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Solar Panels on barn roof


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At present our "swimming pool" only consists of 4 flower pots on the ground marking the proposed corners and we'll probably get it actually dug and installed by around 2010. (The weather at the moment makes me wonder why I'm even thinking of a pool! But it's sure to get hot soon - please). 

I've seen a few websites but wonder if anyone has actually installed a solar heating system and could give an idea or two about the following: 

The adjacent barn needs a new roof first, which partly explains the pool construction delay. It occurs to me that some form of solar heating panels mounted on the roof of the barn at this stage would be a good idea for the future warming up of the proposed pool.

How do the panels fix to the roof? 

Do fixings pass through the tiles and onto the timbers? 

Do the timbers need beefing up?

What do I need to think of when talking to the roofers? 

Or should I not bother about making provision now and simply wait to install panels in a few years?

Is it worth putting in solar heating anyway?  

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It may well be worth looking at this site http://www.navitron.org.uk/solar_collector_panel.htm . We have just had a delivery of their 30 tube 58mm dia panel EVACUATED TUBE SOLAR HOT WATER PANEL . They are based in the U.K. and they deliver here to France. The best thing for us is that you don't need 50% of the area of the pool to heat it!!! The panel dimentions are in the FAQ section and all the prices are all shown in the price list towards the bottom of the site. the single panel we have measures 2.4 X 1.9 meters. The cost was only slightly more than your £1300 and they are much better looking to boot than this plastic stuff!!!

When the plastic solar matting is laid on the floor and is heating the pool is it too hot to walk on? I have wondered this for ages???

When the kit was first delivered 12 of the tubes were totally destroyed and the other 18 were damaged. I phoned and told Navitron and they shipped out another batch of 30 tubes and included 10 spares as well!!! Their service has been excellent and I would recomend them to anyone without hesitation. I will also say that I am just a very satisfied customer. Shame I can't say the same about the local carriers, more like gorillars [:-))]...

If you would like any further info them either PM or e-mail me...

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i have the solarmatt system, it works well, but i'm sure the navitron is better. With solarmatt you need the heat from the sun for it to work wwhere as with the navitron i believe its the light that heats the water.

the solarmatt isn't hot to the touch at all, unless its switched off then it will get hot, when water is circulationg its cool to the touch.

if i was doing it again i think i'd go for the navitron system.

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Thanks Jonzjob and Mikey - I was beginning to wonder if anybody had a solar heated pool. I've had a quick look at the Navitron site and have saved it for a longer and more careful study. It certainly seems to do the business and is a lot neater than all those black tubes all over the place.

It's got me thinking about hot water for the house too. It might be an idea to install this as a secondary system. In other words don't upset the existing set-up at all, just add this by fitting an extra hot / warm tap where needed. I'm upgrading the bathroom and hopefully getting a new shower room installed so I've a bit to think about. 

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Hi,

If you are making a pool consider putting solar collectors in the terraces around the pool.  We have done this, see our blog http://smartfrance.blogspot.com We will also buy evac tube solar collectors and we have a source in France that is less expensive than Navitron and nearer :) .  Contact me with a pm for info.  We intend to heat our house with a solar combi system.

Bob T.

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Why are blogs such a pain to read. Any normal reading starts at the top and works down! Not start from the top of each bit and then work up!!!

I don't know what the prices are for the kit that you are talking about, but are they the same quality both of the kit and the service? If the glass tubes from your supplier arrived damaged would they be replaced as easily as the kit supplied by the people who supplied mine? I now have a full replacement set of 30 evacuated tubes with 10 spares sent just in case any were broken on the second shipment. None were so I have 10 spares. The only thing that is holding me up now is the U.K.postal system for some of the other bits I needed, not from Navitron, which is not normal!

I have no problems with the people I got my kit from and would recomend them to any and everyone. Naviton are good and believe in old fashioned service!

The solar collectors in the terraces seem like a very good idea, especially if you use evacuated tubes because you don't need the area that's needed with matting or the 'conventional' collectors.

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[quote user="Jonzjob"]

the single panel we have measures 2.4 X 1.9 meters.

[/quote]

From the Navitron site

[quote]

The Navitron panel is 2.25m2 so (working on the 25% coverage figure) each panel will heat 11m2 of pool area. A 40m2 pool would only need 4 Navitron panels.

[/quote]

Am I calculating this incorrectly? your single panel will heat (using the ideal situation 25% coverage) a pool area of 18.24m sq (or 14m sq using the more realistic 35%) - How big is your pool??

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Our pool is 9.5 X 4.5 meters.

I have spoken to the Navitron guys and they told me that their calculations are for the U.K., but that the sun has more strength and longer hours here. Their calculations worked to 3.8  of the 20 tube 47mm panels for the U.K. The 58mm panely produce twice the heat of the 47mm ones and the calculations are worked out using a 20 tube 47mm panel as a count of 1...[8-)].

I only have room for one 30 tube of 58mm panel so I asked if it would be worth me trying that. They said that it would certainly work, but the time to heat the pool would be a little longer. I have a 70.000 BTU (50 KW) heat exchanger which is slightly larger than the one I would have for a single 30 tube panel. This is so that if I do decide that I need to increase the area I can add another panel if  can find room for it???

The biggest stumbling block that I have now is that 22mm compression fitting are not common in this part of France and the ones that I am getting sent over from England will have taken 2 weeks to get here IF they arrive on Monday next [:@]. The connections to the heat manifold are 22mm. You can't soft solder because of the temps involved from the panel and hard solder is not possible because there are plastic panels at each end of the collector manifold box... I don't have the kit to do hard solder/brazing anyway.

So when it is up and running I will let you know how it performes.

One of the things that came up on Navitron's forum was about a solar powered coffee maker!!! It turned out that if you take the copper heat pipe and gubbins out of the glass tube then fill it with water, it takes quite a lot, put it out in the sun and it boils the water!!! I tried it with one of the damaged tubes I have and it took about an hour on a fairly overcast day to boil and by the end of the day the tube only had half the water left [:-))]! I also had a complete tube stood next to it and when that had been in the sun for about 10 mins a drop of water sizzled off the copper heat bulb on the top... It would have taken the skin off of your finger of it had been touched! Someone else tried to find out how strong they were by throwing a football at his panel from 3 meters away. It bounced every time. What a  p r a t ! But it does show how strong they are. He said that he needed to find out because of his son bringing his mates around and them kicking a football around[:'(]. Personally I would have stuck with threatening them with a slow death [6]!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Yep!!! All it needs now is the fine tuning to get the most out of the panel. Just before I locked the pool room, in our summer kitchen, the collector was reading a temp of 60 deg C. That was about 5 mins ago, cloudy sky and I had already had to put a 't' shirt on 'cause the temp had dropped to 22 C, cold wind!

I have e-mailed Navitron with some photos of the instal and a couple of suggestions. One of which is to come up with a 20 mm pipe size fror any kit that they send over here, 'cause 22 mm compression fittings are about as rare as rocking horse poo. You can get them, but they are few and far between. It has been passed to the powers that be and they will cogitate over it.

If you do decide to get this kit then just tell them that the reference came from the forum. Nowt in it for me, I already have all the kit that I need. No need for solar for the water heating, it was installed when we bought the house!! you may be able to get some tubes at a better price, BUT will you get the fantastic service that was given to me?

[IMG]http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f180/Jonzjob/JohnzNavitron.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f180/Jonzjob/JohnzNavitron2.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f180/Jonzjob/JohnzNavitron5.jpg[/IMG]

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Hi Jonzjob,

I attended a Navitron course in June. The 22mm connector can be changed by means of fitting a reduction coupling. I went from 22mm to 15mm, bringing all the 15mm pipe over with me. I'm just waiting for permission from the Mairie to go ahead. I know that's too late for your pool installation, but it might help if you install one on your house.

Regards Paul

 

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Hi paul, why do you need the Marie's permission for your solar? Or is it for the pool?? As a matter of interest why did you go to 15mm. If you do need to modify it in any way you will have to get that from the U.K. too. 14 or 16mm would have done the same thing peut etra and it's easily available here? Mind you if you have 2 22 to 15mm straight adaptors you may well have a market for them here???? pretty please!![:D]

I have found that by almost closing one of the isolate valves either side of the solar collector pump, hot side not pool water side, I can reduce the flow so the water going through the collector doesn't get cooled so fast that the solar panel can't keep up with it. All I need now is a nice cloudless sky like what we have had for ages, but not today. I only thought of running it in manual mode yesterday to see what would happen?

What was the course like? Also have you had a look at their forum (opps!! I just mentioned another forum. Please don't ban me for drug taking in 'Le Tour' too[:-))]).

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Hi Jonzjob,

I need the Mairie's permission as it is an alteration to the outside of my property. What is required is a  'Déclaration de travaux exemptés de permis de construire ou déclaration de clôture'.  I detailed the procedure on another post yesterday, basically for information of anyone contemplating an installation. As it is going on the roof, I need their permission. I don't imagine that your pool installation would require it, as it is probably not easily visible.

I went down to 15mm for several reasons. To save heat loss. Less expense. Easier to work with as I don't have a pipe bender! Also, having done some minor plumbing in a friend's kitchen, I found that the quality of fittings here varies so much, that I thought that it might be easier for now to get everything that I required in the UK. I had bought fittings here, that didn't fit! Some of the packs had pieces missing and were very expensive in comparison to the UK. If I were going to do another installation here I would consider using locally supplied copper and fittings once I had found a good supplier.

Regarding the straight fit adaptors, I only bought the two that I required. I don't think they were too expensive. Do you have anyone that can post you some from the UK? They have to be a compression fitting close to the collector, or non lead soldered as it can melt in the temperatures generated close to the collector.

You should get heat even on a cloudy day, as the evacuated tubes will still work, far better than a flat panel.

I like Navitron's forum. I found it useful when I was infomation seeking and will still use it. The course was very useful for me. I went there with particular ideas on how I was going to set up my system and it made me think again about exactly how to install it. There were quite a number of plumbers on the course, but only three out of the thirty plus people there had bought systems to install themselves.

I had been thinking about energy saving for some time (I don't wear an anorak!), really as a cost saving measure in the long term. I've been looking into rain harvesting, but feel that would work better for us if we were moving and could install a system from the beginning.

Regards Paul

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We decided to get an abri this year, mainly because we didn't think the alarm we had was any use and the child security thing was a worry when we were away.

It does seem to act rather like a solar panel and we could swim in 25° C water in late April, whereas it was only up to that in early June before using a bubble cover.

The main problem is that we are now trying to stop the water from going over 34°, but without losing too much through evaporation.

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Hi Jamesg,

Could you connect a radiator to the pump system for the pool and have the radiator in the shade? My thoughts are that if it is higher than the pool, the warm water would move by convection and you would lose heat from the pool. Especially if the radiator was in a cool barn. Just a thought, but I'm not sure if that would move enough heat. Or, as I might have been thinking too laterally, how about covering the abri with some of that material that people use inside of greenhouses to keep the temperature down?

Paul

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Hi Paul,

I doubt if a radiator would make much difference, although maybe a solar type system running at night may do something.

I had thought that we would leave some of the abri open overnight, but we do get a fair amount of wind here, so not sure about that.  When we tried that the water loss through evaporation was very high.

Some shade would certainly help and we could look into that thanks.   It hasn't been a problem owing to the changeable weather this year and the extended season and clean water make it very well worthwhile.   The abri itself does give some shade, as it is polycarbonate, not clear glass.

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  • 1 month later...

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