DIY Solar Heater Review

[cramar]

Anyone ever come across this site?
Anyone have opinions on the guys setup?

http://ffaat.pointclark.net/blog/archiv ... eater.html

 

[JasonLion]

He has a very nicely done web site, but his heater is not very efficient and won't produce much heat.

For solar heating you want to cover as large an area as possible with panels. Total heat available is mostly a function of panel size. His panel is quite small.

You also want to have as many parallel runs of pipe as possible. Long small pipe runs introduce a lot of flow resistance, which limits how much water you can move through the panel, which limits how much heat you can exact. He only has one long pipe, which is not at all efficient.

 

[cramar]

Planning out my solar set up and I started thinking about one thing which I saw on his site, my run will be going along side the pool, over to the garage roof, back alongside the pool and then back to return port to discharge. When I come back down from the garage roof it will be going right by the pool rail (I going to use an arbor between pool and garage and the PVC will go up/down the arbor).

So, when I come back down to the rail, can I simply discharge into the pool at that point instead of continue the run and tying back into just before the return port? I was thinking something like: 90 at the pool rail, short straight run along rail, 90 down towards pool water, short straight run, 45 angled so the discharge goes in the same direction as the return port. The discharge would be above the pool water.

Just wondering.

 

[JasonLion]

Yes, discharging the solar heated water directly into the pool with a jet/fountain kind of setup is fine. The one constraint when doing this is to have enough flow still going to the return jets to maintain water movement to bring debris to the skimmers. That usually isn't a problem, but sometimes large panels and small pumps don't leave enough non-solar flow to maintain circulation.

 

[cramar]

I was sort of thinking the same with regards to flow/pressure, I was thinking that dropping from 1.5" at the discharge to 1" or maybe even 1/2" would alleviate that, which is essentially what the return eyeball does.