Federal rescue and Solar

Dan Monsen

I blame our goverment for the unfair tax situation. One example of how the tax burdern is shifted from big buisness to the backs of the middle class dates back to the the 1950s. When mid east oil kings did not feel they were getting their share of the wealth they devised a scheme with the help of US oil companys to divert US tax dollars to their own pockets. In the early 1900s congress had enacted tax laws which would allow US corporations to write off any tax paid to a foreign goverments. The Mideast countries wrote a tax into their laws just to tax the oil corporations in their countries, By doing this they gave themselves a hefty raise, around 300 million a year. This is in direct proportion to how much US tax revenue decreased that year and every year afterward. Guess who had to make up the difference?

Andrew Hagen_4

Economics?

I can see the possibility for increased collector efficiency with this design, but the cost would have to be weighed against the cost of adding more collectors. Also, the rated efficiency of heat pipe evac tubes is generally lower than that of flat plates.

Another application I could see for the use of two storage tanks is in a situation like a brewery where very hot water is needed to wash down tanks. In that case, it may be advantageous to stage the tanks, hopefully avoiding the need to run the backup heaters as much as possible.

Your system seems to work well or your home. I'm just not sure the economics of paying someone to design and install a similar system would be there when compared with adding the collectors to fully utilize two storage tanks sized to their respective loads. I have always been of the mind that one wants to fully cycle the storage each day.

Check out the attached parametric plots from F-Chart showing solar fraction versus storage volume per square foot of collector in the first chart and solar fraction versus number of collectors in the second chart. I just did a quick SDHW system, so the numbers aren't accurate, but they are the same for both comparisons. Unfortunately, I have to keep the gal/sf constant for the # of collectors plot, so the storage volume is increasing with the number of collectors. However, I think it is still illustrative of the benefit of additional collector area, even if it means bumping up to the next larger storage tank.