This thing is H. O. T., hot! One of the main uses of energy in the American home is to heat up water. It takes a lot of electricity to heat up water, this cost a lot of money. All day while you are at work, or at school, the sun is busy heating up things outside. If you are a little kid and you get to play outside all day then you know all about this. Lucky for us the sun is free, all we need to do is figure out a way to use that energy to heat water. That's why we are going to build a solar thermal panel, these guys are great at heating up water. Materials needed: Water Drill (with both drill bits and screw bits) Some scissors A saw (a simple hand saw will do) 1, 2X2' 1/4 inch thick plywood 2, 2X1' Plexiglas sheets. 9, 20" 2X1" base board planks 1, 5 gallon bucket 1, 4' length of standard 3/4" heater hose 1, 3' length of standard 3/4" heater hose 4, marine grade stainless steal clamps 4, 3/4" thru-hull PVC thingers (sorry I have no idea what these things are called other than thru-hull) 2, 2X2' black pond liner material (you can buy this in big roles or buy patch kits) a box of wood screws wax paper Silicon Caulk or that silicon goop stuff (like glue). pond liner adhesive tape (this and the liner you can get at a water garden store) Time: I am not going to lie, this project will take you a good 3-5 hours of work, and cost a fair about of money (50 bucks or so), but it works really well and once you get everything cut and assembled it only takes about 1 hour to set it all up. Pictures! Check out the rest of the pics here Are you a Do It Yourselfer? Send in your Projects to TheSietch@TheSietch.org Hot Water From The Sun: The first thing we should do is cut our backing and our pond liner, when you are done you should have a 2 foot by 2 foot square of wood (1/4 inch thick) and two 2X2 foot pond liner squares, drill two 3/4" holes in the wood as shown. Cut the outside slats as well.
gate these home made solar panels are a major fuel saver..regardless of how a person heats their water....and on a greater scale they can also be incorperated into space heating as well.As far as a non-energy "passive" system goes...these panels offer a wealth of savings to the do-it-yourselfers. Thanx for posting this...hopefully people will take heed to the heads up Once the government figures out how to tax the sunshine....then solar power will be the norm...until then...it is our responsibility to harness this power.
We hooked up a few solar panels to our house last summer, even though we're not totally functioning on solar, we did save quite a few $$$ on heat and such.
You can make some solar cookers out of cardboard and aluminium foil - don't know how well they work though. We are approaching winter here - will a solar panel work ok then too, or is it preferably for use in summer?
