A Solar Water Heater - Getting Started

This is not the kind you might think of from the title. I wasn’t trying to heat water for our house, but rather just keep water from freezing for horses out in the pasture. We don’t have power out there, and keeping water liquid is an issue.

My wife found a plan at Build It Solar, and I agreed to try it.

Materials

The first thing was a trip to the Home Depot. I loaded up with the following

• 3 sheets OSB
• 2 sheets foam insulation, 1.5”
• 2 8 ft 2x6
• 4 8ft 2x4
• various screws

I wasn’t sure how things would go together, but I got started.

The Base

The first thing was to get the base. I had a water tank, around which this thing was going, so I started there, measuring the tank top. With those measurements, I cut out two pieces of OSB, which would be my base.

I used a utility knife to cut the insulation to fit and what you see is the base on which the tank will sit. This should insulate the tank from ground head losses, with a cover around it.

I’ll talk about the cover next.

Hooks

One of the things that I’ve been wanting for a long time is some system to hold the air hose on my mini-cart. I’ve looked at some of the air hose rollers at Home Depot, but spending $50 for one of those seemed silly. So I’ve wrapped the hose around the handle for a year, but it kept falling, and it was hard to drag the cart around.

So I had some time recently and decided to build this:

This is the final product where I have six hooks screwed on the back, holding the air hose on the back.

I started by cutting one hook, roughly, on the band saw. I had drawn it, sketched out a rough size that I liked and then cut it large. Here’s a quick look of my first one.

Once it was cut, I then used the random orbit sander to clean it up and round off the rough parts. I then checked the hook against a large coil of air hose to be sure that it would hold it all, with some spare space, and also be as small as possible. I ended up cutting it a couple times more and sanding it to make it better.

Then I grabbed a 2x6 and traced out 5 more copies of this.

These were all cut on the bandsaw, and then rounded on both sides with a 1/2” roundover on the router table. It was a nice day outside, so I spent 20-30 minutes sanding them further to make them smoother and less likely to catch on anything.

Once that was done, I removed the back of my cart, and measured out a circle, marking 6 spots on it. I didn’t try to be exact, but rough guessed where I’d want the three axis to be, drew them, traced the six pieces, and then screwed them in, one at a time with a single 1 5/8” screw.

This was the result, and it works great at holding the hose, and also letting me drag the cart one handed.

It pays to engineer

As I drove to drop Delaney off this morning at the bus, I saw this:

This is my neighbor’s leanto, just off the road as I leave the property. Apparently it didn’t survive the wind all that well. Part of his roof was ripped off:

 

I didn’t see this one being built, but I looked at it closely to check out the construction. Seemed flimsy to me. Not a lot of cross bracing, and the roof was 2 4x4s, butt jointed with the posts and screwed in. Not much support there.

And apparently not enough screws.