[osolemio]

I hope to (finally) be online during this fall (of 2014).

For my project, I have been waiting for 4+ years now, to get some special hybrid thermal-electric solar panels from solarus.se - and it seems I will get them within a few months, so at the moment, installation is scheduled for September.

There are massive unused potential in solar energy, especially thermal, one "just" has to solve the supply and demand time offset, ie transfer the heat over time with proper solutions.

One of the most critical areas is obviously storage, but also the area (and mass) of heating in a building. The larger the area, the lower temperature you need to heat to, and the larger the mass, the longer it will last (along with a good insulation). For that reason, I would like to experiment with extending underfloor heating to walls, ceilings and any other significant area and thermal mass of a house. The lower the temperature of the receiving heat storage, the more you can extract from a solar panel (without using a heat pump). Imagine an extreme situation of one single radiator heating an entire building, versus all surfaces being heated. And if you can control the dew point of incoming air, it would even work in the summer (be sure the surfaces in the house don't fall to get too close to the dew point - ideally by keeping the dew point low).

Low dew point / relative humidity is another overlooked and very important parameter, both for comfort as well as building preservation.

I also find it vital to look at air quality for ventilation (ie temperature and humidity), rather than just volume pr hour. What is the point of requiring a certain amount of air shifted pr hour, if the humidity of that air is quite high? I'd rather have a slow air change, and then control the temperature and humidity of that air is very precise. I am sitting in a hotel room right now, where the air con has an "auto" setting only, so I'm sitting in a constant draught unless I turn the entire A/C off.

To me, the seasonal heat storage is a bit like when you are hot or cold (your body). Some times you work hard physically, it's hot and humid, and you need to get rid of heat to maintain your body temperature. Other times, it's colder, and you have the opposite problem. It's not a question of heating and cooling as much as it is of maintaining a constant temperature. A bit of a mindset thing - but yes, we are not heating or cooling our homes, ideally, we are keeping the temperature constant by offsetting heat loss or gain.

Hence, it is so obvious that if we can keep heat when it's warm, and get it back when it's cold - then we can have both "cooling" and "heating" by using the heat storage as a "savings account"

More of all of that later - it will make a lot more sense when I can actually document with data that it works.