Category: Solar Heating
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Heating A Well House With Simple Clean Solar Electric Power! Thermal Energy Storage / TES
I made a video about this project – blog article continues below: Stopping A Well House From Freezing When I moved to a homestead farm in the country, one of the things I dreaded was the well house freezing. A well house is a tiny wooden “house” built over the top of the well head,…
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PV2L-MG: My Low Voltage DC Residential Micro Grid Goes Live! Direct Solar Photovoltaic
It’s live! After several years of testing and research, then a long and grueling move to the countryside, I installed the first Low Voltage DC wall outlets in my house. A full length multi-episode video documentary is in production to document the system. Within hours these outlets were powering up one of my DC cooktops,…
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Solar Hot Water! Semiconductor Immersion Heating Elements – my research project
Solar panels do so many things very well, but there is always room for improvement and new ideas. One application I find interesting is to directly drive a Hot Water Heater (HWH) heating element in a water tank with PV DC solar panels. But are there better ways to do it? I made a video…
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Boiling Water with 14w of Solar Powered Induction (plus video) EXPERIMENTAL
It’s that time again… another solar powered experiment at the outer edges of “feasibility”. Part of my work and research in solar power the past few years has been about finding ways to do “more with less“. Often I try to accomplish a task using only the solar panel itself, using minimal to no electronics…
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20 Watt Solar Panel Boils an Egg! My ultra efficient solar electric cooker prototype (Video Added)
Cooking food with only 10 watts of solar power sounds unattainable – but it’s not. This was recently proved in my solar workshop. I used a combination of an insulated food container with a diode chain solid state heating element to efficiently extract heat from a solar panel. The result is an ultra efficient mini…
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Solar PV Solid-State heating elements (Diode Strings) explained
This post is mainly to address the lack of understanding about solar powered (PV-to-Load) solid-state heating elements – also called a diode string or chain. The Part 2 video presentation and this blog post should help fill in the blanks. The video itself is also posted here on this page. Watching Part 1 is also…
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Boiling Diodes: a more efficient way to heat water and cook food using Solar Power
Why Solid State Solar Electric Heating Elements Matter Update: further research has been conducted into this topic, and it has been very fruitful. Videos showing some of the latest results are posted on this page. While continuing my research into solid-state solar electric PV-to-Load heating elements, I decided to try heating and if possible boiling…
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Solid State Solar Electric Heating Elements
Background Update: further research has been conducted into this topic, and it has been very fruitful. Videos showing some of the latest results are posted on this page. I’ve spent a lot of time working with resistance style heating elements to extract heat from solar panel arrays. Uses include space heating, cooking food and heating…
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Simple Solar Electric space heater conversion project (With Video)
Introduction and Recap of Past Work Over the past several years, I have experimentally heated my home and workshop with custom space heaters converted from AC to Direct DC operation. What I wanted to achieve was to plug my space heaters straight into the solar panels, bypassing inverters, charge controllers and batteries. Plus save wear…
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Solar PV DC Home Heating PART 3 – engineering and safety devices
PART 1 AND PART 2 | Solar PV DC Heating for Beginners This blog post is a continuation of my Solar Electric Space Heating series. Since 2022 I have been converting commodity AC space heaters to direct Solar PV DC operation. This follow-up blog post has links to all of my video presentations on this…
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Using Solar Panels and Ohms Law to drive DC loads directly
Hi folks, I’m going to briefly cover some concepts that are helpful to understand when driving loads directly with PV DC solar panels: whether it is a fan, a heating element, an electric pump, hot water heater, and so on. We will use a heating element for this example because it’s simple and has no…
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Simple PV Solar heating for beginners – plus video guide
For years I have been using excess solar power to heat my home with various types of directly PV powered DC heaters. I wanted to help beginners who want to try tapping direct PV Solar power to heat their home or shop. So I created a detailed video guide (it’s posted below). Background Previously, I…
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(Updated) Solar Panels can heat your Home or Shop – DIY video series
Did you know that a small (~1kW) array of solar panels can generate enough heat for a typical room in a home or shop? In fact the idea is so simple, so good and so affordable, it ought to be in every home. Note: due to the complexity and safety issues of modifying AC space…
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