It's been a couple weeks since working on the solar experiment, as other projects came up. I built some simple wood brackets to fasten the collector to the south wall of our rainwater tank 'shed'. I had planned to mount the pumping station outside on the west wall of the shed, but decided at the last minute to instead put it inside, sheltered from the rain. Access is obviously more difficult (I have to crawl underneath and through a hatch in the raised floor to get at it!), but it'll work for now.
The outlet end of the collector passes through the wall to the pumping station- I made the connection using a flexible water heater connector.
The inlet pipe to the collector (bottom right) also has a flexible connector. I have gauges at both the inlet and outlet ends of the collector so I can measure the temperature gain, and knowing the pump flow rate, calculate the BTU output of the system.
We're using this collector to pump heat through tubing lines buried under our raised bed gardens. All that's left is to run the supply and return lines to the gardens and it should be ready to make heat...maybe this week :)
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