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Solar Hot Water links for people that needs Idea's

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bryan1

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I don't have a link but I do have some useful math that will greatly help a person figure out what they may be getting energy wise from a system based on basic measurements and readings using these three common volume and energy definitions.
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1 BTU, British thermal unit: A unit of heat equal to the amount of heat required to raise one pound of water one degree Fahrenheit at one atmosphere pressure.
One gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds.
1 BTU/hour is equal to 3.415 watt/hours.
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The simplest way to determine that is to know your realistic flow rate and temperature change for a given stage of the system which works like this.

If your heat collectors are producing a 40 degree F temperature change from the incoming line to the outgoing line and your pump or gravity flow rate is estimated to be 5 gallons per minute you can factor that out to find how much heat you are capturing with the collector.

5 gallons of water weighs 5 * 8.34 = 41.7 pounds and it is gaining 40 degrees F in one minute which means 41.7 * 40 = 1668 BTU's per minute is being transfered to the water. That value may at first not should like a whole lot but consider that home heating appliances are rated in BTU's per hour that 1668 BTU value would need to be changed into a hourly heat rate, 60 * 1668 = 100,080 BTU.

The electrical energy equivalent to this 100,080 BTU's per hour the collector is capturing equates to 100,080 / 3.415 = 29,306 Watt hours or 29.306 Kilowatt hours of electricity.
 
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To me , the early (1970's) ideas of solar as water and space heating, are more practical than the new electric producing ones are. The technology is better now than then for producing electric but in the long run water and space heating is still a more practical use of solar. People now don't seem to even consider the savings you can get on heating. I remember all the projects in the Mother Earth News magazine before it became a arts and craft magazine
 
I remember all the projects in the Mother Earth News magazine before it became a arts and craft magazine

My mom gave me a years subscription to Mother Earth News and I found it horribly disappointing. After about three issues I just called it Para Science Scammer News and tossed it in the trash when it showed up and never bothered reading it. :(

I remember many of the assorted magazines we got when I was in high school and loved reading the How To and DIY alternative energy related articles and learned much of my basic science from them but sadly I don't see much of that type of articles in any magazines any more either.
What they do have tends to be marginally too outright poorly written and far too often biased toward specific dealers or brands over priced junk with very limited real science or true DIY with common materials and components behind it. :mad:

It would be great if someone has a stash of those types of old school articles and could post them here! :)
 
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I have most of the old (late 70's to late 80's) Mother Earth magazines. Thats when they had the real information in them. Plus a ton of the Backwoodsman magazines. What kind of articles are you looking for?
 
I have most of the old (late 70's to late 80's) Mother Earth magazines. Thats when they had the real information in them. Plus a ton of the Backwoodsman magazines. What kind of articles are you looking for?

Mainly I was curious as to if any of them have reasonable relevance to this thread and how much work is it to possibly get them scanned and posted here?
 
Man, he didn't get abused what so ever
He was posting links that were not relevent and the links are to huge pages that required lots of study to find anything.

They were not the type ofwater heater I was looking for and I made this clear.

If you can't speak disapproval freely as you would approval then your site is worthless.

You have taken this attacking stance before bryan1-why have you removed the thread? Discrimination I think
 
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Mother Earth News sells an archive DVD (1970-2010) - though it's not very cheap:

MOTHER EARTH NEWS ARCHIVE DVD: 1970 - 2010

Much of their older stuff is available online, too - for example:Solar-Water-Heater.aspx

**broken link removed**
**broken link removed**

At one time it was possible to easily browse the archive (via simple URL changes), but they appear to have made that a thing of the past; now you'd have to script a scraping system to pull the max content (perhaps based on some keywords, if you only wanted solar-based articles or such, for instance) - not something easily done, obviously...
 
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