04-13-2011, 02:10 AM
It's called passive solar. It's good for heating hot water about 30% of your bill. Tho, they don't really use soda cans for it because, well, soda cans are better at heating air than water. Your better off just exposing copper tubes to the SUN then aluminum cans.
Tho, I hear you can build a passive solar AC unit but it's more complicated. And you can even store this heat. For night time use again a bit more complicated. You'd be better off using passive solar to heat water then run it for radiant floor heating.
But real winner is, passive solar is easy to do ... High efficiency unlike PV solar Passive is 60-70% of the sun's energy vs. 15%. Plus no batteries or inverters to muck around with AND virtually maintenance free = no brainer.
But this is nothing new and have been around before electricity was even invented.
Tho, I hear you can build a passive solar AC unit but it's more complicated. And you can even store this heat. For night time use again a bit more complicated. You'd be better off using passive solar to heat water then run it for radiant floor heating.
But real winner is, passive solar is easy to do ... High efficiency unlike PV solar Passive is 60-70% of the sun's energy vs. 15%. Plus no batteries or inverters to muck around with AND virtually maintenance free = no brainer.
But this is nothing new and have been around before electricity was even invented.