"stone shed"

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We are building a house in Denmark. We have an interesting experiment ongoing in our house-project, which is as follows:

Based on the information from our Danish Architect we are inspired by the land of possibilities (once again) namely US - more specificly the Midwest of the US, since our Architect has heard about a heating-way that is used in the Midwest of the US when you are heating houses. You heat the houses in the Midwest, we were told, by filling up the basement with big stones, that are heatet during the daytime by blowing hot air down the basement, so it is possible to re-use this heat from the stones at night by blowing the heat from the stones at night back into the house. In this way it should be possible basicly to take heat up from the basement at night, so to speak.

Our Architect though that this technique was widely used in the Midwest - but he can not find any information on this from here. We do not want to make the "experiment" without any form of documentation, that this actually works, but we find the experiment exciting.

Here comes the "one million dollar question"; can anyone help us with this request for information on this way to heat houses in the US Midwest (or elsewhere in the US),

-- Ken Kastrup Nielsen (tjaereby@mail.tele.dk), January 18, 2002

Answers

Ken, this is discussed in the old answers. From the question page scroll down to the catagories named alternative energy and construction.

-- mitch hearn (moopups@citlink.net), January 18, 2002.

A friend of my husband is putting in a moble home. To help defray the heating and cooling cost he had two ditches dug about about 12 foot deep.He burried some big pipe in it. He had one end caped and on the other side he had the pipe comming up above the ground. He did this back to back so that the pipe comming up out of the ground was about 30 feet apart. He then parked his moble home on top and vented those two pipes into his home. He gets cooler air comming up them in the summer and hotter air in the winter. I don't know how much this has saved him in the long run because his moble is all elect but he seems happy with it.

-- Teresa (c3ranch@socket.net), January 19, 2002.

I have lived in the midwest USA almost all of my life, and I have never heard of this. It sounds more like a New Age technology. Carrying stones into the basement? That sounds like a lot of work.

We have always heated with gas, oil, wood and now electric. Basements in the Midwest were originally for root cellars and tornado escapes.

I am sorry I can not help you, but it sounds like your Danish architect has been misinformed or misunderstood something.

-- R. (thor610@yahoo.com), January 23, 2002.


I live in the northern USA (Minnesota), but it is considered 'midwest'. I've never heard of this either. It sounds more like something in the South West USA as a possibility?

--->Paul

-- paul (ramblerplm@hotmail.com), January 23, 2002.


Ken, old age midwesterner here.......never seen this done. I have heard of using the rock mass to store solar heat though. Read it somewhere; in fact I think in a green house article in CS Magazine some years back.

-- diane (gardiacaprines@yahoo.com), January 23, 2002.


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-- john q public (noresonce@aol.com), April 04, 2002.

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