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HVAC pros trash solar for utility bosses Solar Panel Inverter battery

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It is no surprise to see guys claiming HVAC credentials offering horror anecdotes about solar energy hardware.  While some of these stories, in part, could be true, I suspect that others are deliberate sabotage. But that is part of technological change: successful insurgencies are kept secret, while “growing pains” for new ideas get full coverage.    ”Business as usual” power companies have plenty of clout, and they don’t hesitate to flex muscles in protection of their privileged turf.Solar Panel Inverter battery  How much longer will we let them control how we use energy?    We’ve got problems, folks, and the quicker we begin standing up to the power bosses, the better off we and our ecology will be.Solar Panel Inverter battery  All the technology we needed to make this a cleaner, solar industrialised, labour intensive world was proven and well-known in the 1960s, but relentless negativism coming from the power bosses and their fellow travelers is retarding progress and chilling much-needed transfers of information.  Solar Panel Inverter battery

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Solar Panel Inverter battery   It is no surprise to see guys claiming HVAC credentials offering horror anecdotes about solar energy hardware.  While some of these stories, in part, could be true, I suspect that others are deliberate sabotage. But that is part of technological change: successful insurgencies are kept secret, while “growing pains” for new ideas get full coverage.    ”Business as usual” power companies have plenty of clout, and they don’t hesitate to flex muscles in protection of their privileged turf. How much longer will we let them control how we use energy?    We’ve got problems, folks, and the quicker we begin standing up to the power bosses, the better off we and our ecology will be. All the technology we needed to make this a cleaner, solar industrialised, labour intensive world was proven and well-known in the 1960s, but relentless negativism coming from the power bosses and their fellow travelers is retarding progress and chilling much-needed transfers of information.   Solar Panel Inverter battery. A similarly equipped solar water heater would shut off the solar unit when the heat was up. Roll the heater off focus, dump the hot fluid to a radiator, pull the shades, that sort of thing. Over pressure, temperature, relief should never be used unless a primary system has failed. If the system does not have a shut down to control temperature, rather than a relief valve, I would not consider it designed at all. A flat plate hot water system should, at a minimum, have a shade with a silvered, or pure white, top to turn it off when required. A less mechanically demanding system might use a dark fluid for heat absorption, and a clear fluid for turning it off. One could design it to turn itself off when the working fluid gets too hot, and then you would only have to stop accepting the hot fluid to shut off the unit.

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Solar Panel Inverter battery I need the meters because the water bleed out of the small air bleeds on the system. I suspect the commercial systems have the same problem. That said, you don’t even need such meters for an electric hot water heater. I think they have them though, in a manner of speaking. The heater elements are temperature controlled. If uncovered they turn themselves off very quickly. All it costs is a trip to the local hardware store, about $50, and a days work to reset em. They also have over pressure relief valves and temperature shut down. A similarly equipped solar water heater would shut off the solar unit when the heat was up. Roll the heater off focus, dump the hot fluid to a radiator, pull the shades, that sort of thing. Over pressure, temperature, relief should never be used unless a primary system has failed. If the system does not have a shut down to control temperature, rather than a relief valve, I would not consider it designed at all. A flat plate hot water system should, at a minimum, have a shade with a silvered, or pure white, top to turn it off when required. A less mechanically demanding system might use a dark fluid for heat absorption, and a clear fluid for turning it off. One could design it to turn itself off when the working fluid gets too hot,Solar Panel Inverter battery  and then you would only have to stop accepting the hot fluid to shut off the unit.

My parents have a flat two pannel, city water solar hot water system, that they have had for years now, all they have had replaced was the wax thermal drain valve activator, electrolis thingys(in the water tank), and the air relief valve(due to junk plugging it up). Other than that, not a single things has been done to it. No shade needed, no special fluid, not even to clean the pannels. it has the air pressure relief valve, vacume relief valve, drian valve(the wax thingy heats up to allow operation of the system, and cools down to drain it), and temp/press relief valve. The only time it will spit out hot water is when nobody is around to use it(my parents don’t care, it is only a few times that happens and very little water anyhow). on the other hand, just down the street(my Wife’s uncle) has a solar hot water system that had so many problems that they disconnected it. I don’t know what problems that they had, and I don’t feel I know enough to be able to fix it.Solar Panel Inverter battery

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Solar Panel Inverter battery : yes on the other hand, just down the street(my Wife’s uncle) has a solar hot water system that had so many problems that they disconnected it. I don’t know what problems that they had, and I don’t feel I know enough to be able to fix it. This was my point about SHW, it is often unreliable, and difficult to fix. BTW, the reason I made my own system ( besides being cheap) was so that I could learn its failure modes and know how to fix them myself. In my case, I quickly realized that I did not want to learn  the arcana of high temperature plumbing on top of a two story roof. This meant locating the panels on the top of the shed. I think folks make a reasonable assessment when they abandon SHW, the risk of injury from attempting plumbing on a roof far outweighs the cost benefit of SHW. Lack of reliability combined with difficulty of repair is what makes people abandon their systems.

yes, but my parents SHW system is reliable, easy to repair and been in service a long time. What makes one SHW system reliable, and easy to repair, besides the kiss factor? I think people who abandon SHW, do so with the thinking that SHW is unreliable, when it is their system is unreliable. It is the experance with my parents’s SHW system, that I think SHW is reliable(depending on the system), and is well worth the cost of SHW. I don’t think most people should be doing plumming anyhow, ever hear of the phrase, “common sense is not so common”? Solar Panel Inverter battery

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Good point on the value of reliability cause if it dont keep working it willnot be widely adopted.  this is a rudimentary engineering and design task.  How about the energy metrics of this SHW absorptive chiller.  How about a life cycle costs analysis? It sounds great that you can collect XXBTU on  s olar panel heat water to the required 163 to 212 F and then use that heat energy to energize the refrigerant.   That all passive an “free” in continuing operating costs.  so to extract the cool from the refrigerant you need a fluid pump to circulate the refrigerant, and then a blower to exchange the energy into a usable air stream… those to motors use a known a small amount of energy compared to a compressor, so the operating efficiency should be there.. so for a 3.5 ton traditional HVAC you pay 2750 installed!  how much would an equivalent shw HVAC cost?   If its 30K then you have to work the difference of 27K off in energy over say a ten year period  and thats not going to happen.. however if the shw HVAC system can be installed for say 10K , then you have a chance of passing fiscal muster, any idea on cost of these things? Marc – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – x-no-archive: yes I don’t think most people should be doing plumming anyhow, ever hear of the phrase, “common sense is not so common”? Ever hear a plumber say “That’ll be $5K up front, $5K on inspection, and $5K when (if) I finishSolar Panel Inverter battery

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… This was my point about SHW, it is often unreliable, and difficult to fix.

I suspect that this is a result of poor design, more than an intrinsic feature of the system. As contra example, a typical hot water heater runs for about 10-15 years, then fails catastrophically and has to be replaced by a plumber, unless you are good with a wrench, strong enough to cart these heavy things around, and confident of what you can do. But I believe that proper material selection makes it 20% more expensive, but 100% longer lived. We might do ourselves a lot better if we paid a lot more attention to the fine details of the design, parts and materials selection to assure that these “neat” solar energy collectors were long lived and repairable. BTW, might want to consider that an old home typically needs plumbing work inside walls, under floors, sometimes under concrete slabs, and roof work. Why would solar be any different? Solar Panel Inverter battery

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solar industrialised, labour intensive world was proven and well-known in the 1960s, but relentless negativism coming from the power bosses and their fellow travelers is retarding progress and chilling much-needed transfers of information.

I read newton’s post. It’s interesting and I like this thread. I have photovoltaic panels that produce about 120kw per month. I get hot water from a solar panel and my hot tub gets heated by the sun. Solar is very cost effective for heating water but not for making electricity. There’s no way power companys are going to seriously start using solar pv modules to make their juice. It’s just too expensive now. Therefore  a power company isn’t helping itself or its shareholders  by embarking upon anything more than token solar projects. I would estimate that it’s at least ten times as expensive in money terms to produce solar electricity. Newton’s post does raise a valid point indirectly. Electricity is certainly underpriced because the environmental cost is often not fully priced into retail electricity. However, even accounting for an environmental cost of say 5 United States cents a kilowatt,  the power company’s electricity is still half the price of buying solar panels, inverters, etc. Solar is good electricity for someone who wants to make sure they have electricity no matter what mischief has closed the local power station; Hurricane’s and Y2K are reason enough for a thinking man to act in his own benefit. That’s what this NG is mostly about. Solar Panel Inverter battery

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I have photovoltaic panels that produce about 120kw per month…

Sounds like they produce 120 kWh per month of energy,  vs. 120 kW of power. There’s a difference… Nick

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…. Solar is very cost effective for heating water but not for making electricity.

I think this is overstated. At the moment this is trivially true, except for those who are looking at a $30,000 investment to connect to the power lines. But the cost of solar electricity can be expected to come down roughly by a factor of 3 to 10, based on more effective mass production and standardization. In 20-60 years somewhere this will, by itself, be enough to make solar the only cost effective solution. Right now we are comparing it to a very under priced fuel source, (the coal mines). I expect that improved and less intrusive local household systems mixed with highly automated and better designed central plants, with the central plant heat used directly in chemical and material production on site and we may start finding the improved pollution easily worth the change.

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… the cost of solar electricity can be expected to come down roughly by a factor of 3 to 10, based on more effective mass production and standardization.In 20-60 years…

Sounds like bull… erm, a rather vague article of faith to me… Nick

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Shoot. Now I have to quantify! Well, I still expect that mass production of solar cells to come down some, due to optimization of manufacturing processes, better choices in mounting and assembly materials and configurations, and larger distribution channels. I think it is reasonable to expect the tail of of the “learning” or manufacturing curve to continue down on the order of 50%, a factor of 2, and we are talking of over the next 10-20 years, inflation taken into account. Successful development of continuous flow cell manufacturing might drop this price a bit more, but it is strongly limited by the demand for high quality silicon. However, this is not the cost of a solar power system, and is not in fact the only solar power system that can and should be considered. On the order of 50% or more of the cost is associated with converters, controllers, storage systems, and the mechanical support structures that are needed. This cost can clearly be brought down by on the order of 50% with standardization and improved design and materials selection. I think the electronics portions can be brought down by around 75%, for the factor of 3 I cited for the whole system. So for solar cells alone, I would have to say a bit better than a factor of 2 is about all that I would expect, and this is almost insensitive of how much the solar cells cost. The other methods of generating solar power include photochemical processes, thermochemical processes, and simple heat engines. Right now, a household scale heat engine is expensive and very inefficient. I believe that the cost factors for these can be very strongly reduced because they are not very far into economies of scale and their design features have not been optimized for household sized units or mass produced grid power. The steam type system is already well enough designed for a first order estimate of what else needs doing. An easily cleaned and polished solar trough, with perhaps a powered brush cleaning system, solar tracking, and storm caging appears to be build able in the household size as well as the mass grid size and cost might be kept just a bit above the cost for an equivalent solar cell support structure, (I am assuming that the mechanical motions required are not so complex as to render the system expensive regardless). For a basic steam engine the system is well developed for multi megawatt power levels and with pretty good efficiency, in the 40-60% level. I think the cost of these systems can be driven down a bit, but most of this cost force is exactly what is done every time we start a new cycle of design build for nuclear and coal/oil power plants. The household sized units can be greatly improved in both efficiency and cost, and I would estimate a factor of 3 for this sort of system. That’s how I justified picking 3 as a possible achievement. This would be achieved by getting the cost of a steam (or similar working fluid) solar trough down by improved design and standardizing the hardware. Finally, the photo and thermo chemical processes. Some of these provide electricity, and so make cheap solar cells, as it were, moving the solar cell type system into the factor of 3 cost reduction. Several of these systems have very interesting operation. Rather than make electricity, they make fuel, hydrogen or some other combustible, or at least reactable. And since the damnable efficiency of the solar cells is so strongly exacerbated by the need to store the power generated at an additional 50% loss, these systems, while not particularly efficient, can make a real place for themselves by collecting and storing the energy in one simple reliable step. No wires to break down. I like it, and I would not be surprised to see these systems provide power, in the form of hydrogen, to a fuel cell economy at a price that would be less than one third that of the current solar cell systems. The optimum would probably be a large flat plate collector system that would provide hydrogen by the (gallon?) with almost no maintenance and little construction cost. If they can debug the chemistry, physics, and manufacturing processes for it, a factor of 10 is probably achievable. Not bull stuff, exactly, but an educated estimate of some things that are very hard to quantify. Feel free to study the subjects and draw your own conclusions. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – … the cost of solar electricity can be expected to come down roughly by a factor of 3 to 10, based on more effective mass production and standardization.In 20-60 years… Sounds like bull… erm, a rather vague article of faith to me…Solar Panel Inverter battery

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