So…geothermal? I wish this was possible too but I don’t see how it will work scientifically. Water is one of the chemicals that have one of the highest thermal mass/specific heat (maybe 1/3 of salt hydrates). Even then, you have to bury a crapton of water underground. This design mentioned in the article is more for short term, like 12 hours storage (since they’re accommodating for solar in nighttime)

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Neywiny a day ago | parent | next [-]

Is geothermal not the opposite of that? My understanding was that the geothermal MO is that there's virtually infinite thermal mass in the earth so it won't heat/cool, not that you heat/cool your local chunk

	▲	syntaxing a day ago \| parent [-]
		To a certain extent, yes. The reason why the water is there is because the thermal flux of the ground is low, so the large mass of water provides a strong buffer. But you can’t cheap physics. You would need a crap ton of salt hydrate to accommodate a whole season of heat needs, even if you don’t factor in thermal loss from the container.

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rekabis 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Geothermal needs either a horrifically expensive vertical bore hole going down a few hundred metres, or a good acre of land for laid-down piping. I have neither the money nor the horizontal space. So I am thinking something compact that needs to go only about 6-10m vertically into the ground (so I can hide it fully underground with about a metre of soil on top), and take up the horizontal space of 4 parked cars. I have more than enough room and cash to have that cube of space dug out.

And being on an alluvial plain, if I filter out all the rocks larger than a pea, a good 90+% of what is dug out can immediately be trucked away.