TMP: Storing ice for the better part of the year is not easy. Much more efficient would be an insulated tank holding chilled water. During the day it would absorb heat from the house, then it could be cooled at night, either by a very large heat exchanger, or by a heat pump. This would pretty much be an air conditioner, but with a 12-hour delay. Shedding the heat at night would significantly raise the CoP.
This same system could be used in the winter to store daytime heat/sunshine until the night.
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Originally Posted by RobertSmalls
I may as well mention that my grandfather has a house on Ice House Bay in Pennsylvania. When he was young (1930's), there was a company that would cut ice, store it all year in a very large shed insulated with 2' thick of sawdust, and ship it 90 mi south to Pittsburgh year round. His deed says that he owns the land, but not the rights to the ice that forms on it.
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This reminds me of what I read on a recent trip to Slovenia. In the village of Škocjan (I highly recommend visiting the
Škocjan Caves) the water that froze in local ponds would be cut up and stored underground, each block wrapped in leaves, then covered with a layer of leaves 1 meter thick, and later sold to butchers and dairy shops in Trieste in the summer.
EDIT: I found some
info on that:
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Equally special is the ice pit near the house Kačiče No 27 which was built around 1860 and is almost entirely dug into a Karst sinkhole. Known as the ice factory, it is the largest ice pit in the area. It is 19 metres deep, cylinder-shaped with a diameter of 17 metres and with a central 32-metre high column that served as support for the cone-shaped roof. The roof was first thatched with straw and later covered with red tiles ("korci"). A wooden staircase led inside. In the courtyard of his house, the owner Mušič from Trieste kept a large pair of scales for wagons containing ice that he also bought from private farmers. After his death in 1906, the ice pit ceased to operate and started to gradually deteriorate. We could say that this coincides with the appearance of first cold-storage plants at the end of the 19th century.
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