A Homemade Solar Water Heater

By William J. Weber
Published on September 1, 1979
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The homemade solar water heater enables Bill and his family to clean up at the construction site, because he built the heater before he built the house!
The homemade solar water heater enables Bill and his family to clean up at the construction site, because he built the heater before he built the house!
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The heart of the collector consists of a
The heart of the collector consists of a "jail door" manifold fabricated from 3/4" copper pipe.
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The 34
The 34" x 90" wooden frame (measured internally) is just the right size to accommodate Bill's scavenged 15" x 34" awning-type windows.
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Diagram shows the parts, dimensions, and configuration of the solar water heater.
Diagram shows the parts, dimensions, and configuration of the solar water heater.

Last summer my family and I started digging out the foundation for our new home. However, after only two sweaty days of laboring under the Florida sun, I realized that we might be going about the whole project in the wrong order. Maybe, I thought, we should erect the solar water heater and shower — which we’d already planned as part of our new homestead — before constructing the house! Well, the more I considered this notion, and the more layers of grime built up on my tribe’s bodies, the more that bit of backward logic began to make frontward sense.

As you can probably imagine, the whole family clapped and cheered when I proposed my topsy-turvy suggestion to them. So I sat down to research the current literature on solar water heaters. I studied every book and article I could find, but ended up more confused than educated! All the plans called for elaborate pumps, sensors, control switches and other complicated paraphernalia.

(Oh, I did learn one thing: we sure weren’t going to buy a heater. Some of those commercial solar units cost over $2,000!)

It took a lot of time and sifting, but I finally devised a simple and inexpensive homemade solar water heater that I knew “us regular folks” would be able to build. In fact, my design involves only three steps:

First, build a glass-covered wood “hot box” to catch the sun’s heat.

Second, install a manifold of copper water pipes inside this collector box so the gathered warmth will heat water.

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