Solar Heat Dump

Josh_10

We've buried coils in the ground on new construction projects and hidden baseboard fastened to the panels. I'm going to try Apricus' heat dump next.

Anybody found other creative ways to dump heat? Or are there good products out there?

Jean-David Beyer

Some friends had an unused well in their basement. They heat pumped the heat out of that to heat their house in winter. They dumped the chilled water coming out of the heat pump into the lake they lived on. They did not install A.C. for their own ecological reasons, but they sure could have dumped the heat into the lake in summertime.

It would depend on the location. I do not know anyone else with such fortunate circumstances. They lived in Washington State not too far from the Pacific Ocean.

hot_rod

It would be

better to not have to dump any heat. But the reality is dumping is un-avoidable at times.

I visited a few large solar apartment buildings last year. They had very large arrays and generous storage. But still, depending on occupancy, DHW use patterns, and other factors they had a dump provision.

In all cases they used large hydronic unit heaters. They were mounted in the daylighted underground parking space, near the mechanical room. They blew the heat to the outdoors from the parking space.

Depending on the amount to be "shed" or diverted perhaps a garage slab, sidewalk or driveway snowmelt.

Add additional storage. The Swiss Jenni system uses 54,000 gallons of storage with about 3000 sq feet of collector, never a need to dump.

Could you adjust the array size in the summer? Remove tubes, cover several collectors? Then you wouldn't be spending money to run pumps and or fans to get rid of "free" energy At some point the energy required to dump chews into the economics of the system.

I haven't yet documented the performance of the Apricus dump radiator. We have one up at the shop, but it hasn't been plumbed yet. With flat panels in Wisconsin we have found the re-cooling function handles all the over heat.

A 3 panel, 120 gallon system with absolutely no DHW load. On my last trip we installed a data logger to see exactly how often and how long that re-cool function runs, when the tanks hits the highest limit temperature, etc

Our data logger is online, but within the company firewall so it is not yet accessible outside the building.

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