Garden Hose Solar Collector Experiment

[BrianSmith]

I decided to try to make a garden hose solar hot water collector out of some garden hose, an old window and some Styrofoam and see how well it would heat water.  Here is a link to some pictures of making it and the results.  All in all it worked pretty good considering how small and simple it was to construct.  Not sure how the long term reliability of it would be    ..... but it made some hot water pretty fast and the price couldn't be beat. 

https://sites.google.com/site/hosesolarcollector/

[Tritium]

When my wife and I lived in the desert southeast of Phoenix we used 100' of black rubber garden hose simply laid on the desert floor. Worked great in summer but not at all in winter which was no surprise.

Thurmond

[BrianSmith]

Yeah there isn't much challenge getting hot water out of a black hose in summer..... 

Once you put it behind some glass in an insulated box, you can just collect and keep more hot water from the hose when its cooler outside.  One bad thing about winding the hose up is that you can't do a drainback with it, so it kinda becomes a fair weather collector, but 9 months of freeish hot water is better than none....

[jlt]

I seen in mother earth news a solar hot water collector made from a old refrigerator.  it was laid on it's side with a water heater tank inside. had a glass covering  the opening. No pumps required. and the parts were free.It also had some coils in the door . At night they just closed the door to save the heat. Will try to find the picture if anyone is interested.   

[BrianSmith]

I would like to see it.  You might start another thread topic for it though.