Yes Peter VanDerWal (thanks for the reply) I am aware of all that you said. I was planning on using at least 4 smooth wall tubes that are buried about 10 feet deep with a downward slope away from the house. The earth tubes will be about 100 feet long, and the soil here is almost pure clay (southern Louisiana in the Atchafalaya Basin).
A little over a year ago we had a heat source mini-split installed so we got a jump on being more efficient. The earth tube project has not actually physically started yet. It’s more of a thinking and study real life experiences at this point. Right now I’m more interested in working on the 1951 Chevy pickup (we actually use pickups as pickups rather than as a manly car). There is a guy on YouTube who is showing his complete process of moving a 1952 Chevy pickup onto an S-10 pickup frame. Something like that plus an electric motor and batteries (not lead acid) is what I have in mind. Another possible project is converting a riding lawn mower and Mantis tiller to battery electric. I watch Jehu Garcia a lot. There is never a shortage of possible projects. Bobby Keeland Not a lot of money, but I do have time and interest. On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 11:52 PM Peter VanDerWal <e...@vanderwal.us> wrote: > Bobby, have you done any research on Earth Tubes? Not just looking up > testimonials and anecdotes, but looked for actual studies? > > I was really yped about earth tubes for a while until I looked into them > and found a few studies. I found a lot of people claiming that all they > did was dig 2 foot deep trenchs and burried 30 feet of tube and 'Wow, what > a difference' > But the actual studies with measurements, etc. tell a different story. > > First of all you need to go a LOT deeper than 2 feeet, 6-8 foot minimum. > One study I found was done in India as I recall, they were studying using > Earth Tubes to cool a green house. > They used 4 tubes 100 feet long, 8 foot deep spaced 6 feet apart. The fan > used to drive the air through them consumed 400-450 watts and ran 24 hours > a day. It was effective at the begining of summer, but by the middle of > summer the output air temps had climbed to around 80 degrees, the green > house temps were closer to 90 degrees. > > I also read lots of feedback from individuals that were having problems > with mold due to condensation in the earth tubes. That is solvable, by > making sure the tubes angle down, away from the house and you have some way > to drain the moisture from them. > > My mini-split heat pump on the other hand uses about 1/2 the energy per > day to cool my house and output air temp is around 50-60 degrees an the > temp in the house stays below 76. I could get it cooler, but it would use > more energy and I'm comfortable at that temp. > > So the mini-split is more effective, for less energy and a LOT less work > to install. If you have to hire someone to dig the trenches, the > mini-split is probably cheaper. > > Sometimes the best solution is NOT the simplest solution. > > My PGP public key: https://vanderwal.us/evdl_pgp.key > > March 19, 2021 6:05 PM, "Bobby Keeland via EV" <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote: > > > In a previous posting I said: > > <Unfortunately I’m still working on my solar > > <water heater, my battery backup for the solar > > <panels, earth tubes and many other > > <projects. > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20210321/8ecfa3a4/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/ LIST INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org
