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SOLAR HEATING SYSTEM CONSTRUCTION LOG
PROGRESS
REPORT:
October
20: Solar heat at last!!!
It wasn't easy -- but I have a working solar/propane heated radiant floor!
The tough part
was that I spent 4 hours this morning adding in a pressure
tank and pressure
gauge per Naoto's recommendation -- and the Aquastar
propane heater
still wouldn't operate! I was very upset and called
Naoto at
Solar
Market. He was very understanding ad offered to drive up
(1+ hour trip
-- in his bio-diesel fueled Mercedes!) to bring a larger
Taco
pump and install it. What a guy!
I was concerned
that installing a larger pump with a different housing
would require
substantial re-plumbing of my system, but Naoto
had a flash of
brilliance and removed the motor and impeller from
the new pump's
housing and observed that it had the same bolt
pattern as the
old pump motor. We found that in fact we could
just bolt the
new motor into the old housing without any plumbing
work at all!
Here is Naoto disassembling the pump and bleeding the
air from the
system.
Finally the Aquastar
heater worked and produced a temperature of 150F
Here's the new
pump motor (Taco
model 006 at lower left). It looks identical
except for the
color, but is almost twice as powerful as the
Model
007.
I have to wait
for the second pump that will be installed later for the 2nd floor
radiators that
I have yet to unpack -- I have to finish the walls upstairs first.
So here's the
whole system working -- you can see the blue propane
flame inside
the Aquastar heater (cover removed).
Becky and I had
a dinner engagement, so I left the system running
at 5:00pm --
feeling like a parent leaving a child for the first time.
We returned at
10:30 to find the temperature in my workshop at 70F
and the heater
had shut off. Outside temperature was still in the low 50s.
The floor was
comfortably warm! YAAY!