this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Do It Yourself
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I'll preface with my qualifications, so if a more qualified person comes along you can disregard me. I'm an engineer who has taken a few thermodynamics courses and has worked as an engineer for a hvac manufacturing plant. I've never done anything strictly related to geothermal, but I've read a decent bit about it (and watched Technology Connections' video on the subject, it's a good entry point)
You may want to call up a company who does geothermal cooling and see what options you have, they've gotten pretty creative on how to bury the cooling lines. (See the video mentioned before)
Going the route of just sticking a large water tank underground probably won't do a ton. I expect that you will have a poor surface to volume ratio, which means poor heat transfer, which means you'll saturate your thermal mass fairly quickly. What this may allow you to do is run your HVAC system during the night/morning when it's much more efficient, and 'charge' your thermal mass for the hottest part of the day.
Assuming you use 300kg of water in a day, and you can get a 10°C delta, my very rough back of the napkin math says you're only going to have about 3 kWh of cooling from just the cold water, which is a decent bit, but it's not a ton. Best case scenario you cut your cooling needs by around 10-20%.
I'm too lazy to do the math of the heat exhange with the ground, but my bet would be you're better off spending any money you have set aside for this on better insulation techniques and/or a proper geothermal cooling system.
I do like your creative idea though
Thanks, hoping that your back of the napkin math is in the correct ballpark, 10-20% lowering of cooling bills sounds very lucrative to me.
And I owe a clarification after reading your analysis since I'm not hoping to achieve any geothermal gains by heat transfer between water tank and ground. I'm assuming that the water will heat up as it cools the room down. But since fresh water is supplied periodically and this fresh water is relatively cool, it will keep the cooling cycle running. I will try to build the tank in shade and isolated from direct heat of the sun as far as possible.