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sjvsworldtour wrote:I like the idea of a solar water heater too. Your water heater eats up a crap load of power whether you are using the water or not. Converting the solar energy straight to heat makes more sense that collecting it as electricity and then converting that to heat. Remove the middle-man and get rid of some waste.

sounds like a lot of sense. Also might be worth doing half and half? Have one section for panels the other section for heating water, but after looking on YT it doesn't look expensive to set this kind of thing up. So cheap it might even be worth having several of them set up to become off the grid? I don't know enough about solar power to know if that's feasible but with sun tracking panels gaining upwards of 20% power increase just from tracking the sun thats gotta add up, surely. Only downside is the power you lose to the motor but I guess thats only an issue on smaller setups.

For hot water (ok WARM water)... Could run thick/large diameter (I'm thinking 1 or 2 inch) black pipe back and forth on the roof. Let the sun heat it up, and gravity feed it to a shower/sink. I know lots of people use black pipe heated by the sun for pools.

Wow my grammar sucks today.

EDIT: Yes you'd have to pump it up there, but you could do that manually with a hand pump.

It seems that a windmill driven pump is in order here.

sjvsworldtour wrote:It seems that a windmill driven pump is in order here.

Ah! Lovely idea. I wonder what would be more efficient... windmill power directly connected to pump or windmill power to charge batteries to power a pump? And if it does it directly, what do you do if there is no wind?

I am certain it would be more efficient to just hook the windmill directly to the pump, but the no wind case is a good point.

sjvsworldtour wrote:I am certain it would be more efficient to just hook the windmill directly to the pump, but the no wind case is a good point.

Make it windmill/bike powered?

The other thing would be the pump filling a container and not circulating the water directly to the heat exchanger. That way you are effectively charging up the system for when you need it.

OOO oooo OOO how about a tank on the roof with a convection system going. I think this is how it'd work.

Have the tank up high, then have the black tubing run lower than it. The water will heat up in the tubing, and then since it's warmer it'll go up and cooler water will make its way down into the tubes. I'm sure we could think of some type of system.

Like this!!

corrado33 wrote:OOO oooo OOO how about a tank on the roof

why is this the first thing i saw in my mind?


Sounds like a passive solar water heater:

Trouble is, you still have to get the water up to the tank.

In countries like India, usually there are water tanks on top of buildings to provide water pressure, so this is a good idea. Also, there is no reason the tank can't heat the water also. It just means painting it black and trying to isolate it thermally.