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[Technology Connections] My water heater is cooler than yours
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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Technology
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Well, try storing heat for later use. How do you do this as a temperature battery?
An efficient device like solar panels are still much much less effective without batteries. In the same vein, producing or moving heat right now doesn't mean some other room or device needs the excess or inverse right now.
Nobody runs a dryer constantly, for example. If there's barely any heat to pull when it is needed, how do you solve for that? Generating heat goes against the goal of recycling it with a central system.
Interesting problem… how do you store energy when it comes in the form of small heat differentials? That sounds like one hell of an interesting battery.
Maybe if there was also a natural source of cold, as well as a natural source of heat. The problem might then be to store the hot/cold inside a material until they can be mixed. Then mixing in such a way that allows energy extraction?
Except you wouldn’t mix them directly. You’d instead let them try to mix thermally, while forcing the heat to travel through something that allows energy extraction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump
You can have both!
Also, see reverse flow heat exchangers
Most houses have hot water tanks
If you watch the video, you'll understand that the temperature transfer process to a hot water tank is incredibly slow. So, water tanks are not a very good battery.
I mean, unless you want to spend 12 hours trying to dry your clothes.
But that's not a technical limit, it's a cost saving engineering limit
Also you can pull heat out much faster when needed. If there's heat left when you're done you can feed it back with a heat exchanger