Man used beer bottles to make mom comfortable
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-04 10:26
A farmer in Mizhi county, Shaanxi province, used beer bottles to make a solar water-heating device so his elderly mother could take a warm bath every day.
Ma Yanjun, 42, a resident of a remote mountainous area where farmers aren't even afforded the necessity of bathing after a long day working in the field, collected dozens of beer bottles and improvised the water-heating device in 2006.
Ma's device not only gifted his 73-year-old mother a bath every day, it also attracted the envy of 20 local farmers, who recruited Ma to help them build their own.
(Xi'an Evening News)
Beer and sunshine land farmer in hot water A Chinese farmer has made his own solar-powered water heater out of beer bottles and hosepipes.
"I invented this for my mother. I wanted her to shower comfortably," says Ma Yanjun, of Qiqiao village, Shaanxi province.
Ma's invention features 66 beer bottles attached to a board. The bottles are connected to each other so that water flows through them.
Sunlight heats the water as is passes slowly through the bottles before flowing into the bathroom as hot water, reports China Economy Network.
Ma says it provides enough hot water for all three members of his family to have a shower every day.
And more than 10 families in the village have already followed suit and installed their own versions of Ma's invention.
my question is how did he manage to fix it???
and let the solar energy collected by the beer bottles change into electricity for heating the water???
how????
if this works can't we ALL collect beer bottles and start making our own water heaters...
and save on electricity bills...
cos i LOVE my bath water HOT.... (^^,)
SO i found these...
A Homemade Solar Water Heater
 | WILLIAM J. WEBER |
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 be erecting the solar water heater and shower — which we'd already planned as part of our new homestead — before actually constructing the house itself! Well, the more I considered this notion, and the more layers of grime that built up on my tribe's bodies, the more that bit of backward logic began to make a frontward kind of sense.
As you can probably imagine, when I finally proposed my topsy-turvy suggestion to the rest of the family, the whole gang clapped and cheered their approval. 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 get one fact straight right away: I discovered that we sure weren't going to buy our water heater. Some of those commercial solar units cost over $2,000!)
It took a lot of time and sifting, but I was finally able to devise a simple and inexpensive water warmer 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.
Third, hook the outlets from the manifold to a storage tank (this container should be set above the heat collector) so the thermosiphon principle will move water from the collector to the tank. (That fancy-sounding phrase, "thermosiphon principle," simply means that, since hot water rises and cold water sinks, liquid heated in the closed loop system will move up toward our elevated storage container, while cooler water will circulate downhill toward the collector to soak up more sun.)
Glass, Wood and Copper
We initially planned to construct a 48-by-96-inch collector box, but quickly scuttled those dimensions when I learned that a sheet of glass large enough to cover such a container would cost over $60! That price tag forced me to do some rethinking and to come up with an economical solution: I decided to make panels out of old aluminum awning-type windows! Several of the discarded 15-by-34-inch glass rectangles were lying around our homesite, and I was able to scrounge up a few secondhand panes for $1.50 each. Then all we had to do was adjust our collector size (we made it 34-by-90-inch) and line up six windows in a row to get $60 worth of glass cover for less than $9.00. (Besides, the lightweight aluminum units are a cinch to install and would be easy to replace from standard sources of supply if broken.)
A plumber friend gave me an old water heater to use for our storage tank, and I was able to "scavenge" all the black plastic pipe and odd fittings I'd need to connect all my units, and plenty of nails as well. Still, try as I might, I couldn't get around shelling out hard cash for my wood and copper materials.The lumber costs weren't too severe. In fact, I bought all the wood I needed for the box's sides and support pieces, plus two sheets of styrofoam insulation and one of pegboard Masonite, for a very reasonable $25.59 (see the accompanying bill of materials).
Our project did require one "killer expense," though: copper. I didn't want to spend any money I didn't have to, but I also figured that the outlay for our conducting medium was no place to cut corners. Copper is incredibly efficient at absorbing and releasing heat. And any less expensive collector material would have given us a "temporary gain but a permanent drain."
So, to build the manifold, I bought three 20-foot lengths of three-quarter-inch copper pipe, two rolls of 50-50 solder, one can of flux and numerous fittings. That added up to an admittedly not inexpensive $75.72. (Of course, half-inch pipe and parts would have cost less, but such smaller diameter lines are too restrictive for good thermosiphon flow.)
I also paid $45 for a large 12-gauge copper sheet, which became the main "heat catcher" inside the box. This material is commonly sold in a 36-inch width, so, rather than cut off two inches of copper to meet my 34-by-90-inch requirement, my local sheet metal salesman kindly bent a one-inch border along each side, which made the piece both more rigid and easier to fasten.
To Work, To Work
At last we were ready to build. We made the 34-by-90-inch (measured on the inside) frame from two 12-feet long 2-by-6's. This rectangle had 2-by-2's spiked along its sides and 2-by-4's at its ends to support the collector plate. An extra 2-by-4 was nailed across the middle of the box as a brace. Then we covered the frame's "bed" with a piece of one-eighth-inch pegboard Masonite and two sheets of heat-holding Styrofoam insulation.
Next we started on the main task: welding our copper pieces together. The first stage of this "penny metal" work involved constructing the pipe manifold, a "jail-door" structure that had four "bars" inside a frame-fitting rectangle. (Since each interior pipe section had to be fastened to the top and bottom pipe lines by three-quarter-inch T's, we did a lot of cutting and soldering at the manifold's ends.)
After that job was done, we laid the $45 copper collector sheet on a level concrete surface (so the heated material wouldn't warp) and brazed the manifold to this backing. Then we put the pipe-to-sheet assembly in its wood and Styrofoam frame bed, soldered the supply, discharge and relief valve lines in place, and topped the finished structure with the six awning windows.
A Trying Moment
To test the airtightness of our manifold, we plugged the collector's intake line, attached a garden hose to the top outflow opening, and trickled water into the pipeworks until air quit coming through the relief valve outlet. Then we tightened up the release mechanism, opened up the hose spigot and let 'er have it!
Sixty pounds of water pressure rushed into our lines. The pipes held for about ten minutes, then a small trickle started running down the collector, so we drained the conduit and resoldered the leaky seal. We left the equipment under pressure all night for its second test, and — thank goodness — when we examined our "sun catcher" the next morning, not one drop of H20 had escaped.
Hot Times
The last construction steps were to paint the collector sheet and manifold flat black, coat the exposed wood with a protective oil-based covering, set the water heater in place (at a 45 degree angle), attach the storage tank and rig up our outdoor shower.
That was that. For about $160 in materials, we'd built a solar heater that now gives my whole family an abundant supply of free hot water. (In fact, we actually had to add a cold water line to our shower stall to keep from getting scalded on especially sunny Florida days!)
Now I'll admit that our fresh air facility does look kind of silly perched by itself on the side of a hill, but we're all as blissful as bluebirds over our outdoor showers. After all, it may take us more than two summers to finish our house, but we're enjoying the pleasures of sunheated bathing right now!
EDITOR'S NOTE: While we congratulate Bill for his clever design, and acknowledge that Mr. Weber's homemade water heater is perfectly suited to his family's needs, we should also add that his device won't be appropriate for everyone because there's no feature in Bill's collector to keep the water in his pipes from freezing! Since such a mishap would obviously damage the unit, any folks who want to copy William's ideas, yet live in colder climates than the Floridian enjoys, should include some method of preserving their pipes.
One solution to this dilemma would be to use Bill's solar collector in the summer and a wood-burning stovepipe system in the winter. This approach is explained in "The Blazing Showers Stovepipe Water Heater," Mother Earth News, No. 42, Page 60.
The most common "collector-protector" technique, though, is to install a heat exchanger in the storage tank so that fluid coming from the collector warms water in the tank but remains, itself, within a closed heating circuit. The sun-grabbing liquid in this sort of rig can be mixed with antifreeze to protect it from bitter weather. Two examples of the method are discussed in [1] "Doyle Akers' $30 Homestead Solar Water Heater," Mother Earth News, No. 51, Page 122 (Doyle used salvaged air conditioner coils to build his exchanger) and [2] "More Ways to Recycle Old Refrigerators Into Low-Cost Solar Water Heaters," Mother Earth News, No. 49, Page 94 (Mother's researchers recycle a gas-fired hot water tank into an efficient heat exchanger). (The article also displays a passive no-heat-exchange unit that Mother's inventors designed. This particular model is protected from frostbite because it can be closed up at night!)
Several examples of direct heaters that, like Bill Weber's model, are inexpensive do-it-yourself solar devices but don't have any freeze protection appear in "The Khanh Solar Water Heater" (Mother Earth News, No. 45, Page 124), "A Simple Solar-Heated Shower" (No. 46, Page 64), and "Recycle a Refrigerator Into a Solar Water Heater" (No. 48, Page 108).
Lastly, a good explanation of the solar thermosiphon principle can be found on page 19 of Mother Earth News, No. 47 in the "Plowboy Interview" with David Wright.
I’ve had a few days during the HMX build while I’m either waiting for parts or waiting for something to dry and had some free time. I’m not exactly one to sit and watch TV when I have nothing planned, so I set out on another project.
While I have electricity out to the garage now, heat has been an issue all winter long. Mattar graciously lent me his kerosene heater, which did an okay job of taking the bite off the chill. Insulating the garage would go a long way to help keep the bitter Vermont cold out, but that’s a project for another day. I decided instead to take advantage of the south-facing side of the garage and build a solar furnace to collect some of that sunshine just bouncing straight off my garage. My dad built one years ago and said he recorded a 110-degree temperature differential between inlet and outlet. And I had enough scrap materials around the basement to do something similar to what my dad built.
I started with some 2×4s and plywood to build a simple box. I’m no carpenter, but I learned that if it’s wobbly, just add more nails.
I actually built the box to certain dimensions, based on what scrap materials I had and on the dimensions of my heat collection method - aluminum cans. That sure was a lot of Sprite. Fifty cans in five columns of 10 will funnel the air upward.
Sealed the box using adhesive caulk, just to keep any heated air from escaping the box.
So you may have already thought, “How can air climb the columns of cans when there’s no hole at the bottom of the can?” Answer: drill press and 3/4-inch bit. Times 45.
The last five cans, the bases of each column, will sit on the bottom of the box and thus will be unable to draw air from underneath, so I poked holes in the sides of each of the five.
Stack the cans with liberal doses of adhesive caulk. Give them enough time to dry.
Once they’re dry, I painted each column with black BBQ paint. Black to best absorb the sun’s heat, BBQ paint to keep from flaking off the cans. At the top, I drilled an outlet hole. I left an inch or two of space between the tops of the columns and the top of the box to permit air to flow out of the columns.
I drilled the outlet hole based on the diameter of some wet-dry vacuum hose I picked up, about 1-1/2 inches in diameter.
At the bottom, I used another wet-dry vacuum attachement that would more evenly disperse the incoming air. Screwed it in at each end, then caulked the seal.
Then started to caulk the columns in place. At the bottom, you can see the inlet hole I drilled. At about this point, I realized that a better place for the inlet would have been through the plywood at the bases of each column. In this location, the air can simply pass over the cans (there’s about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch between the cans and the upper edge of the 2×4 frame) and not really pick up that much heat. If I were to relocate the inlet, it would force all the air to pass through the cans and pick up the absorbed heat. Next time.
Had some red paint left over from one of Heather’s previous projects, so slapped on a couple coats to at least keep the weather off the bare wood.
The caulk is pretty strong. Kept the cans from falling out while I had the box inverted.
Also had some 3/4-inch PVC pipe from another previous project. Bought a couple elbows and T-fittings and whipped up a simple frame to keep the box off the ground and to angle it upward toward the sun. Didn’t give the exact angle too much thought.
Caulked a clear plexiglas cover on the front and sat the furnace out in the sun for a full day over the weekend to see how it would work.
Using some advanced technological equipment, such as this precisely calibrated pyrometer, I determined the intake air temperature, which should have been the same as the ambient air temperature, to be about 80 degrees.
Using the same equipment and methods, I determined the outlet temperature to be about 95 degrees - thus a 15 degree temperature differential. Not 110 degrees, but not bad , considering I didn’t even break $50 in materials - most of that being the plexiglas window.
Obviously don’t have the inlet and outlet attached to the garage - figures that the day I finish the furnace, it’s 80 degrees and sunny and it looks like we’re finally done with winter. Dad recommends wiring a pusher fan at the end of the inlet tube to keep the air circulating through the furnace.
Were I to do this again, I’d first make the furnace larger. As I recall, Dad’s measured something like four feet on each side. Obviously, the more surface area, the more heat you’ll pick up. Second, as mentioned above, I’d relocate the inlet to the back of the box to direct all the air through the cans. Or at least I’d cut a piece of aluminum to act as a baffle and prevent the air from rising straight up. Third, I might use those small soda cans I’ve seen in the grocery stores lately, just to get more surface area.
Fourth, I’d finish the build at the beginning of winter, not the end.
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