Nathan did a really nice job of building and documenting his solar water heating system.
The system is an offshoot of the $1K solar water heating systems with some useful new design features.
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| The twinwall glazing is a very nice look. |
The system uses the usual 300 ft coil of PEX pipe as the heat exchanger, but Nathan recoiled the PEX for better heat transfer performance:
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The 300 ft of PEX is recoiled into a two layer coil for
more water exposure to each coil. |
Be aware that this recoiling can be a challenge -- think about about your method if you don't want to end up imprisoned in a coil of angry PEX.
Nathan also offers details and source code for making an open source Arduino based differential controller.
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| Arduino based differential controller. |
Nathan has the Arduino based controller equipped with an Ethernet shield. This allows the Ardduino to log data directly through his router to an free online logging service called
pachube.com -- there is no need to have a PC running 24/7 for this kind of logging, and it gives you access to the data from anywhere -- very nice!
All the details on Nathan's website....
For more on the $1K solar water heater and dozens of other DIY solar water heaters...
Gary
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