Quote:
Originally Posted by Xringer
It's hard enough to keep up with the regular plumbing leaks.. I hate plumbing anyways.
My hot water system was pretty good quality. We just have very corrosive water here in Woburn.
The panels were pristine.. The HX and the tank were the leaky parts.
The controls and the pumps were top notch hardware. I still have those parts.
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The problems with a fluid based system were pointed out in that government study. They also concluded that when solar panel prices get below $1.50 a watt it will be worth going with PV panels instead of a fluid system.
"There are currently over 90 million water heaters in use within the United States (Zogg and Barbour 1996). The number of installed solar water heaters, by comparison, is less than 1 million due to
durability and installation issues, as well as
relatively high initial costs. Durability issues have included
freeze and fluid leakage problems, failure of pumps and their associated controllers, the loss of heat transfer fluids under stagnation conditions, and heat exchanger fouling. The installation of solar water heating systems has often proved difficult, requiring
roof penetrations for the piping that transports fluid to and from the solar collectors. The solar photovoltaic hot water system described in this paper avoids the durability and installation problems associated with current solar thermal water heating systems (Fanney and Dougherty 1997; Dougherty and Fanney 2001; Fanney et al. 1997)."
fire.nist.gov/bfrlpubs/build02/PDF/b02012.pdf