peak demand periods are.

Guy Mendes

In Switzerland, many villages have a system for the washing machine and tumbler, that switch off the power over noon, to relieve the load when everybody is cooking. But it is disappearing, since many people anyway eat at work and the grids have gotten better since... I'm a bit jealous about hearing your figures for heating up during the day, goes much faster here, in spite of double glassed windows and isolation. Still an old building from 1930, and unfortunately some trees around the house removed...

MrHammond

Great video. I live in the UK where probably only 1% of residential homes have aircon. We just have to sweat it out during periods of hot weather. But I suppose at least we never have to worry about power cuts during the summer months. 😊

IDK if I'm right about English, but I always thought a battery is a collection of cells, while your house is an accumulator. At least that's the connotation in my language. And yes, as an European, we've always had dual electricity billing rates, it's much cheaper between 10pm and 6am, so we run our water heaters during the night and also those accumulating space heaters - basically a pile of bricks with a heater element inside. These tend to disappear with the spread of aircons lately though as we're progressing on thermal efficiency of new buildings. We're also retrofitting isolation panels on old communist blocks of flats.

Ognyan Manchev

Awesome video, and I think a timely point to be making. Hopefully the video does well when you release it! Ewen

Ewen McNeill

Great video. I like it. I'm also glad you pointed out the storage thermal mass at the end - I was going to leave a comment here to that effect, and I'm glad you covered it. I have wondered why more people where I live in the south don't do that, especially cooling or freezing water and then releasing that chill over the course of the warmest part of the day. -- but then again there's still a lot of resistance to solar panels in the south and I don't get that either.

John Dye

It was getting set by the utility. That's the point.

John Dye

Crazy you made this. I just got the samsung dryer, rheem water heater, and pioneer inverter mini split because I didn't realize such things existed until your heat pump video. I expect them all to pay for themselves in under two years. Ever since, I've been programming my nest to come on to sub cool the house and just as I'm noticing how much money I'm saving with my emporia vue, you post this video basically rationalizing everything I was doing. PREACH. Also as far as energy batteries go, We gotta talk about swimming pools. I mean talk about latent heat and heat capacity! Just the addition of another heat exchanger could give you free hot tub if you have the kind that is plumbed into an in-ground pool. I've thought about getting a replacement heat exchanger for a heat pump pool heater and rerouting the compressor from my 5 ton ac through it.

Kent Scipione

Very entertaining and informative, as usual. The problem is that, like when it comes to promoting solar and wind power, too many people will cry, "But that hard! It's too hard! It's too hard to switch and convince and sustain...and turn our allegiances from our oil overlords..." And then will come the argument of should it be voluntary or government (local or otherwise) mandated. Solutions are there, but will we even bother? I'm way too pessimistic to believe we will.

Arthur Robillard

I think that there's good potential for this on the commercial side, but I don't know if it's necessarily a better fit. For offices maybe, but there are many different kinds of commercial out there. One thing I didn't touch on but sort of implied is that I almost think adoption of programmable thermostats has made things much harder as that's become more common. Having some ability to say "these people normally get home around 5:30 PM and want heating / cooling" leads to the ability to pre-heat and pre-cool more flexibly. But bottom line I think the idea should be implemented wherever it can work. Commercial spaces might want to invest in infra like ice storage AC, but on the residential side I think insulation improvements are where we ought to put our efforts in the immediate term

Technology Connections

It really bothers me that the article complaining about smart thermostats raising the temperature at night was showing a Nest in heating mode set to 76. Why on earth is anyone setting their heat that high?

Lucas

Did you see the This Old House segment where they talk about this? They visit a house in Pickens, SC that uses a chiller to take heat and dump it into a tank (a battery!) for future use. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3Em64OBGqI

Jason Wellband

We pay 15.6 cents / kwh for electricity in Tucson. If you are getting it for 7 cents that's a bargain. My thermostat is set at 83F / 28C. Last months bill was $285. 10 consecutive days at or above 110F / 43C.

It feels like the greater benefit, and likelier uptake, would be managing this with businesses and commercial/industrial usage, rather than residential with the public. Thoughts?

Lookin' so fly(wheel)

Your mention of "Economy 7" reminded me of this fun advert from the early 80s. The jingle is still in my head to this day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7wZSiiSkmo

Big Car

The hair is looking good.

Benjamin A.

Luckily, here in the UK (at least where I am) we don't really need heating or cooling most of the year. Once it hits March I barely put the heating on unless it's a particularly chilly night. And, bar the odd few days where it gets into the high 20cs (like it is right now), we really don't need AC. It's only when it gets to late October early November that it starts getting cold enough to really warrant putting the heating on for any significant length of time. Although, even in my house that was built in around 1901, it only needs to be on for maybe an hour before it's too warm. The perfectly average weather is the reason I would never move from the UK.

Anywhere that nighttime temperatures drop into the 60s or below all summer long, like here in Colorado, any well-insulated (and sealed) houses in most of the state shouldn't need AC at all! It's enough to just open your windows at night and close them in the morning, complete with a box fan or whole-house fan for some extra oomph, maybe set on a timer to turn off after morning temperatures rise again. To improve indoor air quality during times of smoke/pollution, homeowners could instead install a filtered ventilator. Trying to get my neighbors to even try this strategy out has been much harder than keeping my house cool. THANK YOU for providing a video I can share to help explain this effect! Can't wait til it goes live! On another note - I'm no expert, but I believe your AC doesn't have to work nearly as hard to pump heat outside when the outdoor temperature is cooler, and the thermal difference between the condenser coils and the outside air is much greater. So you're probably saving some energy on that front as well!

The heat wave in the PNW - it couldn't defeat the Pacific Ocean. Only literally on the beach was relief to be found, in the form of 80f and 20 mph winds. The Columbia River watershed stretches across 5 western states, gathering all water between the Cascades and the Rockies north of the Colorado. The numerous reservoir dams are a type of pumped storage, where water evaporation and precipitation are the pumping mechanism. The system *does* have a few actual pumped storage reservoirs, like Banks Lake. And this Department of (water) Reclamation system's primary goal is to flood a series of canals that feed water through the arid plains in the center of the state. The canals feed thousands of farms and turn the rolling plains of the Columbia Basin into an incredibly productive farming region. This was done by flooding the upper basin of the Grand Coulee, an ancient riverbed where the Columbia once flooded. Dry Falls are deeper than Niagra. Selling the electricity from the dams was pitched as a way to pay for the project, but definitely helped to electrify the West and still powers a significant number of homes today. Wind is just starting to replace hydro, and other WA State rivers are getting undammed and restored to their original habitats. Salmon can't pass through many of the dams, including the Grand Coulee Dam, meaning tribes can't perform ancient ceremonies. But other dams let salmon and other fish all the way into Idaho.

Stephen Gillie