Up & running...

Friday 9 am - Mark arrived early, installed the sight glass, hooked up the electrical controls, and made a 50/50 blend of anti-freeze & water.

We used gravity to siphon the blend into the heat exchanger. Eight gallons later, the sight glass showed that the exchanger was full. Turns out only about 1.6 gallons of this is actually inside the collector on our roof.

We turned on the water, and miracle of miracles... there was NO leak in the plumbing work done by Afshin in the basement or by Mark along the outside and on the roof!






So, while the tanks were filling up, Mark & Afshin installed the new strut to hold up the collector, insulated all pipes from the roof down to the basement.

By noon, Mark was done.

Here's our well-insulated system in the basement. The small white barrel on the left is the heat exchanger, with the grey-colored 80 gallon storage tank to it's right. There are 2 pumps in front. One circulates the antifreeze between the collector plate on the roof and the heat exchanger in the basement while the other pump circulates the water between the heat exchanger and the storage tank. Note the dangling wire over the storage tank. This is for the backup electric system, which we've refrained from installing. We want to believe that the sun itself will be adequate for our needs.

Our old hot water system has been turned off, and is NOT feeding into our hot water line. Although we expect no problems with the new system, for now we've left it so that it's only a flick of a valve and re-igniting the pilot to pull it back into service.

5 pm - Afshin, ready for his first shower, was curious how warm the water was. So, using a kitchen thermometer, we learnt that the water had heated from 50 degrees F to 94 degrees F. Note that the afternoon had been partly cloudy.

Washing dishes later in the evening, Meenal found the water adequately warm.

The next morning, we checked the temp again before showering. It had dropped to 90 degrees F, but the shower still felt envigorating. Note that it was still partly cloudy and in the 80s.