132: In Hot Water – Phase Change Materials

On today’s episode of still to be determined, we’re gonna be talking about bathing indirectly. we’re gonna be talking about hot water heaters. That’s right. Be talking about Matt’s most recent episode. You’ve never seen a water heater like this from August 23rd, 2002. But who is this Matt that I’m talking about and who am I.

Well, I’m a writer. I write some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids. And I’m Matt, Ferrell’s older brother, which makes me the older brother of undecided with Matt Ferrell of course is the affor mentioned, Matt Ferrell, Matt Ferrell. How

are you today? I’m doing pretty well. It’s been a good weekend. How about yourself?

I wish I could say the same. It’s been a extremely hot, extremely muggy weekend here in New York city, which means that it has been extremely hot and extremely muggy here in New York city. So, but other than that, I don’t have much to complain about. And as usual I’m gonna invite people right now to jump in the comments.

To prove to you that we actually read the comments. I wanna share some comments from a previous episode. This is from our episode on recycling solar panels. And there were these thoughts from some of our listeners slash viewers. This one from Bradford Smith who wrote this isn’t really about solar panels at all.

Can you do a follow up on gravity batteries? I wanna keep up on them, but the coverage is crap. Brad getting right to the point. He doesn’t like crap coverage. Get to the gravity batteries. He’s cut. You did have a gravity. You did have a gravity battery battery episode that we talked about. Um, it feels like maybe six, eight months ago now.

And it was a while back. Yeah. Yeah. So that may be one to revisit along with some of the other slightly more esoteric battery storage. Like I think of the fly wheels and stuff like that, that you talked about. Maybe there will be an opportunity for us to revisit some of those in the. I definitely have those

kind of topics on my list.

So yes,

the results. So this word of warning from reckless, who wrote in response to our talking about corporate responsibility for their products, and one of us mentioned apple. Now has a process for recycling phones, which effectively is the robots taking them apart. Mm-hmm and reckless wrote knowing Apple’s corporate policies.

I highly recommend you check the veracity of the robots, taking them apart, climb nine times out of 10, their quote. We don’t want you to just throw this product away next year, quote claim is total bullshit. So reckless doesn’t believe what our corporate overloads are telling us. I think it’s a, uh, this may, this may fall into the category of, um, one’s bitten twice shy.

I know that corporations tend to make claims that. later on will turn out to be bullshit. I don’t know, in this case that apples is, but I it’s not, I would every year, the better side.

Yeah. Every year they’re releasing information on some of the recycling programs and how they’re doing. So it’s like, they’re actually being fairly forthright about what they’re proposing and what they’re trying to do.

Other companies he’s absolutely right. Not so much. So it’s, you do have to kind of hold corporations feet to the.

And it kind of goes hand in hand with things we’ve talked about previously where packaging will broadcast such. And so is yeah. You know, a brand new thing or the use of buzzwords as a brand name in order to move a product, just because something says carbon fiber doesn’t mean carbon fiber’s anywhere near it, that kind of thing.

Yep. So it’s, I mean, it really, all these. Corporations. They’re not all created equally and they’re not all behaving equally. And that’s part of the difficulty and that’s where regulation really has to come into play. Mm-hmm agree. So, as I mentioned before, we’re gonna be talking about Matt’s most recent episode, which is about water heaters.

And this is a mode of water heater. That almost seems like it’s. micro version of some larger scale heating technologies. You’ve talked about in the past where it’s been, okay, you lay these massive pipes underground, a certain depth, and then the water, as it cycles through gathers the ambient heat from the soil and then brings it back.

Everything stays even because of just the heat that is retained within. The soil. Yep. This almost feels like it’s a microcosm of that same concept, but using chemicals and reactive properties of actually transitioning from state to state, do I have it pretty much correct? Yeah,

you do. I mean, this, this has a lot in common with that, um, molecule, we talked about a while back with storing the solar energy and the cha shape changing molecule.

It’s, it’s somewhat similar to that. It’s different, but it’s somewhat similar to the fact that you’re storing heat and then recapturing that heat from, uh, a phase change. Mm-hmm , uh, it’s, it’s similar to a video that’s coming out this coming week about a sand battery. It’s something very similar where you’re the way we store heat is very important.

And that’s why I’ve kind of gone down this rabbit hole. All these different technologies that are doing it. What’s available. What’s coming. And this one, I just found fascinating that this it’s it. Especially with the wa water heater, battery aspect of it. It’s like, I’ve never seen anything like this.

Usually you hear about tankless water heaters, which are natural gas that heat the water at the moment of use. And then there’s, of course we’re all familiar with, which is the gigantic tanks of water that you’re keeping hot. This was something brand new to me. And I thought it would be, uh, interesting to a lot of people.

You mentioned tankless water heaters. My only experience with. Was the tankless water heaters when our family, when, I mean, this is now decades ago. Yes. A long time ago. I was in fifth grade. So this is in the eighties and, uh, the 1980s, not the 1880s. For any of our smart Alki listeners or reviewers, and our family was lucky enough to go on a family trip with our father who was going to be taking a class.

He was a professor and he was taking a class over to England to study for about six weeks. And we got the opportunity as a family to go over with him and spent about a month there. Yep. And. I remember we had tankless water heaters in the showers. Yes. And this was in January and it did not work well it did not work well.

And England at that point was going through. A cold wave. Like they had an experience in hundreds of years. So temperatures were below freezing. And I remember the tank of the toilet froze and broke. Yep. The toilet. Yep. And the tankless water heaters, which were effectively little tiny kerosene burners on the wall.

Um, Not very good, not very good. Your showers were brief and chilly and not that enjoyable. Luke warm at best. Luke warm at best. So here is now a new model of water heater. How are , how are we not dealing with the same issue? How is this heating up water to a level that can be used for bathing? And you mentioned in your video, in your video, you talk about like certain people using it for baths.

I would expect that those weren’t necessarily baths, but showering. I just made an assumption there on my own, but. How much water can be heated. And at what rate to be able to use, like running a shower for a five minute period or running a shower indefinitely, what are we looking at here?

Well, it’s, it’s to kind of talk about the ones that we experienced when we were kids that was like the efficiency of like holding and open, like a biting, a match and holding an under, like a gallon of water and expecting it to heat up.

Yes. It was not a, those were not very good. yeah, they’ve come a long way since then. And the tankless water heaters you can get today that are like natural. It’s pumping out thousands of BTUs and it super heats that water like really fast. So they’re really, they’re excellent today. not the ones we experience as kids very different this, um, system it’s, it’s a battery, so it basically needs to be recharge than it discharges.

So it doesn’t provide, we’re like a NA where a tankless water here off of natural gas can theoretically provide a never ending stream of hot water. This does not do that because at some point. It’s going to suck all the heat out of that material, and then it’s gonna be cold again. So it, it needs to charge itself up and discharge and the equivalent, like what we were finding in the, in the research, when we pull it together was like, imagine you have a 40 or 50 gallon, hot water tank.

You can, these systems come in different sizes for something very similar. It would be the equivalent of having like a 40 gallons or 50 gallons with 60 gallons of water in when it’s charged up completely before as it discharges. So. It’s very capable of providing all that hot water that you need, but it will run out eventually.

And then it needs to be charged back up again.

It’s interesting as you talk about this and the, the charge discharge, where the heat is coming from, where the heat is going to, I recently have had the experience of your videos. Having opened my eyes to what is actually going on when I put ice in a. . Yeah, because there is like, we have this and maybe it’s because it’s sensory and it’s misunderstanding what is actually happening, where you take something that’s warm and you put ice in it and you think, oh, the ice is cooling.

The liquid. That’s not what’s happening. That is not, that’s not what’s happening. The ice is melting. And the overall temperature of the thing is dropping because the average temperature is now combining the mul, the melting ice into the beverage. Correct. So the same thing is happening within the confines of this water heater, where you’ve got the, the super charging of a material, which puts it into one state.

The water is in these tubes that go through that material, and then there’s sucking the heat out of that material, which is then heating, heating the tube. Yep. And it’s, it’s, it’s interesting that it’s such a simple. And that’s what made this comment from Alec Miller jump, jump out at me, which Alex shared, he’s been using a PCM quote, chill vest for years.

It has large packs of a gel that solidifies at 57 degrees Fahrenheit. So I store it in the freezer. And wear it when I’m doing yard work on a hot day, it’s not exactly a still suit from dune great reference by the way. But it definitely makes me more comfortable and productive. I thought that that was, I mean, these are things that we have hand warmers.

That’ll gel pack you snap. Yep. And you just put it in your pocket, like, like all of these things are so simple that somehow it feels like we have missed them. in our daily usage in the way, like the materials going into the water heater that, that you shared in your video. Mm-hmm, how actually new is this stuff.

It’s not, that’s, what’s amazing to me. Like this is like, these are theoretically somebody, how long ago could have said what if I took this material and I did this thing. Well, here’s here’s, here’s the

thing that I think might pull your mind a little bit. It blew my mind. Cause I did not know this. Even when we pulled this video together, I shared an early cut of this video with a couple of my friends who are also YouTubers.

One of his, um, his name is Alex. He runs the channel. Ticker simply you he’s an actual MIT rocket scientist. The, the guy worked on rockets, he said to me, oh man, this is so cool. PCMs have been used for decades in space. He. One of the things that you’re always having to engineer around for launching satellites and rockets into the space is how much weight is the PCM gonna take up?

It’s like, it’s like, oh, we always, we have to re-engineer this because the PCMs gonna weigh X amount of weight, we have to account for that. And we have to design it around the PCM because PCMs are just commonplace in, in space. Part of the reason I think we haven’t seen it around that much in daily life is cuz it was very expensive and it took a while for it to kind of trickle down.

Like you’re talking about the hand warmers and things like that. It’s like. Those are very simple applications of this yeah. For consumers. And now we’re starting to hit the point where it looks like we’re kind of hitting that tipping point where in building materials, like the insulation and these water heaters, it feels like we’re finally hitting that tipping point where PCMs are now, so cost effective or getting close to that tipping point where it actually is cost competitive with existing technologies.

And that’s. The magic sauce actually happens. So from a consumer point of view from you and me, it’s like, this seems like completely radical new stuff. And it’s like, no, this has been around for decades. This is a commonplace technology that is pretty well known. It just hasn’t been able to be applied in ways that we would’ve had experience with because of costs.

That’s interesting. I wonder in what capacity it’s used in. Space exploration. Is it from solar heat and converting it in some way that then stores it for the moments when some part of the spacecraft is away from the sun? Yep.

It’s, it’s basically just managing that heat from the, the sun, the internal components.

It’s helping to make sure that the temperatures are well maintained so that like the computer doesn’t fry itself and to keep the components working properly. So, yeah, that’s

fascinat. Yeah. I also like this anecdotal story from Terry Ellison who wrote we’ve had two sun amps in our passive house since 2017, we just use off peak main’s power.

We just use off peak main’s power to heat these overnight and our fairly light HW users apart from energy density. The heat losses are fantastically low compared to a conventional UVC example. Our ch control system went offline while we were on holiday. Our son took four days to notice that the showers were running cold.

Nice and simple. We’ve never noticed water heating slash flow issues in nearly five years of use. I think it’s a real Testament to how the system works and the insulation that it’s operating under. And the way it’s retaining the heat, that it took somebody five days to recognize or four days to recognize that something wasn’t working.

Yeah. It gives you a sense of like what ambient heat is really retained, how it is, how it is really retained, but also this kind of test case scenario is probably coming, becoming more and more common as people are doing more and more with passive homes. And I know you’re looking into. As much of a passive home situation as you can in your new home development, are you going to be incorporating something like this in your house?

No. Part of the reason for that is the, the builder I’m working with is achieving insulation levels and things like that that are. Gonna get me to passive house level quality, a home without this material. So it’s like, it would just be an additional cost. That’s not necessary for how my house is being built.

Right. But I would be very intrigued by the, the water heater battery. There’s a complication in my setup. I would have to talk to sun amp about it, but like my setup is going to have a geothermal heating and cooling system for the air conditioning. And I’m gonna be using, what’s called the, I think it’s a de super heater that will create my hot water.

So it’s basically like the excess heat from geothermal will be siphoned off and used to help generate hot water. It’s like, I’m not sure how much benefit adding a sun amp ther amino would actually benefit. The efficiency of the entire system would it just increased costs for not that much more gain. So it’s like, I’m, I’m not exactly sure what the benefit would be in my specific setup.

Right. So I, I haven’t considered it yet, but I would be very interested to find out some of those details.

It’s another example of the right tool for the right job. You know, we don’t take these things. We shouldn’t take these things and throw every single new thing at our quote unquote problem. We really need to analyze what we’re doing and what we’re trying to achieve.

And it also might be a case wouldn’t it? Where some of this might be more beneficial depending on where. On the globe you are depending on yep. How far north or south, how close to the equator, what kinds of ambient temperatures outside? What kinds of, what kinds of terrain you’re in, how much sun you get?

What kind of wind shear, that kind of thing. All of these HVAC you have, it’s like, there’s all this kind or doesn’t need certain materials. Yep, exactly.

It’s, it’s, there’s a hundred different ways that you can achieve the same end result. you just have to choose the right path and the right tools that will get you to your specific needs and goals.

Mm-hmm it doesn’t mean that everybody should be going out and buying therm and everybody should just toss their water heaters out. It’s like, no, get the right if it’s right for you, get it. But it’s an option that you should consider and look at to see if it is the right fit for you,

which takes me to.

the last comment I wanted to share, which takes us right back around to where we started, which is Andreas Biro. Writing a low tech alternative is just having thick walls. The large thermal mass has a similar effect. And that is something you’ve talked about in some of your other videos, literally building materials sometimes.

Thickness of walls. The types of materials used in the walls. And I remember one case it was the earth and home where it was the home that included earth as one of the major components on one side of the structure, building into a set effectively, a hillside, which provides you with all of that insulation naturally, without having to do anything, to provide this kind of insulation S.

Yeah, you’re using the mass of the earth to help achieve the efficiency that you’re looking for. And to tie back to my home that I’m building the walls are very thick. That’s part of the reason it’s so efficient is like, it’s not like a six inch stud wall. It’s a 10 inch stud wall. So it’s like, they’re much thicker than a typical house wall mm-hmm , which is why they’re so efficient.

I also think it’s interesting that since it’s your house, it has to be called a stud wall. Who the listeners, what do you think about using phase change materials in your homes? Is it something you try? Is it something you’ve done? Let us know in the comments, you can find the contact information in the podcast description, or here on YouTube, you can just drop into the comments beneath this video and weigh in there.

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