this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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It's interesting piece of technology, but it's not 'radical'. The company behind the storage has done their homework and they seem to be well engineered, but the "technology" itself is pretty much as old as bonfires, people have used hot rocks to heat up tents for 'a while'.
But sand has pretty good thermal properties and size of these new iterations of old tech makes them pretty decent solution for energy storage with renewables. I've been following various 'sand battery' products for our own house, but the main problem with all of them tends to be the size required. In practise for our own house we'd need a sand battery roughly the size of 6m storage container (with heat pumps and all the other hardware) and that'd be so expensive that the investment wouldn't pay itself back in my lifetime.
My parents were planning to build a cabin around a Russian stove (massive stone chimney with beds and a ton of thermal mass) for overnight heat, but ended up in an RV instead when their retirement coincided with the housing collapse.
That style stoves are pretty common around here on older buildings. We have one and it really helps during winter and cuts down the electricity bill, at least as long as we have enough firewood to keep that thing going.