Sand Battery heater. Create free heat over 500F using solar electricity!

hey everybody it's Scott from Texas prepper projects and I've got something really fun and exciting for you today so we are going to build a sand battery and I did not come up with this idea not by a long shot I'll link up to the video below where I got this idea from um I've been doing some experiments for the last couple of days on some small scale and I'm ready to build something bigger so what is a sand battery sand battery is exactly what it sounds like you use a quantity of sand and you use the sand to hold heat now why would you do that well water obviously Taps out at 212 degrees Fahrenheit Fort Turners to steam you can heat up sand to several hundred degrees before it melts so you can hold a lot more energy in sand than you can in water and also sand is really cheap a 50 pound bag of sand is five dollars so what can you do with that heat well you can do a couple of things you can use it to hold heat and use a Thermal electric module to create electricity out of actually and in some larger scales people are testing using it for solar and wind farms instead of chemical batteries to turn into heat and then turn back into electricity at night what I'm going to use it for or attempt to use it for is as a gigantic radiant heater so we are now in January here in Texas and we got through our first big cold snap but our snowpocalypse two years ago hit in February so we're not out of the woods yet I do have a Mr Buddy Heater that runs on propane which I feel good about using indoors but there's nothing safer than a big bucket of hot sand in the bedroom or inside the house to radiate some heat so that's sort of my purpose is as a non-toxic renewable indoor heater and renewable is the key there because uh my master plan is to power this thing using my solar panels okay so how does this work so I've got a big pot of obviously filled with some sand this is you know about 10 pounds worth and buried inside of here is the heating module from a water heater they cost about ten dollars on Amazon I'll put a link to it and I've got a little wire terminal sticking out with some Anderson power poles so the water heater module is buried about an inch off the bottom this is a meat cooking thermometer which Taps out at 220 degrees and when I applied 60 volts at 4 amps to this module the bottom of the unit the bottom of this the bucket of sand got so hot that this needle wrapped around like a clock in fast forward so that's greater than 300 degrees at that point the surface temperature was about 110 degrees Fahrenheit so this whole thing was well over a hundred down to 300 towards the bottom uh and it held that heat for about four hours so this whole thing was radiating 100 some odd degrees for about four hours so let's ramp this up here in front of me I have a very large cooking pot that I got out of a junk pile I was going to use a galvanized metal trash can but you know this was free now based on my preliminary experiments I lost a lot of heat from the bottom down in the bottom is about three quarters of an inch of plaster of Paris so hopefully that ceramic will help insulate the bottom and push the heat upwards I'm going to put about an inch of sand in the bottom and then bury the temperature probe from a thermometer that I've got down in the very bottom so I can kind of keep an eye on it these came from Amazon and I know that they max out at 190 degrees because this actually errored out in my preliminary testing [Applause] foreign oh geez what so while digging out the probe the hot water probe from my test bucket it appears that in the surrounding areas next to the probe that pieces of sand got so hot that they actually fused because there's some solid chunks down inside here that's what the probe looks like so I'm going to put this about the halfway mark and keep on going foreign so I have an idea on how to create a lid for this pot so before I fill it up the rest of the way I'm going to put a rim of paper around the top to protect it now I'm going to fill it up with plaster of Paris so this now has 50 pounds of sand inside of this bucket so I'm going to put this cardboard form that I made down the bottom and fill up the top with plaster of Paris you know about an inch or so and make me a little lid foreign hmm so here's the inside and I have the wires taped down here's my concrete cardboard form Which is far too big foreign [Applause] right smack in the middle I'm going to put a hole and stick a soda straw in so that way I can put a temperature probe all the way through and actually get down into the sand there's my soda straw hmm I think I'm just going to go for it I think I'm just going to pour the uh the plaster in and then just sort of bang the sides and see if I can get it to break loose so uh let's see what happens okay let's make some blast repairs [Applause] since I've already done this once I know about what it's going to take uh Pro tip plaster Paris is significantly cheaper at Hobby Lobby than it is on Amazon this is an eight pound bag with eight dollars and I'm gonna use up every bit of it foreign [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] foreign so just for reference the bottom layer which is about three quarters of an inch is four of these cups and two cups of water I've only got enough left to do uh one badge which is two of these and one cup of water and that was eight pounds foreign so we've got the power the power wire for the thermocouple or the uh the heat module my thermometer over here I got a straw for my thumb uh other temperature probe and my little handles and let's Frost the tape foreign the shake method worked really well um this batch isn't as watery as the batch from yesterday but uh just giving this a little Shake helped it all kind of settle out so we've got at least some layer of coverage now when I did this yesterday it took about an hour for it to reach any sort of solidity but you're not supposed to touch it for 24 hours oh it's two o'clock now we'll come back in two hours and see what I did foreign so we got it going the uh plaster Paris has dried I have got 60 volts at three and four amps so 240 Watts going into this and in 15 minutes the bottom has gone up four degrees and the top is at 102 and climbing This Is My Data Logger so we'll be able to track it uh every five minutes here's my meat thermometer [Applause] you know which one I trust more but uh we'll be back it's now 5 15. we've been running for an hour and 15 minutes and the base is at 165 degrees and the top is at 514. well I can feel heat on the bottom now still at 240 Watts unbelievable it is seven o'clock this has been running since 4 30. the thermometer that is down buried at the base of the unit has maxed out my little cheap thermometer so it's greater than 200 degrees my brand new 500 degree meat thermometer maxes out when I stick it inside this hole to hit the sand so the sand at the top is greater than 500 Degrees according to my laser thermometer here in the center the plaster of Paris is 120 degrees on The Middle and 75 80 along the outside the side of the pot is now functionally warm like if you touch it there we go there's a warm spot about 90 degrees I am still holding UH 60 volts at 4 amps 240 Watts which is easily achievable yeah when I put my hand here it it is warm I can feel Heat and that's only two and a half hours in I've got two and a half hours to go so this is rocking and rolling this is really incredible so we'll check back in uh in another hour or so and see where we're at hey everyone it's the next day and I thought I would recap on what we did and what we learned so where we left off uh it had been running for a couple hours I never did follow up on it I didn't make a follow-up video because the temperature hadn't really stabilized and was getting late so what did we do so I took a pot I'll put a layer of ceramic down in the bottom plaster of Paris put 50 pounds of sand in the Middle with a hot water heater element in the middle and gave it 60 volts at 4 amps now those numbers are important because as you saw earlier in the video I have two 35 volt residential solar panels and I got off of Craigslist for about 100 bucks a piece so if I put those in series that's about 70 volts so for 200 I can generate 70 volts at six or seven amps that means I can run this whole thing on solar fairly inexpensively in the backyard and generate an insane amount of heat how much heat well um my equipment died um my indoor outdoor thermometer in the bottom of the bucket was well over 200 degrees because that's where the thermometer stops the top layer of sand was over 500 degrees because that's where my meat thermometer stops the plaster of Paris was uh between 100 and 130 around the top the lid that I made and the sides were around 90-ish degrees I don't know enough about thermodynamics to know if I would have been better off pulling the plaster of Paris lid off and letting the heat completely radiate out of the sand or cutting a little slit I'm sure that a mechanical engineer will help me with the thermodynamics of all of this but the power requirements and the time is really interesting as I said I was going to run this on the solar if this thing heated up in three hours and that's a really important number because most places in North America get between four to five hours of direct sunlight so since I said I was going to talk about solar in Texas we get five hours of sunlight and I have my two solar panels that means in during the day when I have five hours of direct sun I can get this bucket of sand up to several hundred degrees and then bring it inside at night and let it slowly radiate that heat out at night so what are the conclusions here this is a fun experiment you know I've been doing some small scale stuff over the last a couple of days trying to kind of and get my head around this and and make the build a little better it's a really interesting idea um and as I mentioned in the very beginning of the video I was going to try to use this to replace my Mr Buddy Heater I think where this is going to have its most benefit would be inside what's called a micro climate which is basically a tent inside your house where you're trying to trap the body heat of your family or your pets into a smaller area because the outside of the pot never got over a hundred ish you know it's not hot enough to burn yourself on although I did actually burn my fingers on the metal of the temperature probe that I pulled out of that little hole I made in the plastic pairs I actually burnt my fingers on it and took my fingerprints off it was that hot but the body got to around 100 or so so I think this would be a really good way to like slowly radiate out some heat in a and a method that is safe and doesn't produce CO2 doesn't use fuel you know your cost you know a Buddy Heater is about a hundred dollars and the tanks are about five or ten dollars a piece so let's say you're in it for 150 bucks for this you know a small trash can is about twenty dollars uh 50 pounds of sand was five dollars the temperature probe was about 10 bucks the plaster of Paris was about eight dollars and then the two solar panels maybe two hundred so you may be able to you know I want to say replace a Mr Buddy Heater but certainly supplement it for a couple hundred bucks not worry about gas not worry about storing chemicals not worry about CO2 or anything like that and have a great big thermal mask that is uh renewable and and solar powered now if you don't have sunlight because your winter storm is so bad you could feed this with any other sort of electricity um you know I've been doing this in my garage off of a big power supply with a voltage Step Up adapter you know you could feed this with 110 if you had a generator that's what it's designed for uh at 110 volts at 1100 Watts I think you might hit a point where you'd have some component failure I would probably beef up the wire size because as your voltage goes up your current goes up so you're going to be pulling 11 amps at 110 volts so that's residential power level so I would increase the wire size I can't imagine getting that whole bucket from top to bottom up to a couple of hundred degrees that's almost scary um you know getting a thing up to 100 around the outside was still pretty impressive and I actually really liked the handles on the side you know that that cauldron is made for you know Boiling Shrimp or something like that so it was a it was a good vessel and I think a stronger vessel because it's one solid piece than the 20 galvanized trash can from Walmart that I was originally going to use that may eventually rust out across the bottom something like that I also have uh put it on some pieces of hard pink foam insulation to get it up off the ground but in my preliminary testing I learned that that pink styrofoam insulation melts at 300 degrees um will collapse like Styrofoam which is one of the reasons why I decided to insulate the bottom so I took my thermometer and test the shot the bottom the very bottom where the plaster was didn't get that hot so I'm not overly worried about like melting my carpet in my house or melting the bottom of a tent in my house but I would still put it on something I would still put it up on some two by fours and just don't have it directly touch anything so this is a really uh was a fun experiment and if you have any suggestions about how to maybe make this better or more efficient I'd love to hear it I have some ideas about taking the plaster of Paris off and putting like aluminum vent fan aluminum fins in it like a heat like an actual heatsink from a CPU to see if I get the heat to radiate outwards a little bit better so if we have another cold snap here in Texas I may do a REV too so uh send me your thoughts in your comments down below and we'll see you on the next project if you're enjoying this content please give me a thumbs up a like and a subscribe uh building a channel base is really important to YouTubers it also helps motivate us to keep making content we love seeing those tick marks go up so uh if you enjoyed this and found this fun make sure you give me a like and a subscribe and we'll see you on the next project all right thanks everybody

Channel: Texas Prepper Projects

Views: 279,370

Keywords: sand battery

Id: sURBoBqwhT4

Length: 23min 49sec (1429 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 01 2023