Solar Hot Water

by Kitchen DIY

I just found 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 provide you with 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:

#Actively heating air
#Passive space heating
#Generating space heat or cooling
#Heating a pool

Before trying any of the solar hot water projects out there, it is highly 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 assessment is just about an hour long, but will prove invaluable.

Methods of Generating Heat from Solar Hot Water
The two most popular , 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 aren’t as costly as the evacuated tube type, but more of them are needed for the same results.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 fairly new , and are glass tubes, evacuated of all air (a vacuum is a poor insulator , and will allow heat to flow freely from the outside to the inside metal plates than if air were inside the tube ).

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 their ends to connect to your house’s heat circulation system.
A “transfer fluid” that is usually alcohol is circulated in the tubes that can generate, in some areas, as much as 80% of a home’s heat. Since they are made of glass, they are semi-fragile when removed from their mounts, but once attached I have seen them withstand very harsh wind and even hail while not shattering.
Usually found together in groups of 10, these tubes are placed in a mount that, as shown in the picture here, can be affixed a few inches above a roof, or can be mounted directly to it.

The heat created by your solar tubes can be used mainly in one of two ways to achieve the payoff mentioned earlier:

1. 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 on 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.
2. The heated water/glycol mix can then be circulated into tubes incorporated in a radiant in-floor heating system. This heats the floor of a house using simple copper tubing placed just below the flooring material itself. The difference this can make on a cold winter day is simply amazing.

Coincidentally, this may be a good time to mention that a water heater blanket (for sale at most building supply contractor houses) can save a lot of heat when wrapped around your heater. Head on over to the solar hot water section of this site for more info.