Using an indoor water fountain as a solar heat-sink

First, you have a solar thermal water collector outside, flow the hot water indoors and through a water fountain (decorative, pleasing types). The hot water will dissipate it's heat while flowing over the metal/rocks of the fountain. Then the cool water will flow back outside into the heat collector to be reheated.

This should work to assist in heating a room during the day, right?


Or is this just another one of my ridiculous ideas? I feel like I've been having too many of them lately.

Sure it would work, and adding a bit of moisture to the air is good isn't it? There are a few buts though.
Pumping the water will take energy.
If it's cold enough to need it, then at night the water is likely to freeze and break it.
It's a bit complex for my taste.
Something cheaper and easier that circulates air can be passive, so 0 energy to run, and it would have no risk of expensive damage from a malfunction like a water leak could.

That's a good idea, just do an air circulation solar heater. I would definintely have a problem with the water freezing outside at night, since I am now up north where it will go into the teens during the winter at night.


What if I had a huge water tank in my room, and filled that with hot water during the day. How much water at say 100 degrees would it take to noticeably keep a room warm? Or is that idea too much hassle too?

The problem I have is that the basement room I will be in, it doesn't have an air duct, so it gets to about 45 degrees during the winter. The easiest solution is to just keep the door open with a small fan pushing the warm air in from next to the furnace (which is right outside my door).

I just wanted to see if there was some alternative energy way to heat my room.

Here is what they do. You have a solar collector outside but it has antifreeze in its loop. this loop is intertwined or coiled around a tank of water in the residence. This heats the water which than can be used for whatever. If you are only going to use the collector for room heat, you can run the antifreeze loop directly to radient baseboard heaters. Of course, most places where people live you need expansion tanks and pop off valves in case of overheating and creating too much pressure. Water heating explosions can be deadly. Some of the most efficient heaters do not use water or liquid at all. They use hot air collected from piping mounted on an outer southern exposure wall or roof and simply exchange sun heated air.

Moist air can be a big problem in below-grade and well insulated dwellings. Mold and rot occur easily.

Pushing warm air from the furnace room isn't totally great, since the air will rise to the ceiling and exit through any openings.

Radiant heat would be good in a basement, whether overhead or underfoot. "Line of sight" to occupants should be maintained; or the radiation simply heats other objects that heat the air, which goes up and out.

I could see having a 55gal drum (or two 35gal) as the base of a centrally located table, with lines running to an outdoor collector... a PV panel could power a lift-pump. When the pump is not running, the water drains from the collector into the drum. A thermoswitch could break the pump circuit until collector temperature is above freezing.

Thanks for the tips. The biggest problem I am going to have is getting any sort of pipe from outside into the house. My mom will not allow me to drill any holes or anything like that.


I feel like I'm going to have to resort to an electric space heater...ugh. Unless I run it off wind turbines in the back yard, I won't feel good about it.

Look on the internet for a solar heat exchanger. There are plans for these if you want to build your own. Also some of these can be placed in a window opening.
Good luck!.

Even simpler fill your bath tub (if you don't use it) and let the hot water dissipate it's heat in to the room. I had this idea for my bath room as it's usually the coldest room in the house in winter. I want to install a solar batch hot water heater and was thinking if I added it I could use the hot water in the day to heat the room. You do waste the water though and in the desert that's not always good. I could wait until the water becomes bath temperature and then jump in. :lol:

Wineboy that is silly with bathtub. However you could use your system for baseboard heat. But I would still suggest a solar heat exchanger.

Evoforce said:

Wineboy that is silly with bathtub. However you could use your system for baseboard heat.

Click to expand...

It works pretty good with a cast-iron tub, but most folks don't have one in their living room.

A similar scheme is to add a loop to the output of the hot water heater, feeding a run of pex in the living space for radiant heat before it heads upstairs.

Everybody else may not appreciate lukewarm water tho... :lol:


The most efficient system is polyfleece: Bundle-up indoors, wear a knit hat and gloves with the fingertips cut out.

Everything you wanted to know about solar...... nearly.

http://builditsolar.com/
Tons upon tons of info, free plans, etc. A great site for the DIY.

TylerDurden said:

The most efficient system is polyfleece: Bundle-up indoors, wear a knit hat and gloves with the fingertips cut out.

Click to expand...

or move to a warmer climate?

Not really silly if you have plentiful solar hot water. It's thermal mass too you know only you should use the water. Maybe you could recirculate the water out of your hot tub and in and out of your house. In other words have hot tub room with a bad ass solar hot water heater.
???/ :wink:

Be wary of Legionares desease, something i had to be on top of with my evaporative water cooling towers
on my pc, had to run additives in the water to prevent the nasties from growing in the nice warm water.





One of these in your room warms it up quick, also makes it humid as hell, hence the air vent directly above
the towers output. Running certain types of additive in the water could make breathing the air in rather harmful though LoL
I used Milton, its a chemical used for sterilizing baby bottles and such, worked extremely well no algae growth and no
foul smeel from the tower, the Milton smelt like chlorine actually haha...Just needed a couyple of cap fulls to
treat the water for a 3-4 days.

KiM

WTF? Aussie Jesster you have too much free time, but that's bad ass! Is it a thermal tube or what?
8)

wineboyrider said:

WTF? Aussie Jesster you have too much free time, but that's bad ass! Is it a thermal tube or what?
8)

Click to expand...

AussieJester said:

my evaporative water cooling towers
on my pc

Click to expand...

KiM

I once read an article about an RV.
Guy ran a line from his hot water heater to a heater core he bought from a junk yard.
Then we put a 24V fan behind it. (With 12V the fan moved at half speed, much quieter)

He claimed that this method kept his RV warmer then the forced air furnace. And it was cheaper to heat the water.

Solar powered battery bank to run a waterpump, and a Solar water heater, connected to a couple old plastic 50 gallon drums and your waterbed matress. The drums would hold the extra heat at night. A second water pump's speed could be regulated by the matress temp to regulate the heat.

It might not heat the whole room, but it would be a great excuse to stay in bed

If your mom won't let you cut holes in the wall, just make a little frame to run hoses out a window.

Yeah, that's what I may end up doing, with a lot of good insulating material and some 2x4s preventing the window from being opening from outside.

Furnace next to your room, right? With exhaust pipe from the burner coming up from it, venting out the roof?

How much space under the door? Enough for some water tubes/pipes? Run that heat exchanger from PedalingBiped from it. Find a small heater core, and insert it between two sections of the exhaust pipe. It will probably not all fit within the pipe, so you will want to enclose it sufficiently to ensure no exhaust leakage from it. You may also need to clean it regularly to prevent buildup on it that could block the rising heated exhaust from exiting the house. I'd actually do it inside a new section of exhaust tube that is larger diameter than the existing stuff, joined properly to the smaller stuff above and below it, completely enclosing the core.

Use thick plastic tubing and insulate it, for the part coming from the core in the furnace exhaust tube to the one in your room, so that as much of the heat as possible makes it from the furnace core to your room's core.

If the water in the core is heated sufficiently, and the diameters of the pipes to and from it are right, with one-way valves, you may not even need a pump, depending on height difference; it could be forced down by gravity and back up by pressure created by the heat. Probably you would need a pump, though, perhaps a simple PC-cooling system pump would be enough.

If it is left running all the time, you can use a pretty small system, perhaps even using the PC-cooling system cores, too, and the low-volume quiet fan.

It's still inefficient, but the only extra power you are using up is that of the pump and fan, which is fairly minimal. The rest would have been waste heat from the furnace, anyway.

It may not be safe to block the exhaust riser of the furnace if it burns anything other than natural gas/propane/etc, as soot could quickly build up due to velocity drop of the exhaust, and clog things up. That's something you'll want to double check before trying it.



Regarding a water tank to redistribute heat from daytime into nighttime, it's perfectly feasible, assuming you have the tank itself within the space you want to heat. Otherwise you must move the water and/or heat around a lot more, and insulate the tank and distribution system quite well (especially if the tank is to be outdoors). If it's in teh same room, it needs little or no insulation. Just pump the water on top of the tank out to the solar heaters, then back into the tank along the bottom (because warm water sinks anyway, and the less stirring of the tank you do, the more cold water you reheat, rather than having less energy differential with already warm water).

The main problem with pumping water from inside to out and back in, is that it will freeze and burst the pipes at night. I would have to have a closed loop system using antifreeze, from my water tank in my room, to the solar heater outside. So I'd be pumping hot antifreeze through the system, allowing the radiant heat from the pipe to heat the water tank. That seems like the best bet, except that my room is on the completely worst side of the house, so I will need lots of antifreeze piping running either outside or inside. I wonder how hot the pipe would be when it finally reaches my tank in my room.

I could quite easily heat our upstairs area with solar thermal though, that's where the sun hits the house, and the upper deck gets tons of sun most of the day, great for placing my collectors there, then blowing that hot air directly in the window into the kitchen. Alas, it does little for heating my room unless I use 30 feet of clothes dryer exhaust tubing down the stairs and into my room, lol. And I would still freeze at night.

Is there any way to calculate how much energy, for example, 100 gallons of 100 degree water has, for heating a 60 degree room, and for how long?

Again, the SIMPLIEST way to heat my room at night is to just leave my door open, and place a fan atop our water heater which is right next to the furnace, which is 5 feet from my door, and blow that air in my room. I think that will definitely help quite a bit, and cost nothing more than 30watts from the fan.

I still would LOVE to heat like a 200 gallon water tank in my room, to like 120 degrees, with just solar energy from the day. That would be cool (hot). The principle is something that could be done to heat the entire house, all winter, and keep it warm, even on those 5 degree nights. (maybe). Of course, the house would probably be like 90 degrees at 4pm, if that were to work. Our house isn't the best insulated, built in the 1950s.

if you are in the basement, you should run a duct over to your room from the main ducts.

a 6" takeoff and a joint of ducting will get you dry warm air. avoid putting any moisture into the air in the basement since it condenses on the footings and causes lotsa nasties to grow in the moisture that condenses, like mold.

in fact you should add a lot of ducts into the basement if someone lives down there to avoid it becoming overgrown with black mold.

veloman said:

Is there any way to calculate how much energy, for example, 100 gallons of 100 degree water has, for heating a 60 degree room, and for how long?

Click to expand...

The calculation is easy enough. Water has a heat capacity of around 4.2 Joules per cc per degree K. This means that if you had a tank of hot water with 100 US gallons in it (about 380 litres, or 380,000cc) then if you removed 1kW of heat from the tank over one hour (3,600,000 Joules, as a Joule is 1 Watt Second) then the temperature of water in the tank would drop by about 2.25 deg K (3,600,000 Joules / (4.2 x 380,000cc) ), or a bit over 4 deg F over the hour that you were drawing heat from it.

If you wanted to heat a room overnight, say for eight hours, then if you were to draw 1Kw of heat from the tank you would drop its temperature by around 32 deg F over the 8 hour period.

The rate of heat flow from the hot water to the air, via whatever heat exchanger that you want to use, will reduce as the temperature of the water in the tank drops, due to Newtons Law of Cooling, which states that the rate of heat loss of a body is proportional to the difference in temperatures between the body and its surroundings. This means that the heat drawn from the tank would drop slightly as it starts to cool - if you started out with it delivering 1kW by the end of the night it would be delivering a bit less.

A big tank of hot water will hold a fair amount of heat, so isn't a bad way to store energy, provided you can insulate it well to reduce losses.

Jeremy

The mold issue just reminded me. When I lived in the upstairs room, which as half the size, the window seals (between the glass and the window panes), had black mold accumulated on them. I believe this was from moisture build up on the windows, as I could even see the water droplets sometimes. I don't think it was from me being there though, I think it was condensation from differing temperatures.

Yes, the proper thing to do is add an air duct into here, which wouldn't be all that hard either.

I read something (probably an ES link) on the web where a person used tall clear cylinders full of water near their windows as a thermal heatsink to even out day to night temps. IIRC the cylinders were sealed to avoid humidity issues. Very simple no-tech design, and the plus side to using a clear setup is it doesn't block light from entering the room. I'm not sure how they dealt with algae.