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Old 07-14-20, 04:29 PM   #1
WillyP
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Join Date: Jul 2020
Location: Virginia
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Default Need help designing a solar water heater for radiant floor heat

Anybody who has ever owned (or operated) a well-designed greenhouse*1 knows how well heat sinks work. However anybody who has owned a poorly designed greenhouse knows (without a doubt) that heat sinks are nothing more than the fantasy of wild eyed preppers, who believe heat loss is a government conspiracy. The truth is someplace in the middle.
I believe, the main key to building an efficient heat sink is: you must have an insulated barrier that goes well below the frost line. Without that barrier you will be trying to heat frozen ground. There also needs to be an insulated barrier that goes all the way to the wall system and integrates with the insulation system in the walls. A good rule of thumb is; start with a foot below the frost line, then add another foot for every three feet the frost line goes down. So if your frost line if two feet down, you should build a four foot deep barrier. If the frost line is six feet deep the barrier should be at least nine feet deep. This can be shortened by adding “insulation wings”. The wings are basically a panel of foam insulation laid flat below the frost line. I have learned this through working in several greenhouses.
SO I am building a house in central Maine. The frost line is about six to seven feet down.
The way I plan to do it is: I pour a six inch concrete wall to a depth of eight feet (approximately two feet below the frost line) with two foot wings on the bottom. In the top four feet I’ll install pex tubing, just like I do in the slab. But this system comes on in the fall. It serves to heat the soil around the perimeter of the slab. Without heating the house above it. Although there will be some minimal heating of the living space as well. By doing this we get a jump on creating a warm area below the slab. So instead of fighting the soil temperature below the slab, the soil is helping to heat the slab. Of course I’m installing solar powered systems so this method doesn’t cost a lot of money to operate.
The heater:
For my hot water heat. I am building a lean to green house on the south side of the house. It will be 10X16 inside will be a system that uses evacuated tube (vacuum tubes) solar collector, to heat oil. The oil will live in two fifty gallon tanks. We will call them ot1 and ot2. They will be connected near the top with an over flow tube. SO each tank will hold up to approximately forty gallons of oil. But the system will only have fifty gallons of oil in it.
Ot1 will have the intake for the solar heat collector. Ot2 will hold the output of the heat collector. When ot2 fills to the overflow tube, it will run off into ot1. Over the course of a normal day the oil should reach a temperature over 150°F. I believe maintaining a temperature over 140°F will be fairly easy.
From ot2 oil will be drawn to heat the water tanks. The oil from the water tanks will drain into ot1, where it can be reheated by the solar heater.
The water tanks:
I plan on burying two 850 gallon water tanks below the green house. In the green house (above ground) will be a 1500 hundred gallon discharge tank. Each tank will have a coil inside that hot oil flows through (from the above system). It should be noted the manufacture of the tanks recommends never draining them below 80% of capacity, so a 1500 hundred gallon discharge tank will be more than adequate.
I will label them wt1 wt 2 dt1
Wt1 will be one of the underground tanks, it will serve as the main feed for the radiant floor heater system. Wt2 will be the other underground tank and will serve as a slave for wt1. Basically wt2 will just hold hot water until wt1 needs it and then wt2 will pump into wt1. Any helpful ideas for making that work efficiently without a bunch of electronics would be greatly appreciated.
Dt1 will hold the water after it has gone through the radiant floor heater. Being above ground (in a greenhouse) and heated by coils of hot oil. It should easily reheat the water back up to 95°F then a heat sensitive valve will open and it will fill the below ground tanks (wt1 and wt2).*3

I am really hoping for some feedback from anybody who has built a similar system, or any part of it.
The main question nobody is willing to answer is. How much water does a typical radiant floor heater use, for a two thousand square foot house with excellent insulation.
Is 95°F hot enough for the input water of a radiant floor heater? I am getting all sorts of conflicting temperature recommendations. The most reliable information I get says 90-95°F *2is more than adequate.
Has anybody ever done something like this, with a barrier outside the foundation that goes below the frost line? All the science seems to work, but the internet screams never put in a slab without insulation underneath it. But I hear sometimes the internet can be wrong…
Thanks for reading this. I am looking forward to any helpful ideas, or discouraging information that stops me from doing something really stupid that costs a ton of money.

*1 By “green house” I am referring to a glass room, not a house with a “green rating”.
*2 90-95°F is a temperature I got off the internet. I am open to adjusting that up or down. That is one of the reasons I am posting here, and on other forums like this one. Any advice from people with experience, monitoring water temperature, in a concrete slab with pex pipes would be wonderful.
*3 I am using a separate discharge tank, so cooled water from the slab won’t mix with already heated water, until it has been reheated. The discharge tank will have a temperature sensitive drain on it. When the water is reheated to the proper temperature, it will refill the two underground tanks.

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