Solar energy can be harnessed to our benefit. Only, there are many impediments to the road of successful capture of solar energy, and only with research and a desire to do things yourself can you maybe reach a better return on investment, or a quicker one, should I say.
When I installed our pool heat pump in May 2010, it struck me that the heatpump was taking in the heat from the ambiant air, rejecting cool air, while not father than 30 feet from there, my A/C unit was doing exactly the opposite. Extracting the heat from the inside of the house thus rejecting heat outside. Why not put them together I thought? Does it make sense that in the winter, we heat our houses while a fridge inside the heated house has to generate his own cold? If the fridge was hooked to an outside vent, it could work on almost not energy at all, except for the energy needed to work some sort of automated damper.
All of this got me thinking about how we use energy, and upon doing some research on the internet, I came accross solar collectors, that use the heat of the sun to heat water. This water is then kept in a storage for later use, all of this at a low cost. I found it amazing that you could do that. I wondered however, why it was this was not something that was on the roof of every house in the country. The cost of such systems is the main deterrent, especially here in North America, where the cost of electricity is so low. For instance, in Quebec, the one kilo-watt of electricy costs more or less 6.5 cents whereas it cost five times as much in Germany, around 30-35 cents per kilo-watt. The measure of any system you put into place to allow proper determination of cost/benefits is called return on investment, or ROI. In essence, if a solar system allows you to save 500$ of electricity, but cost you 8 000$ to install, it would then take 16 years to pay back the whole system and start saving money. This makes it a lot less interesting here, where cost of electricity is low, but what about Germany, where the 500$ savings might actually be more like 2500$ in savings, thus reducing your break out period down to less than 4 years. By the middle of the fourth year, you would start saving money.
Knowing all of this, I started to research ways to build your own system, so that cost would not be so much of an issue, and make it a better ROI all around. There are many websites out there, where people are sharing their findings about such systems, and one DIY'er could very well use all of the information to design and build there own system. www.builditsolar.com is certainly a goldmine when it comes to this kind of information.
That was my original goal, to build everything from the ground up, so that I could save more money quickly. What happened though was that I was keeping an eye out on private sales on websites likes craiglist or kijiji, and I happened to be able to score three old norsun flat panel collectors for 400$. I though I would not even have to bother building the collectors.
Next was the tank. Solar storage tanks can be quite expensive, and accordingly, I was going to build my own. For that, I needed a good liner to put inside the framing I would built, but I never got to find the proper liner. Instead, I found some brand new tanks that some guy was selling. He had meant to venture into a business with someone else, and they had imported the panels and tanks from Turkey. Unfortunately, his partner passed away, and he never did anything with the tanks and panels. This allowed me to get 7 panels and 3 storage tanks for a very good price.
Now, I have done some research about the proper pipe size to use for such a system, and it can be quite complicated, as the number of panels, the height of the roof and other things can have an impact on the proper water flow you need. You also need to consider which kind of design you will go with. There are many different designs, but in Northern climates where frost is an issue, you either have to go with either a pressurized glycol system, or a drainback system. Drainback is self-explanatory in the sense that when the pump turns off, all of the water drains back down in the storage tank, inside the house where it cannot freeze.
That is the design I decided on, so my search for a proper pump is based on that and the fact that my roof is 34 feet high, so the pump will have to have sufficient power.
Update: Jan. 19th 2015
I have yet to make a decision on the pump and the pipes, so my project is postpone to the greek calends. Am thinkering with my RV Solar pv system as of late. See my other posts!
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