What's up 2007 team?
Hi, this is Aaron Antrim, one of the project team members from 2006. Feel free to bounce stuff my way during your work this summer. What's the present condition/status of the system? --Aaron 00:23, 15 July 2007 (PDT)
C'est la vie
Hola Aaron,
Oh la la, the present condition/status of the system? Well considering we haven't touched it yet, probably about the same as when you left it. When we first sat down to talk with Nacho about it, he was telling us that it works great and they use it when they want the pool a little warmer in the summertime. Then when we were down there checking it out, the maintainance guy told us that they had turned it on once, but the pump "got tired" and hot, so they turned it off.
Currently we are waiting for Nacho to come back from Saltillo with some special PVC parts. According to Oswaldo, a plumber friend of the boys, we need to hook the system up so that the main pool pump pushes the water to the roof. While that is happening we will check the amps to see if the work load stresses out the pump too much. If not, cool, we don't have to think about buying a new pump. From that we can supposedly get some figures to plug into an equation to see how big the system would have to be to actually get the pool up to 80ºF. My question is this: what is that equation? How in the world do we actually figure out how big the system needs to be? How do we make the connection between the prototype and the real deal? Any ideas you can supply us with would be more than appreciated. All the research I've found thus far on the internet is extremely vague and ends by saying that working with a professional es el mejor. Thanks for nothing! is always the feeling I come away with. I'm sure your'e quite intimate with that feeling after working on this project last year?
Muchas gracias, Carolina --waterfaery72
- Well we started trying to answer that same question (what system size is necessary to heat the pool to the desired temperature) last year. Here was the way we thought to figure it, if I remember correctly:
- (1) What is the rate of the pump and volume of water contained in the solar collector? How much water is cycled through per minute (volume of water processed) and how long does it stay in the collector (how many degrees hotter will the water be when it's returned to the pool).
- (2) How much of that heat will be lost, and how quickly, from the pool. There will be some cooling that happens in the pipes that come down from the roof (could be reduced with insulation). But you may be able to find equations to help calculate how much heat will be lost based on the surface area of the pool, or another approach might be to measure how much temperature loss occurs in the pool overnight. I have no idea how the rate of temp loss will be affected by a great temp. difference between pool and air in winter. Oh, as a side note, a pool cover is super-important for having any hope of making this system viable in the winter.
- In short, what we were trying to do was calculate (Temp gain from the system over the course of a day) - (Temp loss from heat transfer in the pool over the course of the day/night). Good luck! --Aaron 13:17, 23 July 2007 (PDT)