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I had one till a hurricane tore the panels (and the roof) off the house. I had 2 4x8 panels on the roof and a cartridge pump to circulate the water. The only thing I ever had to watch was that the panels were drained correctly if the temp was going down too far or just leave the circulator running that night. I'd also get some deposits from the copper pipe that would drain down into the heater when there was a power failure. This setup kept the water at about 160 degrees, so you had to be careful when you turned the hot water on and would go 3 days without sun before I had to turn the electric back on for the heater.
The site you recommended to me, http://www.altestore.com/store/ has an entire learning module about solar hot water heaters. I don't think it's a simple as it sounds. It gets below 32 degrees perhaps 50 days a year here, that means I'd have to circulate this supposedly safe liquid to keep the water from freezing. Then I'd still have to use AC power to power the element in the holding tank to keep the water hot.
I'm sure the process is much less expensive than either gas or electric, but it is complicated. At least to me.
I really thought it would be a simpler process. By 10 AM my garden hose is hot enough to shower with.
We have an LP water heater now, it's worked out fine for over a decade. Most of the year the water is kept really hot. We get almost 3 years on a tank full that runs the water heater and the stove/oven. If something happened we would just turn the water heater off except for the extreme winter months. Having gone without it for a month or so during a cold winter, it wasn't fun.
I haven't looked at the links yet. But when I lived down south I had a water heater outside my trailer that was painted black. It was on the SW side and was exposed to full sun. Like Monkeybird said by 10 am it was hot. Up here I have used coils of 1in black plastic pipe inside an insulated plywood box with a glass door for a lid, again the water got to hot to use straight from the faucet. Both needed no power. But both didn't work in the cold weather.
Survival question. What do I need most, right now?
We have one at work. There is ethylene glycol that runs through the panels to the heat exchanger in a tank resembling a water heater, and this loop is powered by a small 110v electric pump. This particular model (Sepco I believe) also has 2 4500w electric heating elements, but they aren't connected to power. I don't know what the performance is like, but the person who is over that building is very happy with it, and says it reduces his electric bill quite a bit. I think it would be possible to install a small PV system to power the pump and make the whole thing self powered.
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