Hot Water heater

Carol

I don't think you would be happy running your hot water 150 ft from your house to the barn. It will take quite a while for the hot water to make it to the barn, and even when it does it probably won't be real hot.

On the other hand, I don't know how you can hook up a demand water heater in your barn. The whole point of using frostproof hydrants is that all of the water left in the hydrant drains back into the ground. So you can't have any plumbing attached to the hydrant.

Maybe you could put a demand heater in a pit, and run the supply line for one of the hydrants through the heater. I don't like this idea; chances are your heater would get flooded.

A better solution is to build an insulated room inside your building and put a water heater inside it. If you use a conventional water heater, the heater will keep the room warm. If you use a gas heater, you won't need to worry about the power going out. Even if you have to use electric, a small, well-insulated room will keep warm for a long time if there's 40 gallons of hot water inside. Run your plumbing underground to the heater room, and make sure that the pipe running up to the heater is well insulated; surround it with several inches of foam.

Since you've already got an extra water line, you might as well find a use for it. If you have a water softener, run soft water through one and hard water through the other. Or you can hook the two lines up in tandem so you get a little more pressure to the barn.

I guess they fall into the same catagory as parking on a driveway and driving on a parkway.

You can build a small solar HW pannel using a new auto/truck radaitor as a collector coil, cold water in bottom, hot out top. Put the sotrage tank slightly higher than the collector. Install check valve ( for directing flow), auto air vent, mixing valve, and No pumps, are required as this system will thermosphion from the collector to the tank.

For freeze protection:
1) Don't put a check valve in and the system will reverse flow at night. Depending on tank size and abiment temps determines if collector will freeze.

2) add a auto heater coil in the storage tank and use anti-freeze between the collector and the tank coil as a transfer medium. Although not as efficent as pure water will heat enough water to satisfiy your demand.

How much hot water? Of all the systems I designed and serviced this system was the most efficent and had the lowest cost. With a 4ftx8ft pannel using two 40" truck radaitors with 60* abiment, full sun, would heat 80gal of water from 65* to 180* in two hours. This system supplied all the HW for a family of four, showers, laundry, dish washer, etc;.

The only problem with NOT using a mixing valve in the system is it WILL burn a person severely at 180* if pure hotwater is used. A mixing valve lowers the HW temps to 120* or whatever temp you want with-in reason.

T_Bone

Another website asked me to expand my thoughts on my solar HW system. Here's a link to a drawing and my other ramblings.

T_Bone

• Solar HW Drawing