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Some interesting products utilising PCMs in the domestic hot water markets... Replacing traditional hot water cylinders which suffer from very high heat loss ev

• specialist 11y ago
  Had to look up PCM, which stands for phase-change materials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_material https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_material Found a few vendors of various interesting products, here's just one: http://www.pcmproducts.net http://www.pcmproducts.net Found a few articles advocating water heaters using PCM. Sounds cool. Aside: I've tried HotSnapZ brand hand warmers. They're reusable. Neat. I should have guessed this strategy could be scaled up for bigger applications. http://hotsnapz.com/FAQ.html http://hotsnapz.com/FAQ.html
• semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  The economics aren't great for replacing a hot water cylinder with something more efficient. According to this [1] a typical hot water cylinder wastes less than 2000 kWh per year. That's a yearly expense of less than $400. This means a replacement system aiming to break even over five years must cost less than $2000. Replacing a hot water cylinder with a bog standard new one costs at least $1000. Thus the PCM heater must be essentially as cheap as existing solutions, and so it faces the challenge of not being able to get enough initial volume to get the cost below break-even. Government subsidies are probably the only way to make it work. [1] http://www.solarblogger.net/2012/11/heat-losses-from-hot-water-cylinders.html?m=1 http://www.solarblogger.net/2012/11/heat-losses-from-hot-wat...