After ten years on the system, how’s it working for you? Did you make changes to anything? Now I see how the on demand hot water will work with this system. I thought by what I’m watching that the water temperature was going to be much higher. Do you have any kind of electrical generation going on also?
I have a correction for the math. He needed to have found the average temperature rise across sensors 2,3 and 4 which comes out to 34.8 degrees. (34.8 degrees) (80 gallons) (8.34 BTU per gallon)= 23.1K BTU. Great Video by the way!
Did you think about mounting the system on the wall of the second floor? It would be out of the way of the shade from the trees and the kids soccer balls. A vertical mount would collect less snow and may result in less excess heat in summer when the sun is higher in the sky.
The temp differential between the collector temp and the water temp is way out of line. 10-30F. is a good amount between the collector and lower tank temperature. That collector requires a flow rate of .80 - 1 GPM for each collector. The flow rate may be set too low. At time stamp 6:25, when looking at the pump station, there is no pressure in the system. All solar thermal systems run better with pressure in the loop. At zero pressure in the line set the expansion tank to the pressure you want in the system, then purge and fill to proper pressure. Also the temp gauges show cooler temps on the hot gauge side than on the cooler temp side returning to the collector. The controller on-off set-point may require some adjusting. Given the 80 gallon storage tank and the single collector, your water temps should finish around 105 - 120F. at that time of the year daily water usage included.
system is designed to produce 100% of needs during summer with very little over production, if there is any excess, the top of the collector has a heat dump. If you had a pool or hot tub you could stick the extra heat there.
@Fearlessthinker Actually, the house has a 3 foot overhang, but with the 40 mile an hour winds, it just piled snow everywhere against the back of the house. But a blanket or sheet over the collector, might work.
What does the pump run off of ? Electric? Our water tank is set on 120 degrees which doesn’t seem that hot sometimes. It appears your taking a lukewarm shower all the time unless it’s summer. I can’t help from thinking whenever has anyone ever heard someone say “ man I can’t wait to get home to take a lukewarm shower “. I don’t think it’s worth it in the winter months. When I’ve been outside working in the cold weather all day I look forward to getting home getting in a nice warm or should I say hot shower. I guess it would be ok in the summer. If the system cost $5000 to $8000 where’s the savings over time? Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the video. Really helps me to know I’ll not be getting rid of our hot water tank anytime soon. . Been thinking about a tankless water heater though. A buddy down the road has one and never runs out of hot water. The only time it uses any electric is when you turn on the hot water.
@@93Badash 100°C = water boiling 0° = freezing water In my opinion this is more relevant in everyday use ( like weather, cooking )than the 100°f = body temp 0°f = arbitrary Besides that it can be easily converted to kelvin which is important since it is the SI unit
With American and international viewership the presenters need to start showing both. When I’m seeing celcius temperatures I keep an extra window open with the conversion chart to know the f temperature
The system would cost about 5k to 8k depending upon where you live. The variable in costs is typically around the installation costs. This is before any state or federal incentives. The federal government also has a 30% tax credit. Many states have many rebates too. If you can handle the job yourself, you could probably do if for under 4k.
Where does a person shop for one of these panels?. How do they work in the Midwest where cloudy days not bright sunny, but cold days like in the Rocky mountains are normal? How is unwanted heat disbursed during the summer time?
You should insulate all your pipes with armor flex 1 inch wall. You could have used a taco 009 and a similar controller I use resolve som 6,7,8.good luck looks great get more collectors and storage..storage is the key to heating with solar.
With Natural gas rates right now in Ontario, it looks like you would have saved around 10cents on one of the shortest days of the year. My guess is you could make about 50 cents worth of heat in summer this way. $15/month then. $3/mo in Dec, Jan, Feb. I live in Ontario and I'm planning to use my PV panels to heat water once my batteries are full. No outdoor plumbing to freeze that way. I heat water and my floor with a coil in my cookstove firebox for winter. It works very well.
Very good Video All I'm looking for is a sun tracking computer for my concentrated solar hot water system which will heat my house and hot water needs. Everything else is ready to go, just need to track the sun in Manitoba, Canada
Converting form BTUs to kwh because that's what I am used to, I make it about 5.1kwh per day, on this short snowy day. This would be enough hot water for two people I think. Its not enough to heat a home (but I think US homes tend not to use hot water for heating as we do in the UK). However its an impressive result considering the snow. What's it like in summer?
OK ... let me get this right. This only raised your temps to a luke warm shower temp. So you still needed the backup to get the water for a shower. I realize that it's only having to raise the temps from 60ish instead of near freezing. Down here in the south it would take a long time to pay back the system. I use NG to heat my water. Typically the temps are in the upper 40's during most of the short winter and we get a temp boost in the summer as temps are in the 90's and low 100's.
Where is the general location this was done? It will matter if you are in Maine or Canada, i mean i know you said alot about light and heat in the description, but nothing tells us your general location. I seen the snow and i seen the 30 degree temp but that is not the entire story, the rest of the story is where you are at in relation to latitude and longitude. This gives indication how much sun energy you can capture, the angle you are at with the sun is more direct the farther south you go knowing the sun is in the southern hemisphere in the winter.
nice video BUT snow is a problem because the tubes are so well insulated no very little heat from the tubes is available to melt the remaining snow BUT I guess if you are serious about collecting heat in the winter evac tubes could work. I herd there are leek problems from time to time.. I prefer DIY collectors.
John Canivan what I like is a combination of both. Cheap flat ones, since they are easy to come by nowadays anyway, good for collecting ambient light. And 1 vacuumpipe for the colder days.
That is only $1 in electricity at 0.21 $ per kWh. $1800 in PV modules (6x300 watt panels) would have made the same amount of electric on a December day, but would have been larger.
Hi. Thank you for the video. We are thinking about solar thermal to heat our school's greenhouse. What was the exterior temperature at the time you removed the snow from the tubes? I apologize if I missed it being mentioned in the video. Cheers. -J
Not exactly the case, agreed that this system cannot handle 100 percent of my needs, 10% of this is because of shading. Normally, you will never size a system for 100% winter requirements. This is because during the summer you will have significant amounts of overheating. One exception is that if you have a pool or hot tub, you can dump this heat there. Killing two birds with one stone.
i'd like to heat my indoor pool this way, live in NC. I wonder how many tubes it would take and if it would warm the water enough to swim in the winter.
Wrong! Average temp sensor in tank rose 35 degrees, so only 5,804 BTU for the day, but still doable for 1 or 2 people taking a 5 minute at low water pressure. If you had enough of these panels and tanks and a hydronic floor heating system then your whole house would have free heat! Solar water heating is 10 times more efficient and less expensive than solar electric PV panels!
Actually you are wrong. 35F X 80 gal X 8.35 lb/gal = 23,000 BTU. About 1/4 gal of propane or $0.50. And that is with a huge 30 tube system and expensive control system. I have a 10 tube collector -1 that a deer broke. When the water is hot in the collector the pump turns on. That's it. Barely enough in the summer for 2 people.
what do you use to insulate the pipes taking hot liquid to the tank? i have copper coming out of the collector which turns to pex as it drops down over the roof... found that copper gets so hot that it actually melted foam insulation sleeves, so was thinking of wrapping in fibreglass, then silver foil bubble wrap painted black... or abs pipe cut in half, then glued back together over the pipes/insulation.
Good effort but that's a lot of expensive hardware that has to be purchased, maintained and, eventually replaced. Also, I find that showering in water below about 103F starts to feel rather cold. Is it really worth it compared to just using electric or gas?
He is using solar as a pre-heater. He showed an electric on-demand hot water heater that makes up the difference... It is a lot cheaper to take solar heated water from 90 up to 116 than city or well water from 55 up to 116. These things pay for themselves with energy savings in a few years and they last as long as copper and glass last (much longer than photovoltaics). It probably came with a couple extra tubes and you can buy more for less than 40$ each.
Ok, 17412 BTU are about 5.1kWh, right? At about 25c/kWh, you just saved or produced $1.3 assuming 100% efficieny in an electrical heater. So let's say $1.5. that's $45/month. How much did your installation cost so as to determine the return? thanks for the great video and I'm jealous of your snow..
i would add a photovoltaic solar cells a single one off switch that shunts all of the power of the solar on the roof and out the back garden into that boiler via a low voltage heating element just to bring it up to a minimum of soon as the tank reaches the correct temperature either a timer switch or a temperature switch would chuck the solar power back into my battery bank that way your not waiting all day to heat up your tank.
The exposed tubes are all using a glycol solution and the collector its self uses some sort of molten salt that can't freeze. They use these in Alaska. All the "water" in the system is safe inside the house where it belongs.
So it almost gets hot enough at the end of the day to take a decently warm shower in the winter. But isn't hot enough to he considered hot water at any point. Even at that, you would be using all hot water of you wanted a warm shower and no cold making the reserve tank go away very quickly. I think it needs some work still.
Not sure what you're trying to say here. BTU's are BTU's. We heat the tank the most we can with the sun. Thats all savings. What ever we can't heat, we heat with tankless electric, which give us another shot to use the sun since we have solar PV. If we don't have enough solar PV, we use the grid. Its a perfect system.
@@Caseycallender In late spring, summer and early fall its likely doing 100% of the hot water needs. Still not following you here. That said, what makes this a harder sell finaically these days are two things. 1- Due to fracking, gas is cheap right now so its not cost competitive. 2- other solar options have more incentives so its not something most people start with on their homes. These systems are used all over china and india.
I hope he hasn't responded because he has died from legionella infection. It seems like the system draw directly grom the volume in the tank. It very risky having a tank sit at these temps.
This just tells me it is not worth it to install this system. For the cost and where this system is installed (couldn't be worse-on the ground and shaded) for probably around $7,000 there was a 17,000 btu gain. A small space heater does more than that in an hour. Maybe if this was mounted where it should have been (on the roof) and more of them, there would be an appreciable amount of heat gain but the cost would go way up as well.
agreed, fortunately for us in NJ, it's not that common a problem. I moved the collector when we did passive house addition. There it has a little bit of an overhang, of course during wind that doesn't do much.
Wo what did this system cost? I've thought about adding a heat pipe system to supplement my old school, cast-iron radiator hydronic heat system, but don't know about the payback. I happen to be lucky in that half of my roof is unobstructed, about at 45 degrees and facing due south.
no mention of the ambient temperature outside. Where I am it can get down to -30 -40 celsius. so... sno on the ground means very little to me. big difference between 0 and -40
I live in Canada, so similar situation. My system makes loads of hot water down to about -20C (-10F) at which point hoarfrost no longer burns off the tubes. Since my panels are up on the roof I have no easy way to remove that frost so from then on I rely on the woodstove with coil. It's really something to see the hot water I can produce on a winter's day!
