Sunday, April 29, 2012

Solar Spa Heater

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http://www.instructables.com/id/Overview-2/

Solar Spa Heater
Completed coil on our south facing roof just after completion.
Well it's that time of the year again here in Southern California time to fill up the spa and break out the BBQs. This has become a yearly ritual as well as a scathing reminder that electricity is not free.

Any how my wife has been wanting to move in a greener direction and has been rather matter a fact about it as well. We now compost our organic waste and recycle that in to our garden. Her new kick was "How can we heat the spa without using the electronic heater?" She got up on the roof with 50ft of black hose and ran it back and forth a few times, hooked it to a pump and came up with the proof of concept. Yay! [The original idea was sourced from my coworker Gary which has a similar setup for his pool]

Today we decided to move from conceptual proof to full on production. This instructable will walk you through the process that we went through and try to help you avoid some of the gotchas that we found along the way. Hope you enjoy reading this as much as we enjoyed building/documenting this project.

Step 1 Parts list

 

For around $60 US you can build this neat little system using the following parts purchased at your local mega hardware store.

20ft of 1/2in diameter PVC pipe
1 x 1/2in 4-way Cross PVC Fitting
PVC cement for gluing PVC sections to 4 way fitting
500ft 1/2in diameter black drip irrigation hose
2 x drip irrigation to standard garden hose coupling
Around 200 outdoor 8in zip ties

2 x 25ft or so normal garden hoses to use as water feed and return (Not included in $60 est as we had 2 on hand)
1 water pump to push water up to the roof and through the solar coil for heating. (Also not included in $60 est as we had one on hand)


 



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more: 
http://www.instructables.com/id/Overview-2/

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