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first comfortable solar-powered bath
Thursday, September 22 2005
The hot water coming down from the solar panel this morning was deceptively hot, so hot that I couldn't keep my hand on the pipe. But it turned out that this was just the water that had been heating since before I turned the circulator pump on. The moment cold water from the loop passed into the panel, the temperature of the water coming down from the panel started dropping precipitously. It was a real bummer, but it reflected my ignorance of how these systems work. A couple hours later the temperature of the water coming back from the panel was much hotter and so was the water going up to it. It turns out that solar heating of a hydronic loop is an incremental process and you can't expect the panel to raise the temperature of water going through it from room temperature to scalding in a single pass.
Later today I was able to take a comfortable bath using water that had been heated exclusively by the sun. Still later Gretchen took a perfectly reasonable shower. The system works, at least as this time of year (the equinox). Once I get the panel tilted up at the ideal angle for the season, I should be able to collect solar energy even in the winter time. Now all need to do is get beyond the hurdles that the structural engineer will place in front of me, beginning with his visit tomorrow morning. It's hard to focus on anything else with the potential trauma of his authoritarian decree dangling over me.
In other news, Kathy the CAS director was over this morning with her stinky yellow lab Murphy (who, in this season, smells like cooked peas, and not in a good way). I was helping Kathy put together an HTML mailing and web updates related to a terrible miscarriage of animal cruelty justice. Meanwhile Murphy, who spends most of his awake-time thinking about what next to put in his stomach, had slipped off across the road and had somehow stolen a bagel from the neighbors who live in that 1970s-style house.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?050922 feedback
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