The ancients (i.e., people before 1950) were known to run ice houses. A man would cut ice from a winter pond and store it in an insulated icehouse. A man would cut the ice and bring it for cooling use in your home.

Nowadays, we cool our foods with electricity, but what of the ice that is produced by winter but wasted? It behooves us to make use of it. We should cut our nearby winter ice and safe it in an insulated cabinet (large and perhaps subterranean), from which ice may be pulled when needed to cool modern-day ice boxes and to cool summer's overheated persons.
-- Vance, Feb 05 2001

Winter ice for summer cooling http://www.r1site.g...netgsa/cthsawd4.PDF
Feasible with current technology. [rmutt, Feb 05 2001, last modified Oct 04 2004]

(?) Brief history of Billingsgate http://www.raggedsc...pool/market_1.shtml
6 screens - doesn't answer Vance's question, but it's all good [thumbwax, Aug 24 2002, last modified Oct 04 2004]

Note that the amount of thermal energy represented by a ton (2000 lb.) of ice is about the same as consumed by a typical house in four days. (Most of that energy comes from the heat of fusion.)

Now, you'd end up saving more electricity than that, since the alternative (a home freezer) is by no means perfectly efficient. Nevertheless, a ton of ice is quite a bit to be storing in your basement, and delivery is likely to be more expensive than the $10 worth of electricity we're talking about.
-- egnor, Feb 05 2001


The idea is that you could store ice around your ice (that you gather yourself) in your basement icehouse. This would work for people who had ponds on their land. Snow could also be shoveled down a shoot into the basement and packed into blocks.
-- Vance, Feb 05 2001


All this talk of storing ice in the basement reminds me of when Billingsgate fish market moved from the City of London out to the East. The old building on the banks of the Thames was bought by a bank who only discovered months later that the basement leaked, letting the river in. The reason no one knew about this was because the land surrounding the building had become permafrost from all the ice and fish and refrigeration plant stored in the basement. As it thawed, it leaked...
-- hippo, Feb 05 2001


What happened then?
-- Vance, Feb 06 2001


<wonders if this churn is coincidence>
-- bristolz, Mar 31 2005


When I was kid we did not have a fridge but milk and other food were kept cool on the basement where we had a cool spring. Also on the shady side of the house we had a massive storage of ice in a sawdust bin. Ice was cut from the lake in winter. There was ice left on the end of hot Finland summer in August.
-- Pellepeloton, Sep 14 2006


Ive thought about this same idea,but i envisioned an insulated tank under ground or not with antifreeze lines coiling through it.In the winter the antifreeze circulates into the thermal storage medium (water might not be the best although i think water is one of the better choices) and in the summer the reverse.
-- pydor, Sep 15 2006


//water might not be the best choice//
not if you want to run your freezer by a simple temperature transferance though 'fridge and AC should be fine. An antifreeze compound would work but I'm a bit leery about having an entire tankful of poison in the ground.
-- FlyingToaster, Feb 08 2009


// The ancients (i.e., people before 1950) were known to run ice houses // so pretty baked then?

To turn this historical trivia into an idea, you could have some kind of huge insulated storage medium in the foundations which is linked to pipes running under your pond (or wherever). In winter, these pipes transfer the heat out of the medium into the pond. During the summer, you can have pipes running through the house to transfer heat to the storage medium.
-- marklar, Feb 09 2009


FlyingToaster, only the fluid in the lines needs to be antifreeze; the liquid in the tank could be ordinary water.

Furthermore, there are nontoxic chemicals that can be used as antifreeze.
-- goldbb, Feb 10 2009


[goldbb] I was off on one of my own ideas (cold and hot water tanks to provide total year-round cooling/heating), but if you need to get <0C (ie: for the freezer) water won't cut it, obviously.

The most common antifreezes are either poisonous or have other adverse properties.

On the other hand, ethanol's good and has many other uses :)
-- FlyingToaster, Feb 11 2009



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