While writing my little tirade on what we can do about Global warming I had an idea. It's late and I'm very tired so I may feel differently about it in the morning, but right now I think it's pretty neat.
The idea is to use the sun to preheat water before it enters a hot-water heater. We all know that if you let your water run it gets cold - that's the water from the service pipe - essentially chilled ground water. The water heater takes this and heats it up. I believe if that water was warming going in it would take less energy to heat it. (This is proven out in experiments I've seen. For example boiling chilled water takes upwards of 25% longer than boiling hot tap water.) The idea is to divert the water from your heater intake to a series of pipes on the roof or a sunny wall. A network of small pipes (more surface area), painted dull black (better heat absorption, less reflection) could heat the water before it enters the tank. Basically a reverse radiator. Ideally such a system would only kick-in when the temperature was high (and probably wouldn't be useful at all in climates where the pipes might freeze) which would mean some kind of temperature controlled valve (I assume that this would be an off-the-shelf part... although where that shelf is I'm not sure). I don't know if the energy savings (if there are indeed any) would outweigh the cost of such a thing, but it seems like it would be really cheap to build/install and be essentially maintenance free... so even a small energy savings would eventually cover the costs. The answer's probably "yes" but, am I crazy? Jim Davis ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Create robust enterprise, web RIAs. Upgrade & integrate Adobe Coldfusion MX7 with Flex 2 http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;56760587;14748456;a?http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/flex2/?sdid=LVNU Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:223951 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5
