Solar

[Bass]

Hi Brew, April, Ari & Scott, Carol and Everyone else!

Hey, I've been thinking on-and-off that considering all the effort and $ we put into caring for our babies, and how easily all our effort could be wiped out by an extended power outage during a cold winters day, there must be a shop that sells small solar backup generators for the home?
Something that you could plug your filter and heaters into. The generator would only need small panels.. easy enough to drill through from the tank to the outside wall of your house and then mount the collector on the sunny side.

I've spent a while looking online for one of these but had no luck so far.

[gump]

Hey Bass,
I'm also very interested in Solar power, but it is STILL very expensive. Our short daylight hours in the winter here in Canada also restrict the amount of power one can "economically" store. I'm trying to gear up my cottage/ retirement home but I'm afraid it will take a lifestyle change somewhat. Keep us posted on what you find out. How big is your fishroom & how much power are you looking for?
Pierre

[brewmaster15]

Hi Chris!
How are you!

A possibility may be to use a Dc car battery with an inverter for supplying your tanks. Many automotive supply shops round here now sell solar panel rechargers for car batteries though off hand I don't know their efficiency.

theres a newslist I belong to to that is real great for green power...something I have a lot of interest in...
the main site is... http://evworld.com

might interest you.

take care,
al

[RichieE]

I looked into solar pannels last year. My understanding is that they are still not cost affective. The reasons someone might buy them are they dont have access to power or they are more concerned with saving the enviroment than saveing money. A generator still seems to make more sense unfortunately. Rich

[Rick_May]

the problem I see with using solar as a backup source of power is 1. dosen't work at night. 2. usualy power outages are the result of bad weather so the solar wouldn't work very well then either.

[daninthesand]

Did someone say solar? ;D

I've ton a TON of research on the net into solar heating of water. I think its application for a fish room,especially a centrally filtered one would be ideal. Yes, commercially available solar collectors (the kind that produce electricity) are way out of line. Not really practical in my eyes. But collectors that have water pumped through them are (from what I've seen) relatively easy to make as long as you are handy. I have been in contact with a local solar heating company and they feel for simply heating water its quite possible to make it cost effective. It is commonly done to help heat the hot water tanks to a given temp so that it does not take so much energy to heat it up to the temp reached by most household water heaters.

When I informed the rep. that I was only interested in heating the water to 88, he said that it would be very easy and (relatively) inexpensive to do.

Especially if you make your own solar collectors. ;)

I must caution that I have not tried this yet, but I was planning on making a small prototype this summer and see how it goes.

Some of the links I've collected, ignoring those that were IMO useless, are as follows.

http://www.diydata.com/projects/solarpanel/solarcollector.htm#solarcollectordesign
http://www.bigginhill.co.uk/solar.htm
http://www.lecad.uni-lj.si/~leon/other/sse/
http://www.solar-design.demon.co.uk/solar/intro.htm

Basically this is how it goes. You build your collector. Put it on your roof (garage is great place) facing south (assuming you live in N. america) Angled at a degree that corresponds to the average angle the sun is in the horizon during the time of year you plan to use the heater.

Get a circulating pump capable of running your water up to the garage (need a pretty decent pump head) through the collector and down to your fish room. Grundfos makes pumps for this purpose and are commonly available on-line:

http://www.plumbingwarehouse.com/images/grund-up1518su.jpg
Now you could run the water that actually runs through your fish tanks up to the collector but for obvious reasons this is not smart. Contamination of the water is one. Another is in the winter (it gets to -35 here >:() how do you keep the collector from freezing without dismantling it? So you need a double loop system. One loop runs through the collector and pump and associated tubing. This one contains antifreeze/antiboil solution.

Somewhere in the loop you have a heat exchanger that does exactly that: exchanges heat from one loop to the other without the two liquids (fish water and antifreeze) mixing. If this sounds too iffy for you in the sense of disasterous results if a mixing should occur, (You'd basically kill all your fish on the system :'(), then you could heat the fish room (assuming you had one) itself by incorporating forced air heated by the solar system.

The most complicated parts of the whole system are how to get rid of the waste heat and control the temp. While actually heating your water, the solar panel maintains a temperature below that which would melt it! I've read many failed attempts of DIY panels being irreparably damaged when the circulating water shuts off.

However when the system shuts down the heating loop to your water, the panels continue to collect heat, but with non of it being transferred to your water. So you need a bypass loop that opens up and disperses the heat. Some suggest a large coil of pipe buried underground to dissipate the heat to the ground. Others suggest a fan driven cooling system, much like the radiator in your car to get rid of excess heat.

Temperature control is a bit complicated. Its not enough (apparently) to just bypass the fish water to the waste heat loop, when the temp is reached. I've been speaking with a local plumbing supplier that deals with temp controls for system like this and they have me interested. REAL interested.

I could go on and on. Hopefully, if time permits and, and budget allows, I can actually try this. Seems easy enough.

I have not priced this out exactly but i figure it would pay for itself in about two years if I also preheat my household hotwater tank with it as well.

In my mind even if I break even or even if not, at least i can sleep better at night knowing I'm not wasting all that energy.

I'd sleep even better if I could find a way to not waste so much darn water!!!!!!

Hope this gets you started.

Daniel

PS. Rick you do have a apoint though about a backup system, for the winter and for the times if there is a power outage. Power outage is difficult to circumvent in ANY system. In my case winter will see the system I already have in place come to good use. My trusty Tronics and EBO's ;D

PSS. If anyone out there has thought about doing this, or has actually done this, I'd love to hear from you. Good, and especially bad experiences! I undertand a lot of Auzzies preheat their hotwater tanks with solar to save on energy costs. Brits too. IM me if you can shed some of your experience.