Getting in hot water
After some
brainstorming (and a lot of good thoughts from your comments on
our sunroom and hot
water posts),
Mark and I have decided that:
- The sunroom is a lower
priority than hot water, and may wait until another year.
Part of this reasoning is based on the fact that Mark actually
doesn't consider it a hardship to wash up outside in the winter
--- I thought he did. (Personally, I'm pretty content with
our current bathing setup, although I might like to lounge in a
real bathtub some days.) That makes setting up a bathtub
and shower much easier since we can just put it on the other
side of the wall from the kitchen sink, allowing us to easily
plumb directly into the graywater
system and to get hot and cold water with minimal fuss.
(As a side note, I also changed my mind about where the
potential sunroom should go --- you can see my current thoughts
in the diagram at the top of this post.)
- The solar hot water system
and the backup electric hot water system don't necessarily
need to connect together. Since we use hot water
almost entirely in the late afternoon, a batch-type solar hot
water system could serve as collector and reservoir during the
warm months. I still haven't decided whether the best
option is the trailer's old hot water heater, painted black and
placed inside a glass-fronted box (would the insulation keep the
tank from soaking up the sun's rays?) or a couple of hoses
inside a similar box (or just up on the trailer roof).
Without the complication of a thermosyphon system, though, it
definitely feels simple enough to build ourselves.
Our best option for
conventional hot water during the winter is probably a
19-gallon tank, which we'd turn on a few minutes before using
just like Tom suggested they do in Mexico. A
point-of-use unit could be good, but has two potential problems
in our unconventional circumstances --- it would need fancy
wiring since it draws so much juice all at once, and it might
not work with our low water pressure (we get 1 gpm, or possibly
less, depending on how full our
tank is). You'll also notice that I increased the
size of the reservoir we're looking at since I forgot that we
currently use boiling water to mitigate water temperature, while
a hot water heater (even set on high) is only going to raise the
temperature of the water to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. As
such, my calculations suggest that we'd need a 19-gallon tank in
the winter to raise water from around 40 degrees to 105 degrees
to fill a 35 gallon tub. Presumably, we'll learn to tweak
how long we wait between turning on the heater and using the
water so that we don't waste energy heating too much water
during lower-water-use projects like showering and dishes.
Mark tells me we
usually see a very slight lull in our workload in late July, so
hopefully we'll have time to set up our bathing chamber, hot water
heater, and solar hot water system then. If not, it will
definitely be our winter infrastructure-improvement project.
Now I'm off to research whether low-flow faucets and shower heads
will work with already very low water pressure....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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A solar collector won't be of use in the winter. Here at 51°26' N they've been in use for some time now. They tend to gather useful heat from April through to September. I've seen figures ranging from 10 MJ/day on a sunny day in April to 30 MJ/day on a sunny day in July. In these parts they tend to be used on combination with a large (500 L, 130 gallon) buffer tank to capture as much as possible on a sunny day and to account for less sunny days.
An electric boiler would be much more reliable in winter (as long as you have power) than a solar collector. Check with the manufacturer though if it would be suitable for a low-pressure water unfiltered supply like yours. You wouldn't want the tempaterure and pressure sensors to foul up. And especially not the pressure relief valve. Google for "boiler rocket".
But seeing as you have a source of firewood, e.g. a water mantle around the stovepipe might be a goos source of hot water in the winter.
Yes, definitely. But if you remove the insulation, the tank is more prone to losing heat as the sun goes away. And unlike a solar collector, a tank has a dismal area/volume ratio, meaning that it won't catch a lot of sun to begin with, nor wil it heat up the water quickly.
Huh? A thermosiphon is one of the simplest heating devices there is. A typical solar collector setup we see here is much more complicated.
The units in Mexico were smaller than 19 gal. I've searched for a long time and can't find anything.I'm thinking 6 or 10 gallons. And, I am sure they were 110 Volts single element.
If you've done the math, I can't argue with you about what you need though. In Mexico, it was shower only.
In my old hot tub, I find I can barely tolerate 105 degree water. 101 or 102 is most relaxing for a good soak. That's measured with a thermometer, not the indicated setting on the thermostat.
I'm not sure how you feel about propane, but the tankless hot water heater works great for us. I think you can also get en electric version. It only comes on when you turn on the water. We use this for an outdoor shower at the farm and it works great. The only issue would be figuring out how to keep it from freezing in the winter. http://www.amazon.com/Camp-Chef-Triton-Water-Heater/dp/B00A0M6HDM/ref=pd_sim_sbs_hi_1
I finally found a link to a picture of the outside of my apartment in Oaxaca, showing the small water heaters. http://tom2mexico.blog.com/page/5/
I tried to past the picture here, but couldn't. Must be text only. the heaters were real small though. The door is the same size as in USA for scale.
Of course, it was for shower only. SO the size in Mexico may be moot.