Kessil

Solar hot water panel

houser

houser

Past President
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My neighbor and I have been talking for a while about alternate ways to heat my garage (carefully) using the sun. On Saturday bam he hooked me up with a 4'x8' solar hot water panel. I have several ideas of how to use it for my application just wondering if anyone had any inspiration to share. Thinking either storage tank in garage to hold heat or some sort of heat exchanger. I'm not considering using it to directly heat my tank water ;)
 
Get a circulation pump hooked up to a thermostat/controlled port (or skip if it's a "seasonal switch"), and plumb it up to an old radiator from the junk yard and a couple of computer fans. Oh ya, ghetto fabulous!
 
Solar water heaters were part of the discussion when we looked into installing our solar panels.

The company proposed running the sun-heated water into an insulated reservoir which goes into my water heater. The idea being that the water heater does not need to turn on as much.

We did not go with it because the water heater and solar heating unit would have been at the opposite ends of the house and the copper piping needed to heat/move the water would cost a lot.
 
+1 for Gomer's idea. Except you may want to use a couple of heater cores as they will be cleaner and more compact.
Plus with the smaller form you will lose less heat during the recirculation.

Alternatively you could pipe it to home made heating matts on the floor.
 
The problem I had with solar heating : You mostly need the heater at night, when it is cold and your lights are off.
Obviously not a lot of solar heating going on then. :)

Has anyone done the calculation on the size of a thermal storage tank you would need?
Maybe I will turn the heaters off one night for an hour, and get the key data points.
 
My issue is it's cold almost all the time. Let's say ambient is typically 7 to 20 below my tank temp (Indian summer excepted.) I'm thinking that I can harvest some sun in the morning hours through the mid afternoon when the halides kick on. Anything to offset my heating cost is a good thing.

Might take a few months, but certainly worthy of a test.
 
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