Randall's Blog

Yesterday I finished up the installation of the solar hot water system. We bought the system last July from a company called Solar Components but I was so busy with various projects that it has taken a while to finish it up. It's also NOT a one man operation. Chris helped me install the panels on the roof and bring the storage tank into the basement (see earlier posts). I figured I would work on the "inside" stuff when the weather was cold - good thing too as this is what the outside system looked like on December 21st:

The recent work has been mostly plumbing - hooking the big storage tank up to feed warmed water to our existing electric water heater and hooking the panels to the coil in the tank. I originally was going to place the circulating pump on the wall opposite the tank:

However, I saw in various web photos of installations that it could be mounted on the tank and I switched it so it sits on the storage tank. I have to say that this system (which is made in Germany) seems to be well made but it is NOT set up for easy homeowner installation. It's not sold this way so I'm not complaining, I knew what I was getting myself into here. I was told that an installation of this kind might cost $2,500 so I am saving a lot of money by doing it myself. The company that sold it does provide English translations of the various manuals but some of the German symbols and abbreviations are not that familiar. Anyway, the plumbing went pretty smoothly - sweating pipes isn't that hard. This is the hot water heater piping before:

And this is the after:

These are the pipes coming in from the roof:

In order to sweat these collector pipes I had to get into the cistern (through the hole to the right in the above photo - not an easy task) and once I was in I had to call on Debbie to hand me stuff because I didn't want to get in & out more than once. The cistern might make a nice bomb shelter (the walls are almost a foot thick) but it's pretty claustrophobic.

The next part was hooking up the controller. This turns on the circulating pump when the panels are warmer than the water in the storage tank. It has two temperature sensors I had to attach - one on the tank and one on the panels. I used a long extension cord (I cut off the ends) to connect the sensors to the controller (the green cords) and another (orange) extension cord to hook up the electric.

The final task was to fill the system with the 50/50 glycol solution and test it. The glycol is a bright pink:

I thought I could just use the pump to get the solution into the panels but it turns out that they are too high and the pump is not able to get the liquid past 16 feet. I had to go up to the roof and pour the solution into the panels. Once I tightened a small valve that was leaking glycol on the roof there didn't seem to be any leaks outside. Unfortunately, it was a little sunny yesterday morning and this made the procedure a bit more difficult. I did get it done and after running the pump a few times to get the air bubbles out it started working - I mean heating up the water in the tank! I wasn't expecting it to really work until the Spring - yesterday was a pretty warm day though.

I added some insulation to the pipes after I was sure there were no leaks. I did have two small leaks inside but these were easy to fix. This is the circulating pump with the expansion tank off to the right.

I do have one last vexing leak in the pipe that brings cold water into the storage tank (bottom left in the above photo) - I guess I didn't tighten the connection enough and fixing it is going to be a pain. At the moment it just drips on to the floor and into the sump pump so I can wait a while - sometimes leaks will seal themselves.

I'll report back the next warm sunny day about how well it works.