[McKay (OP)]

I am wondering how large of an accumulator pack, put in a basement or something, would one need to power a typical northern European (say, the region of Baltic states) household a whole year round? That is volume, weight, price and kw-hours.
I know most of the power consumption will be in the winter months - less sunlight means more electric lightning, probably spending more time indoors, because it is damn cold outside and heating... which would be the lions bite of the power consumption.. How about we look at two scenarios - one is where the house is fully electrically heated and one where it has fully functioning and capable fireplace. (the house is decently insulated and warm)
*Thinking about solely running on the accumulator pack, without solar/ wind generated electricity charging the pack as it is used, using currently available accumulator packs.
*How much better would accumulators coming out in near future do?

[allan marsh]

Tiz big!
Read energy or extinction by fried Hoyle.... Its a few years old but if you turn all the energy you use in a year... Oil,gas,food, coal, electricity, motor fuel etcetera  we in the UK use 55,000 KWhr per year

From Hoyle,s book you can work out you KWhr  you need in electric or just look at your electricity bill

so.yes you use about 10,000 kwhr so do the math
a lead acid battery 12 volt 100 Ahr weighs "X: Kg  so thats 1200 watt hrs so you need  "Y" units per KWhr then you need 10,000 of them so total weight will be "XXXXXX"Kg
workout the lead needed and the space... I wont do that for you!!! but after the life of the battery worked out and the cost.. you can have great fun working our how many £'s you need and how impossible the result

great fun but seriously get Fred Hoyle's book entitled Energy or extinction writen in about 1970
its still true today except the indians have increased their energy usage from 4000 Kwhr per year a la 1970!!!!!

[Bored chemist]

Well, there's a bit of variation among theh Baltic states but if this is to be believed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita
it's the equivalent of about 3KW average power.
That's something like 26000 KW Hr per year.
A car battery holds about half a KW Hr.
So you would need a stack of something like 50,000 car batteries to store the energy used in a year.

[evan_au]

Bring on the Mr Fusion!

[McKay (OP)]

Hmm, well, I searched for some info onthe Tesla electric car and found something, which I used to calculate:
*30000 Kw/h power pack using the electric car batteries used in Tesla electric cars would be ~811000 liters (cube with a side ~9 meters or a pool with a depth of 2.25m, width of 9m and length of 36 meters) (such a big pack would heat up quite a bit and would most likely need some cooling pipes and/ or free space .. or just spread out over multiple power pack locations.
*would weight some 256.5 tons
*and would cost about 6'000'000 dollars

Does that seem about right?

[peppercorn]

Simple first step: where possible do the most useful things possible with electricity.
Electricity is far too valuable to be squandered on (low-level) heat production if any decent alternative exists!

Maybe you should look into building an an accumulator of the thermal kind first... a large pit full of packed stones, or something.  Look where you can make the most of solar gain on your property in the summer (even improve the thermal store capabilities of the building itself), and consider a ground source heat pump (which can 'pump' in both directions).

[McKay (OP)]

Simple first step: where possible do the most useful things possible with electricity.
Electricity is far too valuable to be squandered on (low-level) heat production if any decent alternative exists!

Maybe you should look into building an an accumulator of the thermal kind first... a large pit full of packed stones, or something.  Look where you can make the most of solar gain on your property in the summer (even improve the thermal store capabilities of the building itself), and consider a ground source heat pump (which can 'pump' in both directions).

of course. Thats why I was wondering about two cases: one with full-on electricity and one with a fireplace or something.