He may not have the measurements etc., but I have the experience.
Our house is over 100 years old, and likely much farther north than the OP. Our well water is so cold that most of the summer, you can barely hold your hands under it. We heat the basement in Winter, but do not cool it in Summer as we have high water table, and are "currently" pumping out between 5,000 and 6,000 gallons of water every 24 hours. That incoming water is quite cold, and yet the mid-80's outside temps still heat the basement air to a point where it stays fairly cool, but certainly not cold.
If we could run all that ground water through a water-to-air exchanger, we could gain benefit. But as I said, the upstairs only uses a 5,000BTU window A/C, and that's rarely ever on the high setting. When the water table is low enough that the basement dries out, the air temp in the basement gets rather warm. I've seen it hit 80F down there.
Our basement also has a cistern. It is solid poured concrete, thicker near the bottom and thinner near tops of the walls. That's the only part of the basement floor that DOESN'T get wet......ever! No air flow in the basement either. No problems with the cistern walls getting mold growth or other unwanted nasties. Not sure why....maybe the normally-cooler temps?
My point is, right now we're having outside temps in low to mid-80's, high humidity (I'd swear I saw fish swimming through the air! :shock: ), and thousands of gallons per day of cold ground water coming in. Basement temp is just comfortable. Not cool, just comfortable. If he fills his cistern with water that has no means of passing the heat gain into the earth, then that water will simply warm to a point that it will no longer provide any cooling effect. Then, that much water would 'hold' the heat during the night, when your house is trying to cool down naturally. Look into solar greenhouses that use 55-gal. plastic drums filled with water that absorb heat during the day, then give it off at night. They don't use the barrels in the Summer, as no need to heat the greenhouse at night. There simply wouldn't be enough heat exchange between the cistern water and the cistern's concrete floor -- no economical way to put the heat gained from the rest of the house into the earth. In effect, your heatsink wouldn't be the earth, but just the cistern.
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Today's Featured Article - Grain Threshing in the Early 40's - by Jerry D. Coleman. How many of you can sit there and say that you have plowed with a mule? Well I would say not many, but maybe a few. This story is about the day my Grandfather Brown (true name) decided along with my parents to purchase a new Ford tractor. It wasn't really new except to us. The year was about 1967 and my father found a good used Ford 601 tractor to use on the farm instead of "Bob", our old mule. Now my grandfather had had this mule since the mid 40's and he was getting some age on him. S
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