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#31
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VERY OT Water heaters without a tank
My son lives in a 20 ft. camper/van and he just installed solar panels on
top. They lay flat on the roof so there is no wind resistance when driving. The panels are small, but will provide enough electricity for lights during a partly cloudy day when we goes fishing and is parked in a field with no hook ups. Barbara in SC "Taria" wrote in message news:9EEvi.339$5Q5.78@trnddc05... The world oil market offers it cheaper to the US? We are having wind generators pop up a lot here in my area these days. It is really windy here and you might say they are taking off. More than a few with solar but those houses are usually built to be more passive to make it cost effective. Back in the Jimmy Carter days there were tax breaks for solar water set ups. Folks financed them when they purchased houses. They were not efficient and I wonder if anyone even broke even on them. Most of the folks in the kind of trailer parks you seem to be referring to don't much work so comparing them to working class might not be a good choice. Taria Jack Campin - bogus address wrote: I think the chances are that in the lifetime of such a boiler, that you may not save much, only break even in terms of cost, but you'd be doing a good thing for the environment by directing the money in a different direction. The same applies to solar water heating - apparently it takes 24 years to recoup the cost. That may be true in the UK, but every city roofscape in southern Turkey is a forest of solar heating systems. They wouldn't have sold hundreds of thousands of them in a relatively poor country if they weren't cost-effective quickly. Probably there's not much difference in level of affluence between the average Turkish working-class apartment dweller and the average occupant of a US trailer park, except that the American is more likely to have a car. If Americans paid a realistic price for their oil, trailer parks would sprout solar heating units overnight. ============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ============== Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760 http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975 stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557 |
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#32
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VERY OT Water heaters without a tank
I read quite a bit of this thread, and it's darned interesting. I've always
wanted instant hot-to-boiling water on tap in the kitchen! Will settle for an electric kettle right now grin. When I was a kid, we lived in northern Minnesota and my family used wood heat. The last couple of places that my dad built had an interesting twist to the wood heater. He used a two-barrel arrangement--think of a 55-gallon drum and another drum a size or two smaller inside it. The inner barrel was the firebox. The outer barrel had a coil of copper tubing inside it. Our water supply was also hooked up to the tubing. The copper tubing, after leaving the wood stove, entered baseboard heaters in all the rooms. Also outlets to the sinks, showers, bathtubs and laundry. I come from a family of 13 kids, and I don't believe there were ever fewer than nine kids at home in those houses, and constant guests on weekends. Never ran out of hot water, and they often had windows open in the winter because the house was so warm! This was in northern Minnesota, mind you, where 30 degrees below is not unusual. The furnace room was at the back of the house, so I don't think there was a problem with the furnace heating the house up in summertime while keeping water hot. But I do remember that the baseboard heat was either on or off, no thermostatic controls. Dad liked things to be simple and efficient. My first husband was so impressed with Dad's double-barrel wood stove that he built something similar (without the water heating arrangement) in our basement and hooked it into the vent system of our propane furnace. That setup had the advantage of keeping the floors warm all winter. He built another in his garage so he could work on cars in comfort during the winter. Of course, any farm with a properly managed woodlot provided plenty of wood at that time. It's not practical now but the information is good to know in case hard times ever come again. Thanks for letting me ramble on........... -- Carolyn in The Old Pueblo If it ain't broke, you're not trying. --Red Green If it ain't broke, it ain't mine. --Carolyn McCarty If at first you don't succeed, switch to power tools. --Red Green If at first you don't succeed, get a bigger hammer. --Carolyn McCarty "Leslie & The Furbabies in MO." wrote in message ... I've been doing some pondering- I know very dangerous! BG Living alone now, I realized I am paying to keep a tankful of hot water heated for many, many hours without none to minimal usage. If I shower 7 times a week, wash 3-4 loads of laundry and run the dishwasher 3-4 times per week then I have a demand for hot water about 9 hours per week. I am heating water 24/7 which is 168 hrs. per week- so I am paying for almost 160 hrs. of hot water that I do not need or use. I don't see putting a water heater with a tank on a timer since I need hot water during the day for hand washing and small jobs and the cost to reheat the entire tank would prolly cost more than the savings if I had a timer and shut it down for 15-18 hrs. per day. The cost of an on-demand/tankless water heater is 3 to 5 times as expensive as a water heater with a tank. What I am curious about is the performance of the tankless water heater. What are the pros and cons? I know they are quite popular outside the USA- what should I look for in features and what should I avoid? Does anybody in the USA have one? I assume what is available here may be very different from what others may have??? Any thoughts? Leslie & The Furbabies in MO. |
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