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Old 06-16-11, 02:28 PM   #1
Daox
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Default Designing & building a solar hot water tank

With the solar panel racks designed to my liking, I am moving on to designing the tank for the solar hot water setup. I think I'm actually going to build the water tank first as I can use it as a temperting tank for my domestic hot water until I get the solar panels installed and working.

The tank will be made of wood, and hold around 400 (updated to 650 now, see later posts) gallons of water. It will be built similar to Gary's DIY solar hot water tank. The main differences are that mine is going to be smaller, it lined with a different material, and insulated mostly with cellulose instead of foam board. These changes are mostly to decrease cost. The smaller tank size matches my 200 sqft of collector with a rule of thumb that you need 2 gallons per sqft of collector. I'll go through the heat gain calculations in another post to see exactly why more than 400 gallons of water is not needed and might actually be bad for the system depending on how you intend to use it.

Anyway, I got it somewhat modeled up over lunch today. As you can see, its very similar to Gary's tank. I will be doing some FEA to see if the plywood thickness can be reduced. This could save a decent amount of money.


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Last edited by Daox; 06-21-11 at 01:16 PM..
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