zlacker

>>PaulHo+(OP)
I would love to see a bus-sized version for year-long temperature moderation. Like, drop house heat into it during the summer so it can re-heat the house over the winter, and pull all the heat out of it by Spring so that it can cool the house over the summer.

Bus sized because that amount of thermal mass is bound to take up a lot of space, but capable of being buried so that it doesn’t actually take up property space.

>>rekabi+2u
You seem to be describing ground sourced heat pumps. If you wanted, you could insulate a a chunk of foundation or earth to avoid heat loss. But just the ground under your building seems to work well enough.

>>stubis+8L
Ground sourced heat pumps need either a horrifically expensive vertical bore hole going down a few hundred metres, or a good acre of land for laid-down piping. I have neither the money nor the horizontal space. So I am thinking something compact that needs to go only about 6-10m vertically into the ground (so I can hide it fully underground with about a metre of soil on top), and take up the horizontal space of 4 parked cars. I have more than enough room and cash to have that cube of space dug out.

And being on an alluvial plain, if I filter out all the rocks larger than a pea, a good 90+% of what is dug out can immediately be trucked away.