sharkdude
New member
my house is built with a crawl space underneath with about 2-3 feet of clearance. It stays quite cool under there, even in the summer. The general idea is to bury a type of closed loop in the hopes that this would provide some cooling effects to the main tanks during the summer.
I think I could do this with just the main return pump with two valved inputs from the sump. This way I could either draw straight from the sump or send some quantity of water through the loop at a slower rate and hopefully achieve some cooling. When the summer heat is over, I could drain the line and close off the valves. Gravity would work to equalize the levels between input to the cooling loop and the intake to the pump, so I would not be sucking water against significant head pressure as you might expect. kind of like a closed loop application.
Main problem I see is not enough capacity in the cooling loop. A total of 100 feet of thin wall 1 inch pvc gives only about a 4 gallon capacity ( pi x radius squared x length of pipe in inches / 231 cu in per gal).
difficult to estimate how much cooling as variable of length of pipe, temp differnetial of ground, efficiency in heat transfer of pvc, rate of water flow, etc.
what do you guys think? am I nuts or possibly on to something that may work?
maybe a buried and sealed larger reservoir? or thin vinyl tubing in many feet coils?
bury it as deep as possible like 3-5 feet?
I want to keep any pumps or valves easily accessible and not under neath the house, nor do I want to add any additional pumps to conserve electricity.
I hope to achieve an approximate 5 degrees F cooling on my estimated 150 gal water volume system during peak summer heat waves.
comments appreciated.
