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Welcome to the HeatBattery wiki!

The project is to built the cheapest smart electrical heat battery, by converting existing electrical accumulators like the one in the picture above.

Electrical accumulators have been sold for many years already, and were implemented to charge at night at cheap electrical rates, and to use the heating during the day when electricity was expensive. It used to be so that there were two rates: The daytime rate (expensive), and the nighttime rate (cheap).

This project is upgrading these existing accumlation heaters, so that they can do a number of things smart: Nowdays electrical rates vary by the hour (sometimes even going negative), depending on the availibility of solar and wind, and of course depending on demand (weekend or Holidays demand is less).

With this project one can choose every time when the accumulator needs to charge: e.g during night that there is plenty of wind energy! During days in the weekend with plenty of sun,...

The other thing it allows to do, is to use the exessive solar energy one has, by their own PV-cells, and store only that in the accumulator. It means that when you have plenty of electricity left while you are at work the accumulator charges, and when you are at home in the evening, you use your own generated energy to heat when the sun is gone...

The project is intended to modify in a safe, smart and cheap way, for the benefit of all (inluding people that do not use it). either you have the accumulators already in your house, or you can buy them very cheap.

The electronics in this project include a custom build PCB, and a Raspberry Pi. Roughly a budget under 200 €/$. Typically the accumulators can be found cheap or for free on second hand websites.

The software is working already in test in Beta, and still under development, but includes a LAMP-server (SQL, Apache or Lighttp, SQL or MariaDB, and PHP), all under the Raspbian OS. So the control and monitoring can be done by any webbrowser: On your aplle or Android phone, Windows PC or any Linux computer.

In the picture a standard accumulator that is opened for showing how it works (white panels removed):

Inside are a number of special bricks, that are heated and that keep the heat for a very long time. The heating is simply by resistors (here 3 rows of resistors). On the side below the blower is visible: It blows air through the accumulator in case the room it is in needs heating. Furthermore the original connector with screw terminals are in the middle.

This heater in the picture here above is still factory-original without the added PCB's to make it smart.

In the picture below the added PCB's can be seen in the red circle: