An innovative design and evaluation of a stratified hot water storage system - the Water Snake

The increase in energy prices and the demand to reduce carbon emission is attracting the attention to the implementation of diverse heating technologies such as heat pumps, solar energy, gas boilers, CHP and electric heaters. Heating applications for integrated technologies include district heating, domestic small scale applications and commercial large scale buildings. Thermal storage is likely to become key to energy efficient heating. A stratified hot water tank will play an important role in the integration of several heating technologies that operate efficiently at different level of temperatures with reduced implementation cost. This paper describes the concept and the assessment of the `Water Snake´, a novel low cost concept of a stratified hot water tank. The results show that the new concept could provide efficient stratification at a very low cost using this invention.