Solar: Tale of Two Showers

Actually, it's a tale of 3 showers, but I was too drawn to the Dickensian reference. Our solar home water heating system was installed as of 1:45pm on Monday, 23 April 2007. This is a completely passive system: no electricity or batteries at all, no gas, just the regular pressure in the water pipes, and the sun's rays beating down.

Shower 1: The next morning (yesterday) I took my normal morning shower. But it wasn't normal. It was lukewarm at best. Yikes! My hope was that the 40 gallons of water in the rooftop 'tank' (the series of copper tubes on the roof: pic) just hadn't had enough time to get fully heated.

Shower 2: Yesterday evening, after a rather strenuous workout on the Bowflex, I decided to take a 'hot' shower. As hot as I could get it anyway. Yee-ow! I had to turn the faucet quite a bit further toward the 'cold' side than I used to. The hot water was hot! Excellent.

Shower 3: This morning. This was the first morning shower after the system had enjoyed a full day of sunshine ...and a night cooling off. The water was not as hot as last night. But it was exactly how it used to be with the gas-fired water heater.

Next up? Well, to see how much (if at all) we might have to adjust our lifestyles to live with only solar water heat, this evening after getting home from work, I started a load running in the dishwasher, put a load of towels in the clothes washer, and got on the treadmill. After doing a few miles, I put my nasty sweaty gear along with a load of clothes in the washer (so this was now the 2nd load) ...and hosed off and took a dip in the pool :) ...so tomorrow morning we'll see how the water temp is after what has been a much more normal (or a bit above-average) use of hot water.

And Shirley tried holding an oven thermometer under the hot water flow and it got past 150F before she pulled the thermometer out. So far, so good :)