This solar heater is filled with almost 200 kilograms of soil which is coated with black paint, and the sun can heat this mass of the soil to almost 100 degrees Celsius. At first, my heater will be covered only with this sheet of cellular polycarbonate, but then I will show experiments with the addition of a glass sheet and experiments with the second additional glass sheet, and we will see how these glass sheets increase the heating temperature of the soil and its temperature in the morning. The morning temperature of the soil is important because such a solar heater should give hot water for a house not only during the day, but also in the evening and at night. This water outlet can be connected to the inlet of our traditional electric tank heater for hot water of our house, and now our traditional heater will consume several times less electricity because it will heat the warm water of our solar heater, not cold water. Of course, we have the opportunity to connect this water outlet to our shower bypassing any traditional heaters, and we have the opportunity to connect this outlet to a similar tankless hot water heater, but for now I do not recommend using these two opportunities because I have not had time to do some important experiments, after which I can recommend the connection to your tankless heater or using this type of solar heater instead of your expensive and dangerous traditional heater based on electricity or natural gas.
So, at first I made this box of expanded polystyrene with a thickness of 10 centimeters.
Then I filled the box with soil, in several layers of 2 or 3 centimeters, and installed this pipe. I paid 4 dollars for these 25 meters of cheap polyethylene pipe with an outer diameter of 16 millimeters, but it is obvious that your solar heater will require a more expensive pipe which made of copper, stainless steel or metal-plastic. Each of those layers of soil was tamped, and the total height of the soil inside this box is 13 centimeters, and the total weight of the soil is about 160 kilograms.
So, this video will describe this third my prototype, and I remind you that this first prototype was described by my old video about a month ago, and its soil was covered with this thin steel sheet which is missing in my third prototype.
This was my second prototype, and I plan to describe it with one of my future videos, and it has this mirror which gives my solar heater additional solar radiation to increase its heating temperature and to increase its heat production, and we see that the mirror is mounted on this cover of thick thermal insulation which is put on the heater in the evening, and therefore the soil inside the heater stays hot until the morning when the cover again opens the heater for its absorption of solar energy.
And we will see how the glass increases the heating temperature of the soil by the sun and its temperature in the morning.
Let's see how my third prototype absorbs and stores solar energy if it is covered with only the cheapest cellular polycarbonate with a thickness of 4 millimeter, without those additional glass sheets, and now is the morning of 22 June, and these temperature sensors say that the soil temperature is about 37 or 38 degrees Celsius. This sensor measures the temperature of water inside that pipe segment which is located about 4 centimeters from the southern surface of the soil. This other sensor measures the temperature of the soil near the north wall of the box, and we can understand that the average temperature of those 160 kilograms of soil will be slightly higher than the arithmetic mean of both sensors.
Now I am showing the sky of that day of 22 June, and we see that it was not a perfect sunny day, and in the evening the sensors showed these temperatures of the soil when the ambient temperature was 34 degrees Celsius, but it is obvious that the soil has lost the heat until morning when the air temperature was 21 degrees Celsius this early morning of 23 June.
Then I added a glass sheet to my solar heater, and the sensors showed these temperatures of the soil in the morning of 25 June.
Now we see the sky of this sunny day of 25 June, and in the evening the soil of my solar heater had these temperatures which are much more than they were 3 days ago when the heater had no the glass sheet. In addition, the glass sheet reduces heat loss at night, and now we see the temperatures of the sensors the next morning.
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