Tony's House

I used to live in a house with a solid uninsulated floor, I have measured the temperature under my floor at various depths and found that they are a lot warmer than is generally believed. This is because I lived in the house and had been heating it, the heat lost to the ground had warmed up the sub strata and immediately under the floor it had assumed the average temperature of the house (this should in my opinion also apply to insulated floors as insulation slows the passage of heat but does not stop the flow of heat)

The thought experiment runs like this: The ground under my basement will warm up to average temperature of the basement if this is heated then this could be say 17.5C so were I to dump excess solar heat into the ground instead then my basement would no longer loose heat (eutopian ideal!!!)

If I can do this with my ordinary heating system then it should be possible to do it with my excess solar for nine months and need no heating for the other three, calculations so far show that it cant be done but I am hoping that this is because we are getting the models to assume incorrect things, like initial conditions, rate of ground warming areas of influence etc -- my monitios will tell us the rreal story

My initial results from the monitoring equipment is showing a very stable themperature of 16C 1m below the middle of my basement slab, this is eccouraging and next years excess of solar energy I am hoping to raise the ground temperature 1m down to 19C but we will have to wait and see...

The temperature under the middle of the slab was still constant at 16 C in mid November. The temperature in the ground fell from the end of December 2009 to March 2010 to 13.5C and peaked in September at 17.9C a meter below the middle of the slab. The boreholes stayed at 23C into October 2010.

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