Doyle Aker's $30 Homestead Solar Water Heater
May/June 1978
By the Mother Earth News editors
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A side view of Doyle's solar water heater before the structure was covered. Note drum, Q X 4 framing, and concrete slab.
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"The little fellow seldom slays the giant," says north Texas resident Doyle Akers. "Not really. Not since David laid it on Goliath anyway. But it sure is fun when we little guys (MOTHER-type homesteaders) get to tweak the giants' (the big power companies) toes from time to time."
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My wife Georgia and I moved out to our little homestead ten years ago because we value an independent way of life. We've found, however—as so many others have—that life (independent or not) carries an increasingly large price tag these days.
So we've learned to scrounge and barter for many of the things we need . . . and to use our own country ingenuity to provide much of the rest.
We patch our clothes and turn out the lights when they aren't needed. We swap for used tools and other items, and then repair them. We carry home the smashed 2 X 4's we find alongside the road, cut out the good parts, and use the lumber in various ways around the place. And we notice the blistering-hot water which comes out of a plastic hose that's been left lying in the sun . . . and wonder if we can't use the idea to help at least one David (our little homestead) tweak the toes of at least one Goliath (by lessening our mini-farm's consumption of the local big power company's high-priced electricity).
Well, we can. And we know because Georgia and I have been doing just that for over a year now. Not all the time and not in a polished, state-of-the-art fashion. But—for a total investment of only $30 and a week of slow going—we now have a solar water heater which supplies us with almost all the hot water we can use seven months of the year. (And if we really wanted to, I don't think it'd be too hard to modify the setup so it'd operate on a year-round basis.)
Now I'm not an engineer, so I know my solar water heater isn't perfect mechanically. And I'm not an artist, so it isn't particularly pretty either. And I did make some mistakes—most of which are still stuck together with No. 8 box nails out there in the yard right now—when I put our sun-powered unit together.
But our water heater does work, its design is quite simple, I did mostly build it with salvaged and bartered materials, and I do figure that most anyone who can swing a hammer and screw two pieces of pipe together can do the same.
Except for some helpful articles in MOTHER, most of the information floating around about solar water heaters a year or so ago was entirely out of our reach. Sure, the ideas that the big industry and the big government engineers were coming up with would work . . . IF [1] you had an arm elbow-deep in some tax-supported treasury, [2] you wanted to build on some incredibly large scale, and [3] you were willing to wait somewhere between 15 and 20 years for a payoff on your investment.
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