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In a garage with a south facing side I'm going to play with a solar radiator. The plan is to make it like one of those home made pool heaters that use black pipes but instead fill them with something other than water, something that will retain the heat and release it over time. The area available is about 30'x11'.
There is a lot of other designs around I've seen that should be cheaper, easier to build and more effective. You need a lot of heat for any type of liquid and I'd only be considering that for making hot water during hot weather.
One of the more popular ones include taking some soda cans and cutting out some of the top an bottom, you want to keep the rims. Glue them together to form a tube and paint them black. Set them inside your enclosure, use a thermostatically controlled fan to circulate air from the house and through the tubes. Except for the enclosure should be really cheap to build. I haven't specifically looked at the design but that is about what I gather from looking at the ridiculously overpriced ones I've seen for sale.
Thanks. The idea of circulating the inside air through the pipes or cans as suggested really piques my interest. I don't have a supply of used cans, gave up sodas but I do have some aluminum down spouts from a roof gutter project. I could cut them down since they are 16 footers. I don't have another use for them.
Ah-ha! That's it. Thank a bunch. Hopefully I can get this done by the weekend. Those down spouts will work and I won't have to cut them shorter. I knew someone had this figured out!
Looks like you have a terrible job ahead of you, get a few cases of beer and invite some friends over.
Do it for the children.....
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the pipes or cans
Keep in mind here you want some very thin material so the heat can easily conduct through it quickly, the cans are actually ideal. A gutter is going to be thicker and slow that process down. You're going to need to make it air tight.
So far so good. Taking a little longer than expected, the honey-do list got moved up a notch. Thanks to both of you for the tips. I am sealing all joints and probably would have forgotten that.
Coalman, looks like I could use some beer. I got everything painted black to help absorb heat. Almost everything that is, it seems nothing sticks to that Nashua sealing tape but itself so I used some mastic. They should have called it messtic instead.
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