Water heating

One of the easiest and best ways to get a return on Your investment is to use solar for heating water. It can be as simple as a black garden hose lying in the sun to solar collectors tracking the sun, pumps pushing the water to and from a insulated holding tank.

Heating water is much simpler than making electricity. Even a laser etched high quality PV panel is only about 15 percent efficient. This means that and 3 x 3 foot area in direct sun and near the equator will produce about 150 of the aproximately 1,000 watts of sunlight energy. Water panels, properly installed and pumped at the proper volumes will return around 50 percent of suns heat to the storage tanks.

Hot tubs and even worse, swimming pools are often heated with propane. There is no reason for this in the southwest! Even if you already have the gas heater, consider putting in a panel or two. Most larger swimming pools have a circulator pump already and it can be used to boost water up and then drained back through the panel and back into the pool. A panel in this situation will return all of its potential to the swimming pool, the rest will be made up by the propane ‘backup’.

My tankless water heater. it uses 2 D flashlight batteries to start the burner.

If you don’t want to go so far as to go solar for water heating, at least consider a tankless water heater. This is a type of heater that heats water on the fly, as its needed. There is no large tank of water kept hot all the time. Incoming water is heated just enough to raise it to the desired temperature. The fact that the water supply temperature and flow varies means that the flame is adjusted to keep the desired temperature constant.

water coming into the house from outside may be very cold, mine hovers around 40 degrees. i plan to install a small tank of water that will be inside the house. it will be aprox 20 gallons and will give the water a chance to approach room temperature before entering the heater.

Installing a tankless water heater could be the first step to a solar water heating system. If the incoming water was already hot, the heater would stay off, If the water was not hot enough, the heater would help. This would be a very reliable and cheap to operate system for a home, Laundrymat or any commercial enterprise that uses alot of hot water.

Another thing I like about my tankless water heater is that it is so compact. it hangs on the wall and uses no floor space. pretty cool.

I can be reached via email, at:
solarman@netmdc.com