https://youtu.be/Tq3IS1J3Lyo
Matt and Sean talk about using ice to generate heat. Yes, it’s actually a thing, but does it make sense for the future of heating?
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How Can Ice Heat Your Home? Ice Source Heat Pumps! https://youtu.be/2S5NdYso73M?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
Matt and Sean talk about using ice to generate heat. Yes, it’s actually a thing, but does it make sense for the future of heating?
Watch the Undecided with Matt Ferrell episode, How Can Ice Heat Your Home? Ice Source Heat Pumps! https://youtu.be/2S5NdYso73M?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi7uzySCXq8VXhodHB5B5OiQ
- (00:00) - - Intro
- (03:24) - - Migraine Tracking
- (06:17) - - Previous Episode Feedback
- (15:33) - - Ice Source Heat Pump Discussion
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Undecided with Matt Ferrell: https://www.youtube.com/undecidedmf
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Creators & Guests
What is Still To Be Determined?
Join Matt Ferrell from the YouTube Channel, Undecided, and his brother Sean Ferrell as they discuss electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart technologies, and how they impact our lives. Still TBD continues the conversation from the Undecided YouTube channel.
On today's episode of Still To Be Determined, Matt and I are talking about a cool way to make energy. I'm really, I'm really sorry about that. Hi everybody. Welcome to Still To Be Determined. This is of course, the podcast that follows up on Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging Tech.
I am not Matt Ferrell. I'm Sean Ferrell. I'm a writer. I read some sci-fi. I write some stuff for kids and I'm just generally curious about technology and I'm very lucky that my brother is that Matt behind the aforementioned podcast. So this week Matt and I will be talking about his most recent, which is about using ice as a means of generating heat because of sciencey things. Science, physics and physics. And like the big brains on Brad, and like everybody's just doing all sorts of stuff and saying like, we're doing this thing. And I'm like, I don't think, I don't know. I don't know. So. That's, that's kind of like a bird's eye view of what this conversation's gonna be like.
It's gonna be Matt talking about sciencey things and Sean saying, but what, what? So we hope you enjoy the conversation. Before we get into that, Matt, how are you doing today?
I'm doing pretty well. It's been a good weekend. It's finally, I'm gonna annoy people. We're gonna talk about the weather. Yeah. Spring is springing.
Yes, of course. Spring is is sprung. Yeah.
Spring has sprung. Or spring is, spring is, is feeling like it's actually here. Although right now in, uh, where I am, it dipped back down to being surprisingly cold, so Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, it's this new model of weather, which is like, your guess is as good as ours.
Um, and, uh, I, YouTube has started feeding me the weather channels, which, when that started I was just like, this is a thing. And then I stopped for a moment and I was like, well, of course it's a thing. Why wouldn't it be a thing? This is a, and who's the guy that you and I have talked about before? Hall y'all The.
Ryan Hall y. Ryan Hall, y'all. If you're on YouTube and you want to check out, watch his channel, uh, a good weather report. Ryan Hall, y'all. He's got teams of people who in the faces of tornadoes will run out with their video cameras and phones and take video and send it to him. And he's, he's a one man shop that is, does some of the best big picture weather reportage I've I've ever seen.
I strongly recommend his channel. It is a lot of fun to watch because his videos will be a good 20 minutes long, but he'll start at the West coast and he'll follow the weather pattern for the next four to five days across the country talking about why it's happening, what is happening, what to expect.
It's educational. It's very good educational. It's very science based. He's like, he's really demonstrating that meteorology is a science. It's not just, um, somebody standing in front of a green screen. And it's, it's a great, it's a great channel. So I, I recommend, uh, checking that out.
The reason I brought up the weather, Sean, I've gone down this weird path of, I've been setting up AI agents for myself to do tasks. Oh, good. Repetitive task. I know, that's fine. I know it's, I know you're gonna enjoy that. Oh wow. But there's, there's a method to my madness here 'cause it's like I've been in weather mode for the past couple days 'cause I've been setting up, I get migraines and I'm a human barometer.
Yeah. A lot of 'em are triggered from the weather and so I track my migraines in notion and so I've been setting up AI agents that will watch my notion things. When I start a, like I get a migraine, I just go into notion and I say Started and it adds a new entry to my database, and then the AI agent will kick off and it will go scrape weather data for the current weather.
Mm-hmm. Get the barometric pressure, all the stuff, dump into the notion database, and now I'm setting it up so that it will also scrape historical thing like look 24 hours behind see what it was. Like, how did the pressure, did it drop? Did it arise? Like what were the things going on? Because I'm trying to find all the different patterns that are for my specific migraines that I get. Yeah. So that I, what I wanna do then is to create an AI model that then will also look into the future, look at the next forecast for the next 10 days, and give me kind of a calendar view of like. Mark a day as red if it's a high risk or green, if it's okay, like I want to kind of like build out my own little migraine track.
Are you effect effectively building a migraine predictive app? That would be, yes.
Something you would, alright, well there, there are these on the market. There's why I use for a while called You Buddy.
A second million.
Yeah. Migraine Buddy does this, but it was like, I did not like the app. It's a, I didn't like the interface.
I've tried it. It wasn't adding as well. I
did not like it. It was a lot of work. Yeah. It was a lot of like, it was too much work. It was like, oh, you've got a migraine, you don't feel good. Spend the next 10 minutes telling us about how much you don't like your migraine. And it was just like, migraine, buddy.
You're more of a migraine annoyance. I think I'm gonna stop using you.
Well, that's what I'm doing. It's like, it's basically start, stop and it started, and when it's done. Then I can just like maybe a voice memo of like what it was like, and then I want the AI agents to figure everything else out for me.
Like I don't, I wanna make this as painless as possible.
Yeah. ' cause the headache's bad enough.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I've noticed that myself the past couple of days where it's been. Like, especially at night when the weather has changed. And I was walking around two nights ago and I was just like, why does my eyeball feel like it wants to go and just shoot across the room?
And I was like, oh God, I think it's, I somehow, it always stymies me for a good 30 to 40 minutes and then suddenly like, oh, this is a migraine. I don't know why.
It's the same thing for me. It's like I've been suffering for like two hours. Like wait. I should take some medicine for this.
It's like, wait, there are solutions here.
Like, oh wait, if I go take some medicine and guzzle a glass of water and just try to relax, I'll actually fall asleep. Anyway, enough about the Ferrell Brothers and how their brains hate them. Let's talk instead about last, last week's episode. This is episode 2 59, in which we talked about flow battery developments and how old technology is being used in new ways.
And there were comments like this from Cyrribrae who, when Matt and I were talking about the various ways that Matt has electrified his life, and Matt said the difference between a old style gas powered lawnmower and a new electric lawnmower is like night and day. You've got less noise, less like it just seamless into a new way of living.
Cyrribrae points out, you know what, the best way to avoid dealing with a crappy lawnmower is? Not having a lawn. And this is actually true. True. This is maybe said facetiously with a little wink, but it is also something that people do do. There are people who are part of the, I don't know what they call it, a return to a wild yard effectively, where they just allow wild flowers and they let the grasses grow taller with it providing a haven for insects, which then increases the bird population. It also is environmentally protective in the form of it will help offset flooding better than shorter grass will. It is also not going to release gases in the same way 'cause when you cut your lawn, that then rots and you end up with methane production.
So there's a whole lot of reasons why people don't do yards and or lawns. And Matt, I don't know if you'll recall this, I say that facetiously. I know they would recall this when we were in high school. I used to tell dad all the time. When I have a house, it's going to be gravel. There's not gonna be any grass anywhere.
It's just going to be a gravel yard. 'cause I do not like to mow and I kind of got there because I live in Brooklyn and don't have Yeah, space. Your wish came true, Sean. Your wish came true. There we go. All I had to do is live in one of the most congested cities in the world. The results of this from William, who jumped in to say, I find it so odd that it seems that no one is working on hybrid vehicles.
This is in our conversation that we had around like the various ways that electric battery storage and electric vehicles overlap or don't overlap. Some of these, like a flow battery is not gonna be the style of battery you're gonna have in a vehicle probably. So William was responding to the idea of battery development and vehicle development and pointing out that in his mind, a gas generator is normally more efficient than a standard ICE engine.
I think he's heading toward the model of why don't you have a gas generator powering a battery in an electric vehicle that then pulls that energy into the electric drive and yep. As I say, all of this, and the reason I pulled this comment is so I could see that expression that Matthew currently has on his face, which is the knowing little I've got a secret, which he's actually talked about before.
We talked about this exact style of hybrid engine before Matt. You've talked about it being developed mainly, if I remember correctly, mainly for large scale trucking, Edison Motors, but also perhaps in other smaller scale vehicles. Do you wanna talk about that for a moment?
We, we, I interviewed Edison Motors, the, uh, founders of that.
It's a Canadian company that's making gigantic trucks and they're doing exactly this. They're making more efficient electric trucks that are using a power source that's agnostic. It could be a diesel generator, it could be a fuel cell, it could be pick your, pick your poison and drop it in there. Right now they're doing like diesel generators, but it's way more efficient than having an internal combustion engine, right, which is like, and then you have the benefit of electric motors, which have way more torque than a typical, like
the energy loss, the loss from an ice engine where you've got the gas combusting driving a piston to drive a a motor, that's a physical effect as opposed to generating electricity, which then goes into storage and then drives a motor. Yeah. The wasted energy is incredible. Yeah, it is. There's a reason why you put in as much gas as you do. I mean, you, we don't think in terms of like the volume of it, but you're putting 10 gallons of a thing into your vehicle if you have Yeah. An average sized tank. Yeah, that's a lot. That's, and the idea that you could maybe fill up a generator with one or two gallons and get just as much drive is pretty impressive.
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, fuel cell cars. Not happening as many, as much as these car companies still are trying to make it happen.
It's not gonna happen. But fuel cell cars, it's the same thing. It's the same thing. It's just a fuel cell that's generating the electricity that's stored into a battery that then is used to turn the wheels in the car and make it go. 'cause a fuel cell car is not just straight from the fuel cell to your wheels, it's still using a battery pack as the interim step, all that kind of stuff.
So this concept is out there, but it like, we kind of like turned our back on gas or fossil fuels to do it 'cause we're trying to go clean. But it's like, well you can still do a mi midterm step and it's, and it works fantastic,
right?
So why not do it? Yeah.
There's not just, it's not all either or. That's one of the things that we've talked about on this show quite a bit, is the right tool for the right job.
And don't put all your eggs in one basket. It's not going to be like, oh, you gotta get rid of. There can be no ice engines, like, well, clearly, like we're in a period of time where we're gonna have decades of overlap. Oh yeah. There's gonna be decades of, some of these cars that have been built recently will last 25, 30 years if they're taken care of, which means you're gonna see these vehicles on the road.
That's not the point. Yeah. The point is, transition isn't an on off switch. The point is gradual change, so.
Mm-hmm.
There was this from Iron Man who, in response to home flow batteries said he finds them intriguing. However, it would need to be paired with a small lithium or sodium battery that can react to power outages near instantaneously.
That is that similar to what is actually looking like it would come to market is a combo package. Are the companies that are developing these things thinking in those terms, or are they thinking in terms of improving the responsiveness of just one type of battery and making that the goal? Right.
The ones I've been seeing are not hybrid.
It is just a straight up flow cell. That's it. I don't know how the responsiveness is on them though, because there's very little, um, details in the spec sheet for that kind of a thing, like what the response time is. But Ironman is not wrong, that they're not quite as responsive in general, but the fact that the large grid scale stuff that was I talked about in the video, which is they did a test of a black start system where like, like grid goes down, can this thing handle it? It did. So it's like clearly they're finding ways to get around that. I don't know if their installation has capacitors they're using as an interim step. Yeah. Um. 'cause there's ways that you could do it to mitigate that slow response time.
And my guess would be maybe on the grid scale stuff, they are using capacitors as a midterm step, but I don't know what they're doing on the residential side. 'cause there's, the spec sheets are pretty thin.
Yeah. It does seem like it would make sense, like it just right outta the gate, it just, yeah. It seems like, okay, if you, if you took the, like a lithium battery or a sodium battery of the style that are currently available and just halved it in size, you don't need it to be as big as those ones that are intended to be standalone.
So if you halved it or even quartered it in size and combined it with a flow battery, it really does seem like it would create that kind of web of overlap. Mm-hmm. That would mm-hmm. Provide support for both. Finally, this from Darth Sirrius that we shared a comment last week and Darth jumps back into the comments saying, thanks for the shout out, but also responding to the idea of showing your work, saying, I also used to do the same thing as Matt.
I did a lot of the work in my head on long math problems, so I had to invent a way of showing my work that reduced it down to only showing like a third of the actual steps, just enough. So that the math teacher would give me credit without any side eye really. I like the fact that you were working not just at a two tier level of, I've been presented with a problem.
I don't know the solution according to their method, but I think I can create my own method. But then also creating the third tier, which is, and then I'm gonna create some sort of weird hybrid shorthand to make it look like I'm telling them how I did it without actually telling them how I did it 'cause that would be too much work.
Nice three-tiered process there. That creates a better path. I dunno. On now to our discussion about Matt's most recent episode, this is his, how can Ice Heat your Home? Ice Source Heat pumps? Yes, we are breaking your brain. It's very briefly, Matt, if I could say what I think is happening.
Mm-hmm.
You tell me if I'm right or wrong.
I think that in the formation of ice, there's magic because there are pixies.
The Pixies, yeah. Are making the ice and they're so excited about it that they get all dancey, and in doing all of that, they're releasing body heat. How close am I to being right.
You're, you're, you're so close, Sean. Mm. So close. So close, but yet total off. Okay. Now you tell me what you think is happening.
It's all about phase changes. It's like I've done other videos where I talked about phase change materials, when if when something changes phases, it will often release heat in that process, and that actually happens in ice forms. That's basically all this is doing is they're trying to get into that phase change where the water turns to solid, and in that process it releases more heat in that moment, and it's trying to capture as much of that as possible.
That's essentially what it's, it's the mis, it's the fascination of physics. It's just like they're, there's playing on a physics, basic physics principle and just leaning into it.
I tell you, big brains on bread. Exactly. There were a lot of people who took issue. There were people who were like, I don't understand the science in the comments.
Mm-hmm. And there were people who were like, I get the science, but I don't think there's an application. So there were a lot of comments like this from just Steve who said, unless I missed something, there's a bit of an issue. Whilst the use of the existing natural gas pipe is a good reuse of infrastructure.
This is totally wiped out by the need for a return pipe, which doesn't currently exist, necessitating digging up every road and street to install anyway. So there is an element of do we actually understand what the suggested plan is? What the, what the idea is, and is it in fact as workable as the people doing this research would hope or is this so far out of our hands?
Yes, we don't understand it anyway.
The, the, the research team that put this idea together is still not, they're, they're, they still have to do the official proposal for the UK government, so we don't know the exact, like exactly what's gonna end up in the final proposal, but in my conversations with them, in my team's conversation with them, it's pretty clear that you only have to just get rid of a slush when it's done.
And this is a one-time use. This is not a loop that it keeps going around and around, so it's non potable water that could be rainwater, rain runoff, you know, wastewater coming in and doing this. It just has to be evacuated outta the house, and we already have that in most houses. Like in the uk you have toilets and sewage and ways to evacuate that water.
Same thing in my house. I have water that drains from my washing machine into a little thing in the wall, and it goes out the sewage pipes. This could be the exact same thing. So technically you wouldn't have to dig up the streets and all that kind of stuff. If all you care about is getting the slush outta the house and it's just gonna melt and go away, it's just water, right?
You could dump it right into the sewage system. Um, 'cause it's not for drinking water, it's just non-potable water. So you could do that. I have a feeling that's the basic premise here.
Right. Mark loves to fly, jumped in on the point of the type of water pointing out slushy machines don't work well with regular water.
They require sugar to keep the ice from breaking the auger. The liquid then reaches subfreezing temperatures while remaining fluid. Non-potable water may work, but it could cause big problems. What is the issue? You mentioned non-potable water because it's, the point is it's not drinkable. It's not something you would want to drink, so why not reuse it in this way?
Mm-hmm. Is there something about it being non-potable that is also helpful in this?
For this team, this specific use? And it was funny 'cause in all the conversation we had with them, they were extremely clear that this. For the UK specifically, they've designed this for the uk. Like they, they had said what we are planning would not work in many other places around the world is specific.
'cause the UK gets a ton of rain, like right. A lot of rain, A lot of that. Getting non-potable water is not an issue. So it's like,
right,
we have all this extra water. Well what can we do with it? What a weird, what a
weird brag. Yeah,
exactly. You wouldn't like Seattle, like non potable water. We've got,
you want non-potable water, you're talking to the right guy.
We're very gray, rainy, depressed. Let's, let's put that some use. But that's basically what, what it was, is that's why they came up with this idea of non potable water, because you wouldn't wanna use potable water because that's a precious resource, and that would be a waste to use potable water for this process.
So the decision of using a non-potable water versus potable water had nothing to do with making the auger work better. It was just literally like, here's a resource that won't put tax. It won't like put a pressure on our drinkable water supply 'cause it's something we're currently not using. It's a resource we don't usually use, so let's use that and put it to put it to good use for heating.
That was basically it.
You've already touched on this, but heathkitshop jumped in to say, where does all the slushy ice go after it's made? Yeah, I know it goes down another pipe. Where does that pipe lead to? You've already touched on this, the idea that it's simply. It can go into the sewage system, which eventually would lead, I imagine, in some cases, to a processing system to actually clean the water and make it potable.
Is that something that is an option?
Yeah, if it goes into a, if it goes into a wastewater reclamation system, the municipal system that gets cleaned and it could be turned into potable water down the road. The other thing is like in, in my conversations with them, uh, Ramin, who is one of the researchers, he is, I don't wanna get into this 'cause it's still making my brain hurt, but like.
Phase changes. Well, when you turn ice back into water, Phase change, you could put it to use again. So he's working on a system that is basically taking that slush and reusing it again in a system for like refrigeration kinda systems, like using it for cooling you can extract, right? So it's like that system would be for.
So water
turns ice, it releases heat, and as ice turns to water, it absorbs heat. Correct.
Mm. It absorbs more in that trans Yeah. In that transition it's absorbing more than it normally would. So it's like, yeah, you're, you're using the phase change going in and out in different ways. And so he was talking about like, this could be used for refrigeration systems, it could be used for air conditioning systems.
So he's working on a system right now, like, doing that side of it and, and coming up with proposals for how that could be used. Not necessarily in the uk, maybe it's in the Middle East or something like that. It's like places that are hot. It's like there's different places that different might be able to use this in different ways.
And so they're, they're working on that right now. But it's still very early stages on that research.
Right. And once again, leave it to the commenters to subtly slide in and drop some info that I think would be a great place for another video for Matt to visit and maybe even cause him to visit Germany again.
We have this from Konstantin who jumps in to say, such systems are known in Germany under the name Eisheizung, ice heating, already for 13 years. Wow. On YouTube, there are many videos about it. If you search, for example, under heizen mit Eis, this system was not widespread because of problems with broken plastic pipes.
You need some material which can hold mechanical deformations of phase change water slash ice. So this that's cool. Is something for all the people and they were just like, this would never work. Well, it. Apparently didn't work so great in Germany either, but they tried it 13 years ago and I actually did do a quick YouTube search.
Here's the thing, you're gonna have to use YouTube's translation matrix in order to understand this, because every video I saw was in German. In German, yeah. So Matt. I wonder if there is an opportunity for you to reach out to a YouTuber who's actually talked about this and maybe do a collaborative discussion around this, because Yeah, somebody tried this, so, yeah.
Well, when, when, when I was talking to the, uh, researchers, they said to me, uh, we're not scientists, we're engineers. Yes. And they were like, this is well known physics. This is not blazing new ground. It's just how we're, we've, we're trying to problem solve for a specific situation.
Here you go. And that's why I talked to 'em. 'cause it's like, this is incredibly clever. They're, they're, they're taking what we know how to do and trying to apply it to their specific situation to solve a problem. Yeah. Super clever.
Yeah. So thank you to all the commenters, all the viewers, all the listeners.
Thank you so much for your comments. As you can tell, they really do drive the program. Please jump into the comments now and let us know what you thought about this discussion. Was there something that you were hoping I would bring up that I didn't and then maybe we can talk about it next week? Or is there something that, you know about that we weren't aware, and maybe you could point us in direction for more research. Don't forget to like, subscribe and share it with your friends. Those are all very easy ways for you to support the podcast. And if you'd like to support us more directly, you can click the join button on YouTube or you can go to still tbd fm.
Click the join button there. Both those ways, lightly throw coins at our heads. I. We appreciate the welts, and then we get down to the heavy, heavy business talking about how Pixies make ice. Thank you so much everybody, for taking the time to watch or listen. We'll talk to you next time.
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