I just came across this at a site that has specialty tips about solar hot water. It’s not bad: Are you looking for solutions for converting your home to give you solar hot water? Solar water is an easy thing to come by, if you know how to harness it.
There are several reasons you might be looking to harness solar hot water. Top reasons are:
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Passive space heating
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Actively heating air
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Heating a pool
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Generating space heat or cooling
Before embarking on any of the solar hot water projects out there, it is recommended that you perform a site survey to know just exactly how much solar hot water (or electricity) you can expect to reasonably get, knowing the area of the country you reside in and the solar patterns in your area. This survey is only about an hour long, but will prove invaluable.
Methods of Generating Heat from Solar Hot Water
The two most easily found, and as a result most common types of solar hot water producing machines are the flat-plate type of collector and the evacuated tube.
Flat Pate Collectors
Flat plate solar collectors are less expensive than the evacuated tube type , but you also tend to have to have more of them to attain the same result .These collectors are simply plates, as their name suggests, much like a car’s radiator inside.
Evacuated Tube Collectors
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to generate solar hot water that is becoming more popular today is to use evacuated tubes (or “collectors”). These are relatively new devices , and are glass tubes, removed of all air (a vacuum is a good heat conductor, and allows heat to flow freely from the outside to the inside metal plates than if there were air were inside ).
They contain small metal pipes that run from top to bottom of the tube with what are essentially heat fins attached. At about 6 feet long, they have connectors on each end to connect to the home’s heat circulation system.
A “transfer fluid” that is usually alcohol is pumped in the tubes that can generate, in some areas , as much as 80% of a home’s warmth. Since they are made of glass, they are semi-fragile when out of their mounts, but once attached I have seen them withstand very extreme wind and even hail without shattering.
Usually fixed together in groups of 10, the tubes are placed in a mount that, either as shown in the picture here, can hover above a roof, or can be mounted directly to it.
The heat created by your solar tubes can be used primarily in one of two ways to achieve the benefits mentioned earlier:
- Feeding the hot water produced back into a water heater. This greatly reduces the load on the heater, giving maximum efficiency and minimal load when the water heater is called upon to do its job. This way, instead of heating incoming water from supply temperature (usually around 48 degrees Fahrenheit), it might only have to take the intake water from 100 degrees to 120, or perhaps not even heat it at all.
- The heated water/glycol mix can then be pumped in tubes built into a radiant in-floor heating system. This heats the floor in a house using simple copper tubing routed just underneath the flooring itself. The difference this can make on a cold winter day is many times nothing short of amazing.
As a matter of fact , this may be a good oportunity to mention that a water heater blanket (for sale through most building supply houses) can save a lot of heat when wrapped around your heater. Head over to the solar hot water section of this site for more info.
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