Re: whither the ice house?

 

So that looks like a cube of ice about 11 feet on a side, around 8800
gallons of water.

11 feet on a side doesn't sound very enormous, and 8800 gallons is a pretty
small swimming pool.  But moving 73,400 pounds by hand sounds somewhat
daunting - that would mean moving a little over 200 pounds every day for a
year.  Of course, it's not freezing cold every day of the year, so you'd
need to multiply that daily total by some factor.

I'd also guess that these figures don't take into account that in the
Philadelphia area, not every day in winter is below freezing - some of the
ice squirreled away early in winter would melt (how much depends on how well
insulated it is), so you'd probably have to move more ice than these numbers
indicate.

Too, there's no such thing as perfect insulation, and no inhabited house has
no internal heat gains.  You'd need a fudge factor that would up the total
as well.

The whole thing sounds a little dubious.  If the goal is space cooling,
maybe it would be easier/cheaper to set up a system of buried pipes that
suck in outside air, cool it underground, and vent into the house?  Or
instead of using ice, how about just using water - you'd need more, of
course, but the first leg of the summer warming cycle would be to cool the
house, then collect the warm water and store it for the winter, where the
first leg of the winter cooling cycle would be to warm the house.

  Lou wrote:

Why move it at all? Why not turn water into ice inside the ice house?
Some kind of automatic device could open doors, or circulate brine,
to 'let the cold in' whenever the outside temperature is below freezing.


So, one might figure an added fudge factor to cover unknowns and global
climate change and increase the mass of ice accordingly. If we use brine
filled loops of pipe inside the ice house then I would imagine we could
fill almost all of the volume with water/ice. An average two car garage
(24x24x12) has a volume of some 6900 f^2 so this would provide more than
five times the requirement for that Phila house.


Well, yes, of course it's dubious. Who wants to build a structure as big
or bigger than their house just to store ice throughout the year when
they can just buy an air conditioner?

Anthony

 
Good idea.


A saltwater roofpond might do that, with thermosyphoning stalagtites
freezing fresh water below.


Phila has about 340 "freezing degree-days."

Nick

 
Maybe there's another way...

Nick