Heating buildings with ice

by: Mirjam Visser, 2014-06-12 13:14:06 UTC
Sustainability Aspects: Energy collected from the sun, wind and earth is stored in ice. Building heating cost, and CO2 emissions, are reduced with 50% and the cost and emissions for cooling in the summer are near zero.

Solarice system

Solareis (solar-ice in english) is a heating/cooling system technology that combines five renewable energy sources; sun, air, earth warmth, water and ice.

How does it work? Underneath the building a hugh vat of water/ice is build which stores the solar energy from the panels on the roof. During phase changes from water to ice energy is released. 126 Liter water changing in ice is equivalent to one liter of heating-oil. Advantage of ice over water is that the solar-ice system can be renewed and oil not. The trick lies in the fact that much more energy is needed to change a material’s phase (in this case from solid to liquid, or the other way around) than in heating or cooling a material within the boundaries of one phase.It takes as much energy to melt one liter of ice (at a temperature of just below freezing) into water (at a temperature of just above freezing) as it does to heat a liter of water from just above freezing to 80°C.

It is this latent heat that is used to warm the building very gradually during the colder season. In this manner, one m3 of ice stores about as much potential heating energy as 10 m3 of natural gas. The system uses solar power during the autumn to add energy to the system. This means that greenhouse gases are reduced to an absolute minimum.
During the summer, cool water can be pumped though the floor heating or used within passive systems to cool the inner climate

Designer: Isocal
Manufacturer: Isocal
Category: Heating and cooling buildings
Websites: www.solareis.de

Images

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Solarice system
Ac0fc390-d461-0131-9bf7-4040823e9e3d
Solarice system
by Isocal

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