![]() |
|||
Product Design | My Artwork | Living Sustainably | |
Art Engineering | Levitation Kit | Solar Power | Chevy Volt |
Solar Heating | Thermal Windows | ||
Contact | About Me | Solar Hot Water | Solar Mower |
SOLAR HEATING SYSTEM
Detailed blog about the design
and installation of this system
LIVE PERFORMANCE STATS
Page takes a while to load and does not work right with Safari or Chrome
browsers,
try switching to Firefox or Internet Explorer if the page jumps around on you.
![]() |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
● sensor location | updates every 10 seconds |
48 HOUR chart updates every 10 minutes hover mouse over chart to see details |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() 4 - 4X8ft. Sun Earth collectors |
COLLECTOR TEMP. |
Heat exchanger pump: |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() Rheem 80 gal. water heater used as storage tank |
STORAGE TEMP. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() Bosch Aquastar AQ125-PLP-S |
Chart shows propane tankless heater
on/off cycles. Heater is: (turns on when solar tank drops below 120F and pump(s) are turned on) |
Baseboard pump: Radiant floor pump: |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() My 2nd floor office/lab |
2nd FLOOR OFFICE TEMP. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
OUTSIDE TEMP. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Things to notice: ![]() The propane heater only operates if the storage temperature is below 140F, and it brings the temperature up to 140 to feed the radiant loops. In the absence of solar gain the storage tank will settle out between 70 and 110°F. 110°F is the return temperature of the hot water from two baseboard radiators on the second floor, while 70° is the return temperature from the concrete radiant floor. The collectors augment this base temperature when the sun is shining. When you see the propane heater short cycling - that is when it is heating the 2nd floor via radiators, and the storage temperature typically will rise in steps each time it runs if it was below 110F. On sunny days you will see the room temperature rise in the late afternoon due to the direct solar gain of sunlight entering the west facing windows. This effect can be significant in spring and fall. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I drain and fill the collectors seasonally since they would over heat in
the summer. If antifreeze gets too hot it will turn acidic and rot
the copper pipes. We have a long heating season in Maine and I
fill after the first frost and drain once temperatures get above 40F
consistently.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I also monitor the
solar domestic water heating system on my house, and the
solar electric power
generated by my solar array. If you are an electronics geek
like me, then you need to know about the technology behind this web
page. It is a device called an
ioBridge that is
designed to monitor and control things through the internet. It is
affordable and relatively easy to set up. In order to monitor the
AC and DC pumps on this page, I built my
own interfaces to the
ioBridge. Here are the
schematics for them. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |