this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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is home hydrogen a thing? i was wondering before, if it works in cars, why is it not in houses?
hydrogen scales well if you use big industrial setups, both for generation and for storage.
basically, bigger tanks are cheaper (consider higher volume/surface area ratio) and in fact the best tanks might simply be naturally occurring underground caverns. you can't have these at home.
Technically it could work. However, traditional batteries make a lot more sense. Hydrogen makes some sense for a vehicle because it can be more energy dense (it actually only makes sense for large trucks). However, it has to be stored at cryogenic temperatures. In a place where you probably don't care about mass or space much, other battery technologies are far better, without the added cost of cryogenic cooling and having to deal with hydrogen, which leaks through anything.
You would store it as a pressurized gas in this scenario. You would only use liquid hydrogen in specific situations.
Hydrogen gas is really hard to store. It is tiny, so it's basically always leaking, no matter how good your seal is.
Underground caverns can store it for years. This is simply not true.
What do you mean it isn't true? It's a well known fact. It's just a proton and an electron, so it's absolutely tiny. There is almost no way to seal it perfectly, especially in gaseous form. It's always going to leak. Even for rockets this is an issue. You can make that amount relatively small, but it pretty much always has some loss.
Caverns may make sense for large-scale solutions, because the quantity is so large compared to the loss. Most people don't have massive caverns under their house though, nor do they have a need for that large of a quantity.
Even in tank form, you can store it for months. It is not much different than CNG.
Large-scale solutions matter too. The utility companies can utilize such a thing.
The question was specifically about home hydrogen. Yes, it makes sense for utility companies, as well as large vehicles, as I said before. It's a great solution to turn renewables into a shipable commodity. Home use though doesn't make sense. A regular battery has much better properties for home use.
The same applies for home hydrogen storage too. Compressed hydrogen is good for months. Another option would be metal hydrides which apparently last a long time too. The problem is that you simply cannot power your house entirely with batteries alone.
There's a engineer that did it in his backyard. I'll see if I can find it when I get home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djg_l7cEtWg
https://hydrogenhouseproject.org/index.html