Unintended Consequences of Solar

kgruber said:
I don't understand why refrigerators pump hot air into an already hot house. That should be vented outdoors.
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You could put your refrigerator in the garage. ;)

I agree with your point (and Geico's about just transferring cold from outdoors in winter), but the added costs of installing and maintaining piping would make it a non-starter. ROI would be too long.
 
Alexb2000 said:
How about a radiant barrier of some kind, perhaps on the bottom of the panels? I can't see how this is anything but radiant transfer. They have paint, thin sheets, etc. that all provide a radiant barrier. Heck even tin foil must work, I see it on the windows in every trailer park.
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On a slightly related note for metal hangar owners that want to build a comfortable workshop inside: I sheathed a 500SF+ workshop in aluminum backed insulation with about 1/8" of fiberglass bonded to it. The results have been more than satisfying. Better than 4-6-8 inches of fiberglass batt by a long shot - at least in the sunny south.

Makes me wonder whether it would be an effective solution for the metal hangar itself. Basically reflecting all that radiant heat from the metal exterior right back out.
CJones said:
Have you thought of plumbing the solar panels into your interior hot water supply? Not sure if that is an option or financially feasible based on the ROI, but (so far) sunshine is free!
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We moved into a Danbury CT home some years ago that had a solar hot water heater system. The panels fed a single large storage tank with a supplementary electric heater. Problem was, we didn't know there was a switch that turned the heater on. Our first winter, the solar part gave us enough hot water except for a couple of stretches of gray days. Quite amazing. Once we found the switch (that should have been thermostatically controlled) life was grand. See below for the irony of it all.
comanchepilot said:
Had a friend of mine with a well in a part of Connecticut where they brought city water - the wife insisted on the city water cause they had lots of iron which meant lots of iron sulfide at times in the water.

When he put in asphalt instead of a rock driveway he designed and buried 1/2" Pvc pipe, hooked it up to pipe extension from a part of the house, isolated it from the rest of the system and installed a hot water recirc pump from his pressure tank for the well, which he made bigger. starting in December when the ground started to freeze he turned that pump on - and it melted the snow falling and never had to plow his driveway. . . .pump added about $7 a month or so to the power bill - the only time he ever had a problem was with snow falls in excess of 12" - the it took about a day to melt it all - he made sure when they built the driveway it had a good swale away from the garage and the house - for your average 3-5" snow fall it melted on contact and never covered the driveway . just recirc the water back underground deeper than it came up -

Was a fantastic swamp yankee invention . . .
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Very nice... perhaps until it's time to sell the property.

In our case, our very professionally installed hot water system was considered a liability in the market. We ended up selling it to a broker and they removed the system replacing it with an oil burning system to make it more sell worthy. YMMV.
 
Matthew said:
I got into that argument with my kids about windmill farms. If we build too many, they will use up all the wind, we'll have global warming, and polar bears will starve. So windmills kill polar bears.

The best they could come up with was, "I don't think it works that way."
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I agree with your theory, now you have a consensus.:yes:
 
I don't have air conditioning in my house, I have a swamp cooler. Or evaporative cooler to the yankees out there...:D Two years ago I added a grid tie solar unit, putting the panels on the roof. Before that I added a steel roof. I have noticed that I don't use the swamp cooler as much as I had before. Plus here in New Mexico I get about 496 sunny days every year :rolleyes:...with humidity in the single digits or lower, and 6500 ft. in elevation. The plus side is my electric bill has been on the average 40 to 50% lower than before the solar unit. The panels cover about 95% of the southern half of the roof keeping direct sunlight from heating the house.

My garage and well house are off the co-op electric and run entirely on solar power. I am thinking I might do the house the same way in a year or two. And yes I know it will take me about 9 years to make up the difference between paying an electric bill and paying off the solar unit. But I live in a rural part of the state and last weekend we had a power outage for around 8 hours. Power loss is the norm here, not a one time thing.

My friends think I am environmentally concerned, but in reality I am just cheap.
 
comanchepilot said:
So the true question is:

If solar is adopted on a wide scale, will it cause local cooling of climates since the energy which formerly struck the ground and heated the air is now being used to create electricity and is no longer available directly for climate purposes.
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Considering that the solar panels only convert sunlight from a fairly narrow spectrum into electricity, I have to say no. The infrared that does most of the heating isn't useful to the solar panels. For something like a pool heater, which does make use of the infrared, all that's happening is that the heat is being diverted from the roof to the swimming pool, and ultimately escapes into the air overnight.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
Basically it would be a second system if we wanted to go with a hot water heater for the house. I have a friend with such a system around here, and he loves it. However to do it properly, you're basically pre-heating the water before it gets into your tank. So you get a second water tank, it gets heated by the roof to around 90F, the heater takes it the rest of the way. The way our house is set up, that would be more difficult to implement and would take up space in our storage room, which is already too small. So, not really an option. Maybe good for you in Jawjuh where it would probably heat your water the full way! ;)

The garage is heated - two infra-red heaters that run 220V and plug in when needed. I should insulate the doors. So I think the photovotaics make the most sense if we decide to finish the roof off. :)
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Yeah, I was thinking about a 'pre-heat' system. My uncle who works for a natural gas company has talked about installing the Renai heaters as a type of 'pre-heat' to keep the water in the pipes warm so you don't run a lot of water waiting for the hot water to get to the faucet.

It's hot enough in our attic right now that we could just run PVC in open air and it would probably get up to 90* in the pipes. :hairraise: Luckily/unluckily, our roof is old enough that it doesn't have a ridge cap - just one electric vent fan - so it gets mighty toasty up there this time of year.
 
comanchepilot said:
So the true question is:

If solar is adopted on a wide scale, will it cause local cooling of climates since the energy which formerly struck the ground and heated the air is now being used to create electricity and is no longer available directly for climate purposes.
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Go put your hand near a solar panel, then put it near some nearby grass. Which air parcel is warmer?
 
Ted DuPuis said:
You could put your refrigerator in the garage. ;)

I agree with your point (and Geico's about just transferring cold from outdoors in winter), but the added costs of installing and maintaining piping would make it a non-starter. ROI would be too long.
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Not necessary at all, just seal the top and sides of the back of the fridge to a vent duct that runs out the roof.
 
CJones said:
Yeah, I was thinking about a 'pre-heat' system. My uncle who works for a natural gas company has talked about installing the Renai heaters as a type of 'pre-heat' to keep the water in the pipes warm so you don't run a lot of water waiting for the hot water to get to the faucet.

It's hot enough in our attic right now that we could just run PVC in open air and it would probably get up to 90* in the pipes. :hairraise: Luckily/unluckily, our roof is old enough that it doesn't have a ridge cap - just one electric vent fan - so it gets mighty toasty up there this time of year.
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A small circulating pump does the same thing. All boats pretty much circulate the hot water loop.
 
Henning said:
Not necessary at all, just seal the top and sides of the back of the fridge to a vent duct that runs out the roof.
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When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, there were still a lot of iceboxes around. (They weren't in use anymore, but a lot of them hadn't yet been removed.) Many of these iceboxes were more-or-less part of the buildings, having been built against exterior walls (or walls along a common hallway, in the case of apartment buildings) so the iceman could replace the ice from outside through an opening with an insulated door that went through the wall.

-Rich
 
RJM62 said:
When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, there were still a lot of iceboxes around. (They weren't in use anymore, but a lot of them hadn't yet been removed.) Many of these iceboxes were more-or-less part of the buildings, having been built against exterior walls (or walls along a common hallway, in the case of apartment buildings) so the iceman could replace the ice from outside through an opening with an insulated door that went through the wall.

-Rich
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Wow - I'd be stealing beer!
 
CJones said:
It's hot enough in our attic right now that we could just run PVC in open air and it would probably get up to 90* in the pipes. :hairraise: Luckily/unluckily, our roof is old enough that it doesn't have a ridge cap - just one electric vent fan - so it gets mighty toasty up there this time of year.
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You could do that, and there are also pool heaters that do a similar concept. Of course, what happens when a pipe starts leaking... :eek:
 
Oh, got in the pool last night - 87F. Almost a giant hot tub! :D
 
Henning said:
That became an issue with the reflector as well, had to set a thermocouple in the line to 'park' the mirror off the sun when it got to a certain temp.
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The solar heat has a thermostat. It's max is 104F, and it will both heat and cool (cooling by sending water to the roof at night).

We've been leaving it at 104 mostly to see how hot it will get. 87 is the max so far - highs this week have been around 90, so pretty good.
 
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