Programming IntellaMaxx Controllers 11.15.2010

SUNMAXX SOLAR HOT WATER SOLUTIONS PROGRAMMING INTELLIMAXX CONTROLLERS Date: 11/15/2010 Okay. I’d like to welcome everyone to our Solar Programming IntelliMaxx Controllers Webinar. I’m going to take the next thirty minutes and cover in as much detail as I can domestic hot water and IntelliMaxx controller programming. I’m going to try and answer all your questions. Please feel free to as always send me a question in the chat box. I usually do my best to answer them right away. Before I get into it can anybody confirm for me that they can actually hear me? That would be a good start. All right, perfect. Let me begin by introducing our two basic controllers that we have for here the IntelliMax-DHWBPlus and the IntelliMaxx Economy Plus. Obviously the Economy plus is a much more complicated controller. It allows you to tie into heating systems quite easily and often it can replace some of the home heating system logic. Now the IntelliMaxx-DHWBPlus which is what I’ll focus on today gives you many options for your solar system. With only two relays and as you’ll see there are many things that we can do with those two relays. We can run pumps and valves or two valves and two pumps. As well as monitor performance data and log that data we can also tie into second tank or heat dump loop and obviously the b bus data logging capabilities. Okay the DWHBPlus has a thermostatic function as well as differential function. I’ll go into more detail as far as what that means momentarily. It allows you to set certain programs to activate at pre-determined temperatures rather than pre-determined differentials. They do use the PT1000 temperature sensors. As you might be able to barely make out in this photograph there’s a black and grey sensor. Just to point out the black sensors are rated for 280 degrees Celsius. So the black sensors are always what you use in the solar collectors. The grey sensors are used for the tank. These are a good controller to use for drain back systems. There are a few important functionalities in terms of how effectively a drain back system can operate using one of these controllers. There are nine different systems that are selectable that we can pre-program settings and just choose which array is most suitable. I’ll go over those in a minute too. There are also energy metering and very simple settings that you can activate. That allows you to monitor performance without having any additional software or any other components. This will be able to monitor performance for you as along as you activate that function as with all resale controllers. Yeah, it sure does Don and I’ll discuss that momentarily. You can pre-program your controllers based on the parameters that I’m going to introduce to you in a moment. But you can also tell your controller to do anything that you need it to do. There’s software that you can purchase and it’s fairly high end. It’s in the neighborhood of $800 for the software. But it’s a one time use and that will allow you to tell your controller to do things that’s outside of the standard factory setting options. So that is always an option for you. Now let’s just get right into wiring the controller first. Right out of the box you’re going to have a pre-wired controller. This photograph here you see the wires that the lead in the neutral and the green ground. They come pre-wired with our DWHB Plus pump station. Okay so if you order the controller separately you have to wire the circuit in. Very simple the lead in the neutral go to terminals 19 and 20 and the ground to 12. But if you buy the pump station with the IntelliMaxx controller it comes pre-wired and all you have to do is plug the controller into the wall. The sensor wires on this photo I showed the brown on the left and the white on the right. However there’s no polarity to these sensors. So you can wire them which ever way you want. There’s no polarity on the sensor wires. If for some reason you don’t have the sensor wire wired properly there will be a flashing triangular sign on your controller. That indicates to you that the sensors are improperly wired. So it is relatively foolproof. The instruction manual is very detailed and laid out with troubleshooting guides in an attempt to make this what could be a complicated procedure and turn into something very simple. Often people will say “Do I need to hire an electrician?” Or “Should I get a certified or licensed electrician to do this?” And really the answer is up to the municipal code but in terms of what pre-knowledge it takes to wire these controllers is very basic. So my answer is “No, you don’t need an electrician in order to wire or program these controllers.” As you get into the economy system and tie into furnaces and boilers it does help to bring in an electrician or HVAC guy in. But this is something that you should be able to handle quite easily I believe. Okay now in terms of programming. You have only three buttons to choose from. They’re numbered one, two and three from the right to the left. My finger is on button number one. That button will forward the menu. So right now you see the photograph that says collector. That’s sensor is reading 71.9. It’s going to move forward to the next sensor. It’s going to move to all four sensors if they are installed. And then it will give you the Hp percentage the number of hours that the pump has run. Then the last option will be a time menu. Once you get to the time menu then you can begin to access the sub-menu by holding down button number one. So let me go to the next slide real quick and show you the different arrays. So these are the different options. This I took right out of the instruction manual just to remind you folks that you can go to sunmaxxsolar.com in the information section and download this controller instruction manual ahead of time. And often the manual will help you understand what type of system might work best for your application. So rather than working backwards building the system and deciding which array would work best. You may go the other way around and choose the array that best suits what you’re trying to do. Then build your system around that particular array and the functionality of the controller. So basically I have a standard solar system as array number one. Then you have a solar system with a heat exchanger. Array three is solar system with after heating. And then you have a solar system with tank charge where you’re trying to maintain stratification. We’re going to see more and more stratifying tanks and stratifying valves. They’ve been doing it for years in Europe and they really utilize and maximize tank stratification. I don’t believe the United States market has really tapped into this stratification performance yet. Now that’s a good question typically for array number seven it’s designed as an east west type of arrangement. I would recommend that you can use one pump with two valves because you don’t want to run…What you definitely need to have is two separate returns coming from the collectors. Because in the morning the east bank is obviously going to be hot. You don’t want the west bank to be circulating it all because it hasn’t picked up any heat whatsoever. So although this diagram here shows two separate pumps for the east and the west bank you could also just do one pump and one valve. It would be a little tricky for you to regulate the flow through each respective bank but it certainly is possible Joe. Then for eight the solar system with after heating by a solid fuel boiler. Number nine is solar system with heating circuit bringing the temperature from the solar tank and delivering it to the heating system. So basically array number nine is a mildly complicated copy system that you’re able to accomplish with only a basic controller. Those two relays can actually do quite a lot for you. What you won’t be able to do however is tie into the logic of your boiler with this particular controller. All right so basically what you want to do and let me remind you…Choose which array represents what you’re trying to do. I do recommend that you look at this instruction manual before you build your system and you can model your system after the functionality of the controller. Rather than trying to make the controller fit what system you have designed. Couple really basic settings before we get into it too much. You have the delta t o and the delta t f. You turn the pump on and your delta t o comes out of the factory set at 12 degrees. For northern climates we recommend you change the delta to o to 17 degrees. This gives your collectors a greater chance to heat up and really start to produce energy before your pump turns on. We’ve experienced a lot of short cycling the pump will turn on and then the fluid in the pipe will be enough to cool the collector off and then we’ll turn the pump off. Then we’ll turn the pump on and turn off and turn on and turn off. So by raising the delta t o up to 17 degrees particularly for northern climates then it reduces the short cycling of the pump. Now if your homeowner or service call for your own contract you can visit your systems twice a year. And if you did it in the spring and in the fall you would change the delta t o. Because in the summer time there’s no reason for your collectors to be seventeen degrees hotter before they turn on. So I recommend turning your delta t o down in the spring and then turning your delta t o back up in the fall. Particularly for northern climates but same is true for most of the places in the country. In the spring time you turn your delta t o down and then in the fall you turn your delta t o up. This is very simple to do and you can instruct your homeowner to do it or you can provide it as part of your service contract. The delta t f is what is going to turn the pump off. When the approach temperature or when the differential decreases and the factory setting is eight. We see in our systems we’ve turned that down as low as possible and five degrees seems to be a nice delta t f. So we recommend you change your settings down to five degrees. Okay anybody have any questions? Now in order to change those settings again there’s three buttons that you have to work with one, two and three. My finger is on button number one. Moving okay is button number two. And then button number three is the minus. I would like to point out that I do have a typo on button number three that’s actually button number one. On my screen you see array number one. Array number one that’s on the sub-menu. So you get to the sub-menu by pressing the plus button until it goes to the option called time. That’s the end of the main menu. Once you get to the end of the main menu you have to hold that button down for a few seconds. As you hold it down for a few seconds the sub-menu will appear. The sub-menu begins with your array options. So the first thing that’s going to appear in my sub-menu are the arrays. That would be array number one so I scroll through by pressing the plus button until I reach the array that is most suited for what I’m trying to do. Once I get to that array then I want to change that setting to array number two for example. So I hold the okay button down. By holding the okay button it’s going to cause the set. There’s a little icon in the screen with the word set. That set button is going to flash. As soon as that set button flashes then I can change the setting or I can push okay. If I push okay then it automatically changes to whatever appears on my screen. So I’ve gone to array number three and I like array number three. So I hold the okay button down for a few seconds. I get the word set to flash and then I press okay again one last time. I’ve automatically changed the setting to array number three. Now for each of the nine arrays factory settings will cause this controller to work. So all you have to do is change the array that you’re looking for and plug your controller in. The factory settings are pre-determined to make this controller function as recommended by the factory settings. So you really don’t have to do anything beyond choose the array. If you don’t even choose the array then the factory setting will be array number one which basically turns a single pump on. Now even though you’ve chosen the array. There’s still some functions within each array that you can activate. Many of the functions will not be active until you manually activate that function. Once you activate the function then you can change some of the parameters within that function. So I’m going to go through some of the functions here just a few technical things. This does have a built in transformer so you’ll bring a 110 volts in. This has two semi-conductor relays. So you will bring in 115 and you’ll send out 115. The display operates at 24 volts but like I said it’s got a built in transformer. So really this is fool proof. There’s no re-wiring or re-wiring of relays and switches. All you have to do is plug this controller into the wall and it will work. All right now let’s get into programming array number two. Here’s what I done is just showed you the two different arrays. Two of the nine and for instance every array has number one operates both relays. You have to enable certain functionalities. So I’m going to go through those functions now. For example there’s a table in your instruction manual that lays out the definitions of all these features. I’m going to go through some that I think are the most important and highlight why they are important. SMX is your maximum tank temperature. Now this does have a non-adjustable setting of 200 degrees. No matter what happens when your tank reaches 200 degrees Fahrenheit your entire system will shut down and it won’t be able to turn back on again until the tank drops below 200 degrees Fahrenheit. You can’t change this. You can however change your maximum tank temperature your preferred max tank temperature. We recommend that the tanks don’t exceed 180 degrees. So given a slight delay we recommend that you change your SMX function to 175 degrees. Now SMX has to be activated and you do that the same way that you choose an array. Once you’ve chosen an array then you continue through the menu until the three letters SMX appear. Once SMX appears on your screen and you hold the okay button down until you get the flashing set. Once you have the flashing set then you can adjust that temperature accordingly. And press the okay button and you’ve programmed it. So we recommend 175 for SMX. The emergency collector shut down now this is where you’re system will shut down when the collectors exceed the maximum temperature and it ranges from 170-390. We’ll 390 degrees is the stagnation temperature of the collectors. That is what they’re testing for at SRCC and Solar Key Market in Europe. Where there’s been no damage to the collectors and they’ve stagnated for thirty days at those temperatures. However right out of the factory or right out of the box these controllers are set for emergency shut down at 270 degrees. Now if you’re using type L copper or stainless steel you can handle 270 degrees. You’d certainly wouldn’t want your fluid to be circulating at 270 degrees. But if you have your pump on the return line going back to the collectors then you should be okay. So this is sort of a preference but you should not exceed what the factory setting is. You can’t turn it down but don’t turn the EM up. Again this EM is a function that you have to activate. OCC now this is going to cool your collectors down this is the heat dump loop or you have a secondary tank. OCC will be active once SMX is reached. SMX is the max tank temperature you set that at 175. Once your tank reaches 175 then OCC will be active. OCC will either trigger a second pump or it will open a normally closed valve. By opening the normally closed valve your solar pump will continue to pump even though you’ve exceeded SMX. So if OCC is not activated and you reach SMX then your solar pump will shut down. That’s okay as long as you have a second pump activated that’s going to act as your heat dump. But if you want your solar pump to continue to run even though SMX is reached then you’ve got to activate your OCC function. System cooling is another function so you have collector cooling but you also have system cooling. Now system cooling is where you want to cool your entire system down. Don, all systems don’t need a heat dump. Most often heat dumps are used in cases where you’re producing excess in the summer because you designed an economy system. Most often for hot water systems and as long as the storage tank has been designed properly. Then a separate heat dump loop is not required. There are ways such as steam back which I talked about last week. Steam back is going to allow your collectors to basically shut down their production in the case of over stagnation. So heat dumps are not always required although heat dump may not necessarily be wasteful. For example if you have a secondary tank the OCC function will activate that secondary loop. So rather than dumping into a heat dump loop you’ll dump into a secondary tank. Now system cooling function is when your entire system reaches maximum temperature but it’s less than emergency shut down. Now this OSYC function is something that you activate if you’d like your system to be able to bypass EM. In other words you’re going to exceed your maximum tank temperature that you’ve set but it’s still less than the emergency shut down then you can dump into a high temperature heat dump somewhere. I do not suggest you using OSYC with evacuated tubes. So that function is disabled the only way you can enable it is to activate it in the menu bar. For evacuated tube systems we recommend not using OSYC because the temperatures can spike so rapidly. Now the tank cooling function OSTC is a good way to cool your tank down during times of overproduction. So if you have a slightly oversized system and you’re producing a little too much everyday for the month of August. Then you can dump some of those Btu’s out at night into your collectors by activating the OSTC function. This is something that you can activate seasonally if you like. It’s very simple. It literally will take you about five seconds to turn it on or turn it off. What’s going to happen if the OSTC function is enabled it’s going to automatically adjust your SMX. It’s going to bring your SMX down to whatever you set it at let’s say 150. So it’s going to cause your OCC loop to run once your tank is above the maximum set point. So by activating OSTC and setting that temperature that will automatically replace your SMX temperature. Which will cause the collectors loop to circulate at night time. Which means that you start the day with more of a buffer before you have to begin sort a safety mechanism. There’s another long term OSTC that you can activate and that’s called OHOL. This where you are going to be producing a significant amount of energy for an extended period of time with no load. In this case you’re going to everyday your solar loop will turn on while you’re gone and it will dump heat out until your collectors are the same temperature as your tank. So at night time what you want to do is deplete your tank of as much energy as possible because there’s no load. So essentially you’re creating a load on your storage tank using the OHOL function. Another important one especially in the north is the OCM. This is going to allow you to determine the temperature setting that you don’t want your pump to turn on until that temperature has been met. For example if you have a concrete floor and you’re operating your concrete floor at 65 degrees or 70 degrees. If you have a 17 degree differential your collector may kick on when it reaches 75 degrees. But at 75 degrees you’re not producing nearly as much energy as you might be consuming by running your pump. So it really isn’t paying to run your pump because you’re really not pulling any energy in your floor. So even though you’ve met your differential you activate OCM so that your collector loop will not turn on until you exceed 85 degrees or 90 degrees. Something that is a significant amount of energy that makes it worth your while to run your pump. Another very important one that I think is going to become more and more common. Replacing the antifreeze is the OCF function. Remember these are functions of the basic domestic hot water controller. So by replacing the antifreeze they glycol in your loop with this OCF function. What this is going to do is turn your collector loop on when the heat transfer fluid drops below a certain temperature. Now we recommend starting off at 35 degrees Fahrenheit this is going to be based off sensor number one which is in your collectors. Your collectors tend to cool off at a slower rate then you’re piping will cool off because they’re very well insulated. So what you should do if you’re going to use OCF is monitor it very closely because if for some reason you haven’t programmed it properly then you’re going to have some freezing in your line. So you’re really putting a lot of weight and a lot of importance on this proper operation of OCF. But if you can get it to work and give you accurate readings of temperature then it eliminates the need for any glycol in your loop and it also increases your heat transfer. And it increases your total system efficiency by eliminating that glycol. You do however sacrifice some of the energy that you’ve captured in order to keep your loop from freezing. So I’ve heard estimates and these are estimates only. But I’ve heard by using your OCF function in place of glycol you reduce your total Btu production by three to five percent. It consumes three to five percent of those Btu’s that you produced in order to keep your loop from freezing. But to me that seems like a pretty good tradeoff particularly because think about first thing in the morning when your collector loop might be 20 degrees and it’s slushy. Your collectors are heating up and now you’ve got to spend more energy to try to bring that entire loop up to temperature. So rather than spending the two hours of morning time sun just bringing your whole loop up to temperature. You could already start your loop at ten or twenty degrees hotter from using the energy that you captured yesterday. So I like the OCF function but I caution you to be very careful about accurate readings for your sensors. You should find the coldest spot in your collector loop. You can use sensor four which is just the data acquisition sensor. Use sensor four and place it where you think is the coldest spot and correlate sensor number four with actual readings of sensor number one. If those too…Yes, you can Don. Although it’s sort of redundant to use glycol and OCF it would be a good way to practice using your antifreeze function without the risk of freezing your loop. Okay couple of other important ones before I close it up here. OHQM is an energy metering function that doesn’t require the use of any other software or equipment. What you do need to have however and it’s included in the IntelliMaxx. You need to know the flow rate in liters per minute. Open up this OHQM in your menu and press the okay button. Set button will blink. Once the set button blinks it’s going to ask for the flow. You have to enter the flow in liters per minute. And that’s the maximum flow. So you set your maximum flow and once you’ve pre-programmed your maximum flow for your system. Maximum flow is if your pump is running at a hundred percent speed what is your optimal flow rate. So once you program that it’s going to store your performance data on a daily basis. So at the end of each day you can go to your OHQM and look to see how many Btu’s have been produced by your system. It’s going to give it in kilowatt hours. But it can be easily converted to Btu’s. The manual shows the conversion chart. This is a good a way and most people don’t take advantage of OHQM. In fact most people don’t take advantage of most of the functions for this controller because they just aren’t familiar with it. But it can do a lot. OHQM is an important function especially for your clients’ ease of mind. To show them that your system is actually producing. It’s also a nice way for you to trouble shoot. Perhaps find places where you think you’re producing the energy but you’re not consuming it. So where do you have some losses. The drain back option this is going to do two things. Drain back option one will first start off your system siphoning by activating a secondary pump or ramping up the pump’s speed to a hundred percent until the siphon is achieved. That can take up to five minutes. So ODP has a time delay option that’s going send voltage to a secondary pump. That secondary pump is going to double your head which allows you to overcome that initial head from zero. Once you’ve created that siphon it might take up to five minutes then ODP will disable the secondary pump and allow the variable speed function to operate the circulator. It will also ramp up your existing circulator to a hundred percent or whatever’s required to overcome the head. So you can get away with a larger more powerful pump just for system siphoning. Once that siphon is created based on the time sequence that you’re going to pre-program. It won’t be able to read whether there’s a siphon or not. But it’s going to be based on a time sequence that you’ve pre-programmed that you’ve observed how long it takes for this siphon to yield you. Then it will ramp it back down to the optimum flow rate. Obviously you have manual one for relay and manual two. This gives you the option of turning a relay on or turning a relay off or using the auto settings for your relays. So often times you want to override the factory settings for one time shot. So you go to man one and press your okay button and then it gives you the blinking set. There’s going to be three choices for man one. It’s going to say power on or power off or auto. So you can keep your relay off. You can keep your relay on. Or you can allow the automatic settings to override. So this is an important feature especially for starting the system up and trying to play around with it. You want to make sure that you get some circulation before you put your tubes in different things that you want to be able to change. Those are some of the most important features of the DHWBPlus that I wanted to go through with you. I did run over. I try to keep it at thirty minutes. I do have more that I’m going to just quickly introduce and move on. I’m going to do another webinar for the IntelliMaxx Economy Plus. All the same functionality as the DHWBPlus however there’s many more things that we can discuss. The Economy Plus this is going to be another webinar we’re going to do in two weeks. Real quick some of the accessories that you can purchase with your IntelliMaxx are the v bus. V Bus is going to allow you to integrate into a home computer system network system wireless. The data logger is basically an external hard drive that’s going to collect data for thirty days from your DHWBPlus or the Economy Plus. You can also get a touch screen monitoring system that can be monitored remotely. You can run some cables and bring it up to your homeowner’s kitchen if they want to see what’s going on. You can also download software for the IPhone and look at the entire system monitoring anywhere in the world. There’s also flow meters that can be installed for long term system monitoring system performance. As well as flow switch that will activate other relays not based on temperature or anything just based on there’s flow. Flow switches are used more often with domestic hot water systems and external heating exchangers. And anybody with an IPhone can download this app that allows you to see what your system is doing no matter where you are in the world. You log into a URL address that you have your v bus downloading all the information to. I know thirty minutes is not enough time to do nearly as much as I’d like to do with controllers. I do encourage you to ask questions. Yes, Don both controllers will log the data with the Economy Plus and the DHWBPlus. Contact your sales rep for more information and go to sunmaxxsolar.com and download the DHWBPlus installation manual. Take a look at the arrays that are possible and start to think about designing systems and installing systems that the controllers are pre-programmed for. It’s going to make your job much easier and the performance is going to be better. So again there’s a lot more that we can talk about for controllers but I like to keep this at thirty minutes. I’ve already gone over for seven minutes. So please do email me and I’ll try my best to respond right away. Thanks a lot for taking the time to learn about the controllers and I hope to see you again next week. You can always go to solarwebinars.com and look at the archives for a review of any information that we’ve covered again. So thanks you all take care and we will see you next week.

Fundamentals in Steamback Design 11.08.2010

SUNMAXX SOLAR HOT WATER SOLUTIONS FUNDAMENTALS IN STEAMBACK DESIGN Date: 11/08/2010 Ok, Good Afternoon everybody. This is another one of our Sunmaxx Solar webinar series. Today I’d like to talk about the fundamentals in steamback design. This is a relatively new concept for the most part in the U.S., although there are many installers that have been doing it for quite a while. It’s much more common and useful in European solar thermal systems. So, I want to touch base a little bit on some of these design strategies, to introduce it to you, for those of you who are not familiar with steamback design. I think it’s going to become much more common in the U.S. as an alternative to drainbacks. Ok, so as always I’d like to encourage you to ask me questions in the chat box. We do have a relatively small class, small group today, so it makes it a little bit easier to address questions immediately. Ok, I’ll get right into it now. So, generally when you design a combisystem, you’re going to produce more energy than you need in the summertime. So, the options are really to either, traditional options are to, reduce the production, or to dump your heat. Heat dumps are very, very common in the U.S. market. In the European market, dumps are relatively strange. They don’t design too many systems using a heat dump, instead they use the steamback designs. Now, not to say that they never design systems, and when I say they I mean the European installers, heat dumps are really only designed when steamback system will be limited. There are long runs of copper, convoluted runs, but I’ll get into that in a minute. So traditionally we either don’t make it or we have to do something with it. Now with a steamback, looking at this simple design here, what I want you to focus on is the location of the expansion tank. So, in most pump stations, the expansion tanks are located above the pump, ok. The location of that is critical in allowing for steambacks to occur. So, for those of you in attendance that have installed systems, you probably have allowed for steamback to occur without even knowing it. So, steamback is, essentially, a time during stagnation when the pump is off and the collectors begin to overheat and boil the heat transcript fluid. Now, the heat transcript fluid in a closed loop system is usually 50% glycol and 50% water. Water has a lower boiling point than glycol okay. SRCC shows us that most collectors can stagnate at upper 300s low 400 degrees Fahrenheit with no danger. So, stagnation is not really a problem for collectors, stagnation is a problem for glycol. Much of the glycol in the market has a buffer and those buffers will break down when they approach temperatures of usually 250 and upwards of 360. So some of the best glycols on the market are going to be able to stagnate up to 360 without turning acidic. But we can’t rely on that alone. We have to allow for this condition we call stagnation. So, when the pumps shut off and the collectors stagnate during the solar day the boiling points of the two fluids is going to cause water to boil, creating the steam, and that steam pressure is going to force the remaining fluid, or the remaining solution which would be mostly glycol, into the expansion tank. Okay, so imagine collectors at high noon stagnating, alright and they’re producing temperatures exceeding 390 degrees. There’s no danger to the collectors, remember, the only danger is to the glycol. So if the water boils at a lower temperature and forces the glycol out of the collectors, then what remains is a collector full of water steam. Which we know from SRCC that that presents no danger to system life or longevity. So simply not necessarily creating a steamback system or designing a steamback system but small differences in installation allow us to allow for steambacks to occur. So steamback, basically the laws of physics tell us that water will boil and increase the pressure and that pressure will be used to force the remaining solution out of the collector. Now steamback happens in five phases. I would like to remind you we’ve been 6 minutes so far and I haven’t had a question so far. For those of you who know me, I do enjoy questions. So get your thinking caps on and see if you can ask me some questions. So there’s five phases to steambacks, okay. As I just described to you, the whole process. The first thing that’s going to happen is the liquid, the heat transfer fluid, is going to expand. And that expansion increases the pressure. What we don’t want to have happen is our safety valve to open, okay. Most safety valves in pump stations, I know for the Unimaxx pump station, it’s 87 psi. So, we want to be sure that we do not approach that pressure. So the first thing that happens is the liquid is going to expand, and once the fluid, the water, reaches the boiling point, the expansion is going to increase by a factor of 240. Okay, so that increasing in pressure is going to push the liquid out of the collector, and this is when we enter phase two. This can happen in a matter of 3 to 4 minutes, it might take up to an hour to work all of the remaining fluid out of the collector, and as you know the remaining fluid should be close to 100% glycol. Now, the third phase is when the collectors will push the remainder of the fluid out and the water will boil and this boiling of the water, as I mentioned, can increase the volume by 240%. So, it’s going to push every last bit of glycol out of the collectors. Now we have super saturated steam, or super heated steam. Again we are still less than 87 psi, but it’s extremely saturated water steam. Finally, once the solar day ends collectors cool down, pressure drops, and the expansion tank will refill the collector with the, not only the condensate from the steam, but also from the glycol that had been separated. And then that solution will very easily be mixed again and we have a 50% glycol concentration at the end of the day, and we haven’t boiled our glycol. So this steamback happens during stagnation, and it’s going to happen whether you like it or not. So what you really have to do is consider what types of design, and what types of collectors, will more easily allow for steamback to happen, because steamback is a physical process and it essentially protects your glycol. So by allowing for steamback, you have an added insurance. So the last step, to address the question, as the solar day ends the production by the collectors decreases, the steam is going to obviously condensate. As it condensates, it reduces the pressure inside the collectors. That pressure inside the collectors, once it reaches a point less than the pressure of the expansion tank, well then the expansion tank is going to force the glycol back into solution, back into the collectors. This happens just as a natural process. In order for these five phases to occur, I’m going to go over a couple of points here on system design. Now this graph shows the different pressures at the expansion vessel, depending on the quality of the design and the quality of the collectors. Now if the ability of the collectors to effectively steam back. Now, the red line is a poor emptying behavior collector. So, what you see there, is during phase two, the transition between phase two and three, when the super heated steam is emptying the collector, it creates more steam power. So it takes more steam to force the remainder of the fluid out of the collector. So, although this does work, it takes longer for that steam to force the glycol out. Some of you may know that glycol buffers that protect the pH of the solution, they don’t break down immediately, once they – okay Nathan, good question I’m going to actually address that in just a couple of slides. So as I was saying, the pressure inside the collector doesn’t necessarily have to climb to four to four and half bars. One bar is one atmosphere by the way. If the, and I’m going to discuss the perimeters of the collector that allow for steamback to occur, there’s a couple of design strategies, not only in the collector but also in the piping. So what we want to have happen, as you can see the green line shows once we enter phase two, phase three occurs without any added pressure at all. So in other words, once we begin to empty the collector in phase two, phase three, the steaming of the water doesn’t do anything to increasing pressure because it is easy to empty the collector into the expansion tank, and I’m going to show you a couple of designs that will allow us to do that. So what you see here, these four would not have very good steamback characteristics. In other words, these would take more steam pressure to remove the fluid from the collectors, than it would – if I go back for a moment, this green line is what we’re really after. We want to design a system with collectors that allows for the transition from phase two to phase four with no added pressure. These systems would represent the blue and the red line, because as you can see, if we are coming in on the left hand side, in order for the steam to force the fluid out it’s got to overcome a pressure rise and push it all the way down and then back up and out. And the second one, we’re basically moving in one direction, so the amount of pressure, these are actually in parallel but in an unbalanced, parallel arrangement. And the third one, this is very typical of a U-pipe evacuated tube system. You essentially have reverse return piping folded in half, so the third one is not effective in removing. Now bear in mind all four of these styles will allow for steamback, just being very particular now as to which style requires less steam in order to steamback. Now the answer to that question is here, so this style piping arrangement allows for steamback to occur very easily because it can happen in two directions. So for example, the serpentine style on the left. The serpentine style that you see on the left-hand side is the single best design for steamback. Now when I say best, again I mean it requires less pressure to empty the collector. What we’re really after is emptying the collector of glycol. Most collectors are rated for about 10 bars, they are pressure tested for 10 bars. And if I go back up here, even the worst ones, so poor, good, and very good are just relative, so even the ones that say poor emptying behavior, that pressure that’s required of them to eliminate the glycol from the collector is still about half of the pressure the system can take. So most collectors are rated, and you should check with your manufacturer, speaking for SunMaxx the collectors are rated at 10 bars, that’s what they’re pressure tested to. So even though I say poor emptying behavior, it’s still less than the maximum allowable pressure of the collector. I hope that answers your pressure there, Nathan, in terms of parameters of collector that affect the performance. And this design, take a look at the third one, the third one is a harp-style or header riser style collector, and it does show arrow coming in, the supply to the collectors coming in on the bottom right, and it’s moving up and out to the top left. So, it’s coming in on the bottom right and it’s leaving on the top right. But this arrow very easily, in normal design we would have the supply going to the tank opposite the return coming from the collectors. So if you look at this third one, this arrow can just as well be over on the opposite side as it might be piped in for a reverse return method. The fourth diagram shows how easy it is to remove the glycol solution from this system because I have two possible exits. Now, location of the expansion vessel is probably the single most important thing in allowing for steamback. I did mention the design of collectors will affect performance, however, even some of the worse poorly designed collectors still can empty the collector with less pressure than is allowed in the collector. But, if you do not install the expansion tank in the proper location, then regardless of your collector’s ability to create steam power, it’s simply not going to work. So, if you take a look at the design that’s in place, it says poor location of the check valve. Now many pumps Taco, for example, that has check valves that are integrated into the pump. It’s not a very strong check valve but it’s strong enough that it will slow down the movement of steam into the expansion tank. So if you take a look at the placement of the expansion tank in the diagram labeled poor location, why is it a poor location to put the expansion tank below the pump? If we read textbooks on hydraulics and pump performance, we talk to Taco and we talk to Vilo about the placement of the expansion tank relative to the pump, it’s often been argued that expansion tanks should go behind the pump so that the pump doesn’t have increased pressure that it has to overcome. If we put the expansion tank in front of the pump, while the pump turns on, the required pressure may be taken in by the expansion tank and the pump is just pumping and pumping and pumping but it’s not going anywhere because of the positive pressure on the push side of the pump is being taken in by the expansion tank and the column of water doesn’t get moving. So, I have been involved in a system where we had the expansion tank behind the pump like this, the pump did not have enough head to move the fluid, so we had to move the expansion tank behind the pump, and the pump then was able to move the fluid. Now, as you know, if you put the expansion tank behind the check valve, it’s really not a question as to where the expansion tank should go in relation to the pump, it’s a question as to where the expansion tank should go in relation to the check valve. So, the check valve is not going to allow for movement in the opposite direction. So, it’s going to actually block the expansion tank’s ability to take in any of the super heated fluid coming off the collectors. So, just to the left of this, this is the good location of the check valve. So, if we put the expansion tank in front of the check valve, but behind the pump, now what we’ve done is we’ve eliminated the need for increased pressure by the pump because the expansion tank is behind the pump, but we’ve also increased the system’s ability to allow for steamback because we’ve put the check valve behind the expansion vessel. There is another consideration to make, however, most pumps and I know that Taco and Grundfos are rated at about 250 degrees Fahrenheit. So if we put the expansion tank behind the pump such as this, but in front of the check valve, which is what we recommend, then we also run a risk of overheating the pump, because if the collectors are stagnating and producing temperatures that are boiling, and we might have a 250 degree boiling point for water. If your system’s operating at 30 psi, for example you have 2 bars, the required temperature in order to boil the water may approach 250 or more, 260, so once that temperature is reached, then we have some steam production and we’re into phase three. Well phase three is going to send that glycol back down into the expansion tank, that’s exactly what we want, but it has to go through the pump before it gets to the expansion tank. So you do run a risk of endangering the pump, so you want to check what the high temperature limits of your pumps are, and I can tell you that the Taco 00 series, I believe it’s a 256 degree Fahrenheit number, I may be off by a little bit, but not much. So I’ve got poor, good, and I might recommend better. Better would be where we put the expansion tank in front of the pump altogether. Another thing I’d like to point out is very simply that the bladder, or diaphragm, in your expansion tank should always be wet. We don’t want to have 250 or 270 degree water or glycol or steam or anything slamming down into our epdm lining, most bladders are made out of epdm rubber, and that does have a melting point. So, if we flip our expansion tank upside down, which I’ve seen some installers do, then it’s going to cause the bladder to be dry. That would be a situation where we have 260 degree water being forced onto the collectors and strikes the epdm lining on the membrane directly, and if this happens everyday, all summer-long, you’re definitely going to have a short-lived expansion tank. So please be sure that your expansion vessel is always wet. Now location of the expansion tank is one thing, but size of the expansion tank is another. Now before I go over this formula, which I’m not going to do in too much detail, I want you to understand that SunMaxx sales reps, engineers will size your expansion tank for you. All we need to know from you is the size of your collector field, the pressure rating on your pressure relief valve, the target pressure (what you hope to be operating your system at) and that target pressure can be anywhere from 1 bar to 3 bars, generally anywhere from 15 to 50 psi. Now, the side note here, system pressure does not affect performance. So if you’re used to operating and you want to operate your system at a higher pressure, that’s not going to affect performance. It will, however, dramatically increase the size of the expansion tank required because you’ve increased the boiling point of both the water and the glycol, which means you’re going to have hotter fluid which will have expanded, as temperatures increase so does expansion and you’re going to be able to allow for an increased temperature because of an increased pressure. So although I make a recommendation of setting your target pressure anywhere between 15 and 50, I would recommend you set your target pressure in the low end of that range, as system pressure does not affect performance. Okay, so the size of the expansion vessel, as we have very poignantly learned over the last 3 or 4 years, systems have been exploding, pressure relief valves are opening, customers have been scared. They see steam shooting out of their basement, they don’t know what’s going on and they think it’s dangerous. So we have to take it very seriously, this steamback phenomena. Steamback will happen, our job is to let it happen. And without a properly sized expansion vessel, we’re not going to let it happen. So it’s not as simple as saying, “well expansion vessel should be 20% of the system volume or 30%, or even 60% of the system volume.” We have to look every case by case, and what we need from you is the volume of the volume of fluid in your piping, total volume of fluid in the piping, and we can help calculate that if we know pipameter. We also need to know the target pressure of your system, the maximum rating of your safety valve, and the concentration of the glycol that you’re using. And if you’re using 50% glycol – ah yes, Vince, what we recommend is that you actually charge your expansion vessel at 5 psi greater. So as you take your expansion tank out of your kit, I believe they are charged at 37 psi, I’m pretty sure that’s what they are. So what you want to do, just like a tire tube, you can have a straighter valve, take a look at your needle get a tire gauge in there, see what the pressure of the tank is and charge that up to 5 psi greater than what your target pressure is. So sizing up your expansion tank is something. Well Carl that’s a good question - expelling steam means a loss of water, how often do you need to replenish? You’re not really expelling the steam, this is a closed loop. So when you create the steam, the steam actually gets trapped inside your collectors, and it’s that steam pressure that forces the fluid out of the collectors. So there may be some losses if you have an air vent that might be open a little bit, but generally, there should be no losses of steam because if you’re losing the water, you’re not increasing the pressure, and it’s that pressure increase that we need to force the glycol out of the manifolds. So it is a closed loop and you will not be expelling the steam, rather you’re going to trap the steam, and that steam gets trapped inside the collectors. Okay, so for those of you who are interested in sizing your expansion tanks by yourself, then this would be the formula to use. It’s very straightforward, I’m not going to take the time right now to go over each particular, I’m sure there’s a name, a step and process in algebra, but I don’t remember the steps involved. However, I’m not going to go over each variable, but you should know this, you need to know the volume of fluid, the concentration of fluid, the collector field, your target pressure and your maximum pressure rating for your pressure relief valve. Those factors we will use to size up your expansion vessel and you can have relatively quick turnaround. If you have systems out there that are about to enter their first winter, you probably don’t need to worry about it too much because stagnation rarely occurs in the winter time. Stagnation generally occurs in the summer, so if you had just installed a system and you want us to double-check the size of your expansion tank, get a hold of your sales rep and we can do that for you too. It’s better to be safe than surprised. Clients can be very surprised if steamback happens without a properly sized expansion tank. If they happen to be home during the time, it will scare them, I’ve seen it happen, so this is the number one thing we’ve got to be sure of, is the expansion tank properly sized. A couple of other considerations as we wrap it up, the position and size of the expansion tank, and proper concentration of glycol. I just want to point out that although some of you look at glycol as an antifreeze, that is what it is, it’s not necessarily any more or less of an antifreeze at 40% or 50% or 60% or 70% or 80%, the magic number for most places in the U.S. is 50%, and you can go down to 30%. However, please remember this, if I have 60% glycol or 70% glycol or 80% glycol, as I increase the concentration of glycol, water and glycol have different densities, so I’m going to encourage the separation of that solution. So, even though I have an 80% glycol, water is not going to be mixed in solution as it would be with a 50% glycol, so the water comes out of solution, and at night if the water comes out of solution then we have pockets of solution that are vulnerable to freezing and they’re going to end up in that collector manifolds. So 50% is actually better than 60%. There are lots of other fluids that are used, oils and ethylene, there are a lot of different heat transfer fluids and we’re playing around with some materials now, but currently for closed loop systems that need antifreeze protection, the best approach is to use a propane glycol because it is safer for the environment, it’s readily available, it does have some drawbacks with viscosity and the like, but for the most part, for the next couple of years anyway, propane glycol will be the heat transfer fluid of choice. Nathan, the webinar slides will be posted on the site. As soon as I’m done here you’ll see a pdf on solar webinars that you can download and use that formula, that probably would appear in a pdf form much clearer than it has here. For references use Siegenthaler and Hausner and Fink. So to wrap it up, I’d like to thank you for your attention once again. Stay tuned for next week, take a look at our schedule. If you have any suggestions or things that you’d like to see covered please don’t hesitate to send an email to me with that suggestion. I do encourage feedback, both positive and negative. Amy, you want to position, normal installation of expansion tank is going to cause the bladder to do what? The point is don’t turn it on it’s side or flip it upside down because what’s going to happen is the steam is going to rise and come right up in direct contact with the bladder, so we generally recommend taking a look at the stickers on the expansion tank and installing them so you can read them like you normally would. If there are not stickers for proper orientation, then look at the installation manual and just be sure that any of the fluid that’s trapped in your expansion tank is resting on the membrane, so that in order for any steam to touch the membrane, it’s got to pass through fluid. That’s cooling it down, reducing the temperature and likelihood of melting. Yeah, it is a problem, Dave, and what it is, is little micro-explosions of steam that, the banging of pipes happens in situations that don’t have good emptying behavior. If you have convolutions in your pipe where you might get pockets of condensate, that condensate is going to be introduced to steam and you get little micro-explosions and those are the bangings that you hear. So, not only the collector requires good emptying behavior, but the entire pipe run requires good emptying behavior. So, in a sense, just as we have limitations for drainback systems, everyone of our pipes needs to be sloped down in order to drain. Steambacks require the same type of attention, we don’t want to have places where there are pockets of water before the expansion vessel. Not that it’s a problem, but you will end up with the interface of steam and condensate and little micro-explosions, and there’s not a whole lot you can do to reduce that at this point. Well I do want to formally end it, and I’m happy to – okay I got another question… No, you don’t need a specific steam condenser, and I would be interested in email to speak with you more about that to see. I’m not exactly sure what you’re referring to, but as I mentioned before, steamback will happen whether we want it to happen or not, it’s going to happen it’s just a matter of have we designed it so that we allow for steamback to occur, is the expansion tank properly sized, does our piping represent proper emptying behavior, and do the collectors represent proper emptying behavior, and is our expansion tank located in the correct spot relative to the check valve. If those measures are in place, then we’re in good shape. Again, email me any questions, this is just the beginning of our interactions and hopefully we’ll see you next week. Have a great solar day, as I look out my window here I don’t see the sun, but that’s not surprising, again we’re in upstate New York, hopefully we’ll see it here in the next couple of days. Okay, take care everybody, bye bye.

Troubleshooting and Maintenance II 11.01.2010

SUNMAXX SOLAR HOT WATER SOLUTIONS TROUBLESHOOTING AND MAINTENANCE II Date: 11/01/2010 Okay, well I’d like to welcome you to the SunMaxx Series Solar Hot Water Webinar: Maintenance and Troubleshooting. I’d like to spend the next half an hour speaking with you about different maintenance and troubleshooting techniques that we find very successful. As always, I’d like to remind you to type a question in the chat box. Since we have a relatively small group, this might lend itself well to discussion-based webinar. Without further ado, I’d like to get right into our first slide. And I see, can somebody confirm I’ve got a little graffiti it appears on my screen, is this the case with everyone’s? Some stars, some scribbles, and a few good mornings, or is the screen clear? Okay, now one of the most important things in terms of troubleshooting and maintenance – sorry Jess, I’m not sure who or what was responsible for this. Oh it’s no problem Tim, we’ll just have to see right through it. We’ll see if I can. Well, a little technical glitch I’ll work out later on. In order to properly troubleshoot and maintain a system, system commissioning is most important. In proper system commissioning you can avoid many of the problems associated with solar thermal systems. A lot of times they do fail because of installation errors or they fail due to neglect. So I’d like to go over four basic considerations that should be made in proper system commissioning. I also want to remind you that you download this pdf form of the webinar, and here you have a link to our brochures resource center through SunMaxx website. So when I say refer to the technical manual and other SunMaxx resources, you should be able to simply click on that and it takes you to our information center, or you can visit sunmaxxsolar.com and go right to the information center where you can download our technical manual. In the technical manual, you will find a troubleshooting and maintenance system commissioning guide. So the four things that I want to specify regarding system commissioning are pressurizing the closed loop, purging the air, getting the air out of the system is probably one of the most important steps in making sure that early on your system is operating properly. And over the course of the first couple of weeks you may have some pump trouble if your air is not completely purged. Another one that we get a lot of technical calls on is programming the controller and then, obviously, mixing the glycol. So one of the first things in terms of pressurizing the closed loop is that you’ve got to use a pump that’s capable of building up enough pressure to ensure that there are no leaks in the system, and our SunMaxx filling station can do that. There are other ways, you can buy at least a half horsepower sump pump from one of Home Depot or Lowe's. And you can do it this way. Our pump's filling station not only has the appropriate size pump to build up to roughly, depending on the vertical height, it can build up to 50 or 60 psi, but that also has a filter, and the filter with the aperture allows you to clean all the debris out of the loop. So, what we like to recommend is that you first pressurize your system with air. Using a modified trader valve, you can build the pressure in your system up prior to purging and flooding your system. Pressurize it with air and you can pressurize it up to 75 or 85 psi. And be sure that it holds the pressure for several hours; so this might be something where you do it at the end of the day and you pressurize it, mark your pressure, and come back the following day. This'll be a first step in making sure that your system is nice and tight with no leaks and no places for air or water to escape. Another thing that you have to do before you pressurize and commission your system is determine what your system pressure will be. What would you like system to operate at? Now, we recommend that you choose a pressure that is most appropriate to the vertical height. And simple calculation would take the vertical height, divide that by 2.31, and then add 1 atmosphere to that. That would give you what your target pressure should be. I do want to point out that pressure in a system does not affect system performance. So, if you end up with your system charging pump being capable of 20 psi, but you estimate that you should have 30 psi, you can rest assured that 20 psi will offer no difference whatsoever in system performance. So, you want to make sure that your at least higher than 1 atmosphere and not to exceed 90 psi. The relief valves on our pump stations are set at 87 psi. So you want between 70 and 90; it's going to give you the same system performance. It's really a question of liability. How much pressure do you want in your system continually? Often, the lower the pressure, the less liability. Now, one reason why determining your system pressure ahead of time is important, that target pressure, is so that we can properly assess what size expansion tank you should use. So, for example, if we determine that your system pressure should be at 35 or 40 psi, that number is what we're going to use to help establish the size of your expansion tank. And should you realize that your pump is only capable of bringing your system up to 20 psi, that in itself is not a problem. The problem lies in the fact that the smaller or the lower the pressure, the larger the expansion tank will need to be. So, knowing your target pressure and shooting for that target pressure is important. But ultimately, determining what your pressure is ahead of time allows us to accurately size the expansion tank. Now once we've determined this and we've commissioned the system or purged it, we have to get all of the air out of the system. There are some built-in mechanisms. The air purger in the pump station is a manual air purger. There's the built-in air scoop that will build a pocket of air bubbles. Then we recommend that you shut this air purger down with a ball valve. You can see a ball valve on that nipple coming off of the supply. That air purger outside should really only be used during system startup. This is not necessary. However, with drainback systems, as you will be maintaining a bubble of air in a drainback system and you don't want to remove all the air. In fact, it would be impossible to remove all of the air with a drainback. So, purging systems may take several days. For those of you who are doing a job an hour or two hours away, several days of purging air is not really something you want to look forward to. However, it is essential, because if you purge the system, you commission the system, and you think you've got all the air out, as temperatures increase, the ability to store dissolved oxygen decreases. And it may seem like you have all of the air out. In just a couple of days, there will be another pocket. So please remember that in the SunMaxx pump station, there is a automatic air scoop. And this air scoops will build up a pocket of air. It will take all of the air out the loop. And it will prevent it from cavitating the pump, but that air still will be trapped inside of the pump station and will need to be manually bled, and we recommend that you do this once a day for the first week. This may be something that if you have a long distance installation you can train your homeowner to do this. What this will do, by getting rid of all of the air, is increase the likelihood of total system success. So purging air is extremely important. Now, in terms of programming the controller, if you use a SunMaxx IntelliMaxx controller, regardless of the model, all you have to do is plug that controller in and bring 120 volts to the controller. Automatically the default settings will allow that controller to operate your system. There are delta T on and delta T off settings preprogrammed, and they will work, however, for climates such as the one that I'm currently in in the Northeast and even in the Northwest, we recommend that you adjust the delta TO so that your pump 1 turns on at a differential of 15 degrees. In the middle of winter, we often recommend that that delta TO is turned up to even in the neighborhood of 21 degrees. This will decrease the pump turn-on, turn-off cycles. The max temp should turn the pump off when it reaches 175. There is a default setting programmed for the maximum temperature, however, you need to activate that setting. So, the default settings on your controller will simply turn the pump on and turn the pump off based on the differential. But there are many other parameters that you can allow your controller to do as long as you activate that particular setting. And the max temperature setting is one that needs to be activated. Your second array, usually tied into a recirculation pump or a three-way valve, can also be adjusted. If you choose the array, for example with the IntelliMaxx DHW plus, there are several arrays you can choose from. You have to find the array that best suits what it is you are trying to accomplish. And just visually, looking at the location of the pumps and the location of the exchangers, and then go to that section in the manual. It will describe exactly what you need to do for array number 2 in order to activate all of the functionality and to adjust the delta T. So once this is done, you should have virtually a maintenance free system. And if you have any trouble programming your controller for the exact option you are trying to activate, as always you call the 1-877-SunMaxx and dial into the extension for technical support. There are several, one of them is extension 229, we can help you program your controller when you get to that point. Okay, so like I mentioned, each controller comes with several different arrays. In our CombiPlus controller there are 11 or 12 different arrays. Now, one thing you can do if you do not find the array that most suits what you are trying to do, we can use these arrays and modify them slightly. So if we know that, for example, array number 1 has pump number 1 and has recirc pump number 2, well that recirc pump number 2 is visually depicted as being a recirculation loop that is bringing heat from the first tank and dumping it into the second tank. What we can do is, if you prefer to have a valve in place of that second pump we can help adjust those delta T or thermostatic set-point. I'd like to also point out, one nice feature to these controllers is they allow for both thermostatic control and differential control. That is, they will send voltage from a relay, for example pump number 1, the standard is that it is based on the differential between sensor 1 and sensor 2, however, given the right array, you can activate a pump not based on the differential but based on the exact set-point. So if I know if I want to replace, in this diagram, pump number two with a valve, I can program the controller to make sure that that valve opens, if it's a normal closed valve, it will open at a very specific set point temperature. So that's a thermostatic option. So each of these relays for all of the arrays has what's called a thermostatic option. And that is, it will activate and energize based on a specific set point rather than a differential. Should you buy your glycol from SunMaxx, you will find that it is premixed. It is premixed at 50% concentration. What this means is all you have to know is the total volume that your system's going to hold. You do not have to mix your glycol. However, it's extremely important. And I know many of you will try to shop around and find value in the different components, which is perfectly fine. But I would caution you that different manufacturers sell different concentrations, if they are already premixed at all. So be sure that you know exactly what the concentration is before you begin to do your mix. Along that same line, when you do your mixing, you must be sure that you have accurate volume for your whole system. And so what we recommend is that you fill your entire system and then you drain your entire system. What this will do is accomplish two things. One is that, first, it identifies exactly what volume of fluid you have in your system, so we know how much glycol to use, how much water. But secondly, it essentially filters your system out by cleaning out the pipes. It removes any shavings or debris that might be left inside the pipes that would normally get caught in the pump or valves, slowly degrading the system. So filling your system and then flooding it and purging it will first allow you to identify exactly what volume you have but also it will help clean your system out. Now, in terms of system maintenance and yearly maintenance, one of the most important things you can do for a closed-loop system is be sure that the pH never falls below 7. Yeah, Don, I think that by filling your system with plain tap water, it's most cost effective. You don't have to do any trial and error with your glycol, but if you measure what leaves your system or what you put into the system, that gives you an exact number to go with in terms of system volume. And then you can just flush that water right back out and down the drain. So, in terms of maintenance, one of the very tricky things is to be sure is that the pH never falls below 7. And with glycol, there can be some indication that you're losing acidity and a very slight drop in pH. But it could happen overnight, after the course of two hours and your system stagnates, if there are collectors, if there's glycol that is still in your collector, that it will turn acidic. And what could happen to the pH is that it will literally drop off logarithmically. It won't just go from 8.3 to 8.2 to 8.1. It could drop from 8.2 down to 7 and then down to 6.5. So you have to very close attention to the pH and also the system concentration. One big mistake I'd like to point out is that a lot of boiler and HVAC guys who install cold water makeup valves to their heating loops, which is standard. However, when installing a solar thermal loop, the last thing we want in that line is a cold water makeup valve. And I have seen a couple of cases where a cold water makeup valve line has been installed with a leak. So there's a small leak in the glycol bay system, which introduces 100% water back in, reducing the concentration of the glycol, causing it to freeze. So make sure you have the proper concentration and that your system pressure is maintaining +/- 5 psi year round. Also measuring performance is something that a lot of guys will overlook. There's some very simple ways to measure performance, all of which are laid out in our technical manual, and I'm going to go over it in just a moment. But being sure that you're setting up a baseline performance data, so for the first week or the first month or the first year, it's important that you and/or your client have a very good handle on how well the system's performing and what can I expect out of it. And should you see a decrease in performance from one year to the next. Then you should begin to look at what would cause such a decrease. But the bottom line is that you need to have a baseline, and system performance can be measured analytically or anecdotally. I'll present to you a very simple way to do that in just a moment, and obviously the mechanical integrity. Now making sure the pH is accurate, you can use one of many different tools: a digital pH meter or a little pool kit or you can use a pH testing probe for example. These can be purchased from different companies. The easiest which would be to purchase a pH kit from a pool company. And with simple litmus paper, this would be a good indicator. Obviously, if you're going to get into the business and become more professional at solar thermal, you're going to want to get a nice digital pH tester. What can cause pH to go down is consistent and excessive temperatures that exceed the manufacturer's recommendation of the glycol. So as a manufacturer ourselves, we have two grades of glycol. We have what we call the low temp glycol which is rated for about 250 degrees Fahrenheit, at which temperature it begins to break down and turn acidic. We also have a high grade, high temperature glycol, which is rated for somewhere in the neighborhood of 360 degrees. So, personally I highly recommend investing a little bit more money in a high temperature glycol, that way you can be sure that even in the worse case scenario, during system stagnation and you do overheat your glycol, the buffers in that glycol do not break down and do not cause the pH to become acidic. Now measuring concentration can also be done with some very simple tools. Many of you look at the concentration of your anti-freeze in your car radiator from a tool that you buy at NAPA. That same tool will suffice, a simple hydrometer will allow you to maintain the concentration. Perhaps it is something you can include as part of your maintenance and service contract with the homeowner. You buy a pH test kit and you buy them a hydrometer and say this is included, this is something that I would like you to look at each year, and if we have any indication that concentration is dropping or pH is dropping then you can make the drive out to his house. Perhaps that's something they can do. Either way, whether you do it or they do it, you've got to be sure that at least once a year of the proper concentration of your glycols, especially going into the winter, it would be something you would do as a normal boiler service call from a fuel company each fall, they would come out and check the boiler. You should do the same with a solar thermal. Coming into the winter, the most important thing you can check is the concentration of glycol. Now, you really have to shoot for a concentration between 35 and 55%, depending on your location. The further north, the closer you would need to be to 50%. But one thing that many people don't realize is that as you exceed 55% and into 60-65% glycol, that's going to change the solution or the makeup of that solution and cause the water to separate from the glycol. We don't want the water to separate from the glycol because then the water will freeze on it's own. So you want to have a nice solution and maintain that solution, and a good solution is mixed to maintain between 35 and 55%. So, I've heard people throw around the idea that 'oh I’m just going to use 70% or 80% glycol.' That would lower the freeze protection, but it would also encourage the separation of glycol and the water. So, more is not better in terms of concentration of your glycol. Now maintaining your pressure, most pressure gauges have a little red dial that can be moved and set as your target pressure, well this needs to be marked during system commissioning so that you've identified what your starting with and you can easily correlate any fluctuations from this standard. We'll also to identify your target pressure, so before you even commission your system, use the little red dial and set it at whatever pressure you're trying to achieve, get your system up to that pressure, close it off and come back the next day and be sure that you haven't lost any pressure. And then fill your system up and put the tubes in or get your pump running and you should be fine. Make sure that that mark stays in place, and you can even use a permanent red marker to help you be sure. That's a great question, how do you extract any glycol without introducing air back into the system? What it really just takes is a very, very small amount. You should have a small drain cock in your filling station as well as any drain of your pump station is going to let you drain just a little bit out. You really just need a few drops, so by removing some of this glycol you will drop pressure but it's going to be a very, very, very, very small amount, minute amounts. So what you want to do is use the fill ports, the fill drain port on your pump station to extract several milliliters of glycol, no more than that. And by removing just that small amount you shouldn't have any problems with getting air back into the system. But, if you do have air back in the system, the pump has a manual air bleeder and so in a very short period, in a matter of just a few minutes, you should be able to get that air right back out if you did get some in. Okay, now measuring performance. This text that you see here on the slide is all laid out in the technical manual, and you can find a section in the technical manual of measuring performance. Basically what you want to do is look at the amount of energy that is brought into the solar thermal storage tank on any given day. By looking at the amount of energy or temperature gain of a fixed volume of fluid, that can correlate directly to the number of BTUs because we know it takes 8.3 BTUs to raise one gallon of water one degree Fahrenheit. So if I know for a fact that I have an 80 gallon storage tank, I'd look at that 80 gallons and multiply that by the number of degrees rise throughout one day and then multiply again by 8.3 and that should be equal to the total number of BTUs that my system was able to produce and deliver to my storage tank on any given day. I want to choose a day that I don't have a load. It becomes a little bit more difficult to calculate production and subtract load in looking at the storage tank. So try to find a day when there is no load and every BTU that we produce goes into the storage tank, and that number is a direct result of gallons times 8.3 times rise in temperature. That's going to equal your BT production. And from that number then you can look at the SRCC report and see what they would expect you to produce, you can look at the TSol that you should have gotten with a quote or you can call your sales rep or call myself, for example, and say 'I've got a 40 square foot system up in Seattle, Washington and I produced 4-7,000 BTUs today, is that appropriate?' and we'll be able to tell you pretty quickly whether we think you're right in line or not, but it's important to have that done and have that in place so that you know exactly what your system is producing. It's also important for the homeowner, to educate them how they can measure their performance because, from experience, homeowners really like to know how their system is doing and will go out of their way to make their own calculations and perhaps keep a log, and that log can be invaluable for troubleshooting. So it's important that you do educate your homeowner. Now making sure that all the mechanicals are intact, a couple key things that you sure of that the bolts are secure and the fasteners are secure, there's no leaks or tears. With flat plates you want to be sure that the underside of it is cleaned of any debris, there's no leaves, no buildup, no squirrel nests. With tubes, you want to make sure the caps on the bottom of the tubes are snug, preventing them from falling down out of the manifold, and that your controller wiring is tightly sealed, there's no penetration into your wiring because that's going to increase the resistance and change your readings slightly. Now moving forward, this troubleshooting maintenance table again has been taken right out of our technical manual, so this is a very good first step line of defense, so to speak, so that if you have any trouble you can work through this and if this doesn't help you then call the SunMaxx tech support line, and that's where we can step in and be of good value. So, I'm not going to go through this troubleshooting chart, just to point out that you do have this available to you through sunmaxxsolar.com. Different situations where the pump won't run, or the pump runs continuously, or there's no circulation in the system, or you've experienced a large pressure drop. These are all the different causes of those effects, and some recommended actions that you might take to prevent that from happening in the future. You might be experiencing overheating, or based on your baseline data you're seeing some performance loss over the first month or the first year or first two years. And if that is the case, and you do have good baseline data then you can start to look at what would cause performance losses. Okay, as promised I kept it to 30 minutes, and I would like to thank you all for your attention. I encourage you to continue to visit us every Monday at noon. We would like to encourage you to take your time, do the systems as per our recommendations. Let me go back real quick, Don's got a question. I'm going to stop the recording now for those of you who are going to archive, and if you'll hang on Don I'll answer your question momentarily. So thanks again, take care.

Drainback Systems 10.18.2010

SUNMAXX SOLAR HOT WATER SOLUTIONS DRAINBACK SYSTEMS Date: 10/18/2010 Good morning. Welcome to the next addition of our SunMaxx Solar hot water series webinar. Today I’d like to discuss drainback systems and how to optimize the performance for both flat plates and evacuated tubes. As always I welcome you to type any questions you have in the chat window. I can try to respond to those immediately. For those of you who are having trouble with audio just please refresh your screen. You might be able to eliminate any problems that you have. I’d like to talk about the basics and we can get into some more complex topics. Although a half an hour is very short period of time to discuss too much. I’ll try my best to cover as much detail as I can in those next thirty minutes. So essentially drainbacks are a closed loop system. There’s different style drainback. You can do an open loop or direct and indirect. What I’m going to talk about today is a closed loop drainback that is indirect heat source. So we’re going to use a heat exchanger to dump into both heating system and hot water. Essentially drainbacks flood the collectors when the pump is on and when the pump is off for different reasons. When the pump is off the collectors will drain. Draining allows the fluid to leave the collectors preventing any overheating situation and also preventing any freezing situation. So drainbacks are relatively unique to the United States for them most part. In other parts of Europe and Asia most of the systems there are closed loop glycol systems. Drainbacks have been around for quite some time over thirty years. Particularly down in the Florida and the southern areas. But they’ve slowly made there way up north for heating systems. Particularly for systems that are sized for large heat loads in the wintertime and zero heat loads in the summer time. So drainback systems as you’ll see have several different merits. Obviously the first one is there’s’ no need for glycol. So as this picture depicts when the pump is off the collectors and the piping outside are drained. When the pump is on then the water in the loop displaces any of the air that is trapped in the collectors and in the tubing outside. Couple of the benefits of drainbacks it really in the function of anti-freeze. So from experience the only good thing about anti-freeze is that it doesn’t freeze. So with a system that doesn’t require anti-freeze. You don’t have all of the other drawbacks that anti-freeze is associated with more viscosity and heat transfer. Cost is another one. Drainback systems additionally have no need for an expansion tank. Presumably the volume of air that’s trapped inside the tank when the pump is on will suffice for any expansion that occurs during the heating up of the system. There’s also it’s an added safety for when the power fails or there’s a brown out or black out. The worst case scenario is the pump will shut off and if that happens then the system is protected if it’s designed properly. As opposed to a closed loop glycol system when the pump shuts off there have to be measures built into the system design that protect from overheating. Additionally there’s less annual maintenance. If they system is designed and installed properly there should essentially be no maintenance each year. Maintenance that would typically coincide with checking glycol acidity, maintaining system pressure and measuring the concentration of the glycol that can all be eliminated. Also there’s less oxidation of the system because presumably all of the oxygen will be used up during the system’s initial commissioning. In very short period of time the oxygen is consumed and what’s left behind would be the atmospheric nitrogen. So this will occur if the systems are installed properly and are tight. That way we don’t’ have any new oxygen gain or any pressure losses. A couple of drawbacks and the one that’s most apparent to me is that the collectors need to be mounted at a slope. So when you have a collector run of ten to twenty feet. What would be required is a drop in elevation from the high side of the collector to the low side of the collector of anywhere from four to eight inches. Now when mounted on a house that has straight lines the aesthetic appeal really drops. Here’s a perfect example although this collector system is probably working perfectly well dumping a lot of heat into the house. It is crooked and so as people drive by or notice the system on the roof that is crooked. They don’t’ realize the functionality of that slope so they might pass judgment. So you have to be very considerate of what the collector field will look like. In some cases aesthetic is paramount. Also if the system is not installed properly it can lead to lots of things that will go wrong for instance freezing pipes. All of the external piping needs to be mounted at a quarter inch to a foot of slope. With the drainback system it typically requires a larger pumps or secondary pump which I’ll show you in just a few moments. That secondary pump can be used to overcome the initial head that’s required from system startup or when the pump initially kicks on. The second pump needs to be used to help overcome gravity. Once you create a siphon in the system gravity no longer plays a role. Another drawback is that there have been some complaints that drainback piping tends to be noisy. There can be some air entrained in the line that causes mini-explosions when high temperature meets low temperature. There can be some knocking in the pipe. So if you have piping that’s installed in the house. Clients will hear it when they first kick on their system until they get that nice siphoning going. So in most cases if it’s installed properly and out of sight. Then the first two drawbacks are irrelevant. Now with our newest controllers that offer variable speed function the third drawback can also be irrelevant. Because we can use a large pump to overcome that initial head and then the controller will throttle back the pump power. So that we’re consuming just what’s needed and nothing more. Obviously if you have pipes that are installed outside then the noise is also irrelevant. So there are many important benefits to drainbacks but it becomes more and more important that you consider some of the drawbacks before you make your final decision. Now let me get into a little bit of fundamental here. One of the benefits to drainbacks is it reduces the need for extra heat exchangers. Every time you go through a heat exchanger you undergo what’s called a performance penalty. Performance penalties can be removed from systems that are well designed. But regardless when you have a heat exchanger very rarely will you get a hundred percent heat exchange. For example this heat exchanger operating at fifty percent effectiveness. In other words the amount of energy that a heat exchanger can transfer across a heat exchanger is typically between fifty to eight percent effectiveness. So this means that if a collector is yielding a ninety four percent….They only yield ninety four percent of what they are expected to yield because of the fifty percent heat exchanger effectiveness. By looking at this graph there’s a diminishing return as you increase the performance penalties. So by eliminating this heat exchanger you essentially increase the system performance by six percent. So you have to be careful not to assume that just because the heat exchanger is operating at seventy five percent effectiveness. Doesn’t mean that you’re losing twenty five percent of the energy because it’ll just take more cycles to work through. However six percent losses can be pretty substantial. And why would you suffer six percent loss if you didn’t need to. So drainbacks eliminate that need to suffer from performance penalty because of this heat exchanger effectiveness versus quicker performance graph. Okay so here we have two drainbacks. We have an open loop and a closed loop drainback system. The open loop drainbacks which you see on the left are typically used with non-pressurized tanks. Non-pressure tanks are very popular with Combi Systems where you have a large reservoir of energy two, four, five, six hundred gallons storage tanks. These are very simple to design because being that the tank is not pressurized. All we’re going to do is pull fluid from the tank up to the collectors when the collectors are producing energy and dump back down into that non pressure tank. So we’re literally pulling the water from the tank to the collectors. Now it does require a system on the left like an open loop…It does require a separate exchanger because typically heating systems and certainly domestic hot water systems maintain an existing pressure. So we can’t introduce a pressurized system into a non-pressure system without the use of a heat exchanger. So although that system on the left the open loop drainback systems perform quite well and are very easy to tie into heating systems we do need to add a heat exchanger. The system on the right the closed loop drainback system where we’re maintaining a certain pressure. Now this system can be tied directly into heating systems. For example we can tie that storage tank being pressurized into pressurized floor, into pressurized baseboard or into a pressurized domestic hot water line. So first you decide whether you’re going to do pressurized or non-pressurized. One of the considerations of a non-pressure tank is the availability of large high volume storage tanks. For example if you designed a system that had a five hundred gallon storage tank. It becomes quite costly to have a five hundred gallon pressurized system. So non-pressure systems tend to be more cost effective when you’re talking about large Combi System designs. With closed loop they’re typically reserved for smaller systems they’re much easier to tie into because there’s no need for heat exchanger between the storage tank and the heating system. However there’s a limitation to the size of the pressurized vessel. I have seen three, four, five thousand gallon pressurized tanks but the cost is sometimes two to three fold that of the non-pressure tank of the same size. Okay here’s an example of a Combi System design that uses a pressurized tank and as you notice the fluid that’s passing through the collectors is the same fluid that’s delivered to the heating system. Whether it’s the heat dissipaters there…Whether the heat dissipaters are radiant floor or tubing or baseboard. It can also be forced hot air. The fluid from the collectors and the tank and the heating system are all the same. So there’s no performance penalty loss there. The only exchanger that you see in the middle of this tank is the domestic hot water exchanger. So when the tank calls for heat the boiler will add heat to the tank if the solar is not producing any energy. So the only time the boiler will dump heat into the storage tank is when the solar is not active. Now in this case the cold water comes into the bottom of the tank and works it way up and out through that coil. So the only heat exchanger is for domestic hot water. Typically heat exchangers on domestic hot water lines have a higher heat exchanger effectiveness or heat exchange capacity. Because of the larger delta t. The incoming cold water temperature versus tank temperature tends to be higher. Therefore we get a greater heat exchange rate and losses are much less. So the design that you see here is probably one of the best ones out there for domestic hot water heating system solar collector tie a pressurized drainback closed loop. You can also have a drainback system like this that does not use a heat exchanger. In this case the storage is the pressurized drainback tank in the case of the one before Don there is no storage for hot water per see. The storage is actually in the drainback tank so presumably we are getting a full recovery of cold water coming into the coil and leaving at the temperature of the tank. Okay. So we’re getting a large delta t from the cold water supply that comes in at fifty and leaves at a hundred and five or whatever you have it set for. At night our storage tank is going to be maintained by the boiler if the solar hasn’t been able to take care of it. So all day long the solar collectors bring the storage tank up to temperature. At the end of day if the storage tank is not up to temperature then the boiler will add heat to that storage tank maintaining that storage tank at a hundred fifteen or a hundred twenty all the time. Now with this one the difference is the drainback tank that is located outside of the storage tank. This small drainback tank only has to store the volume of fluid required to flood the collectors and the piping outside of the house. So in most cases this is a small ten or twenty drainback tank. By mounting it up towards the roof it eliminates the need for a larger pump or a second pump. Because you only have to overcome the vertical height that’s associated with the distance between the top of the water in the drainback tank and the top of the collectors. So the smaller that height the less pump powered required. Here’s a picture I have right out of Tom’s Lane lesson learned book of a drainback system that uses a pressurized drainback tank and a coil. Now this system is used mostly for domestic hot water system. The water in the storage tank is used for domestic purposes. Here is a diagram of a larger commercial pressurized drainback system that uses three tanks in parallel. Each of these tanks would ideally be the same temperature. And there is a larger drainback tank that will allow for any of the fluid in the collectors to drain into. Like I said before those separate drainback tanks can be anywhere from ten, twenty, forty and even eighty gallon drainback tanks outside of the normal storage. Now mounting flat plates to allow them for drainback as I mentioned it usually requires a slope of a quarter inch per foot. Now that slope can be apparent in the installation of the collectors or that slope can be taken care of in simply the piping. You only need stainless steel pumps for lines that are associated with domestic hot water or oxygenated loops. So for any system that’s a closed loop that has a pump cast iron will be sufficient. If the system is open that is with domestic hot water or a non-pressure tank then stainless steel or bronze pump should be used. In fact if it’s domestic hot water then stainless steel or bronze is code. So as I mentioned the flat plates don’t always have to be mounted crooked. But the piping will need to be mounted crooked. It depends what style. On the top you see the header riser style where we have all four panels are essentially piped in parallel. At the bottom we have serpentine. Now there are two different types of serpentine. This is a horizontal serpentine where the pipes are moving back and forth left and right. Horizontal serpentine collectors with a port on the top and a port on the bottom can in fact be used for drainbacks. However vertical serpentine where the manners go from top to bottom they can not be used in a drainback because it won’t drain. Typically flat plates have a header riser style internal piping. And most of those header riser style that have four ports can be used in drainback when they’re mounted properly. In terms of the mounting of the heat pipes there’s much less consideration it’s very straight forward. There’s a single pipe running through the manifold. That pipe like any other drain pipe needs to be mounted a quarter inch tilt per foot. Now that tilt can be accomplished in many ways by…For instance mounting it flush on the roof and rotating the entire piping at a quarter foot. Or mounting it on a flat roof like you see in this picture with one side proportionally higher than the other which allows for the drainage from left to right. But again when designing systems you have to consider what the aesthetics will be like. When you have a long run of forty or fifty feet. For example a four foot run will see just about an inch and a half of elevation change. So one flat plate will need to be tilted at about one point five inches. But for four flat plates now we’re up to six inches. So that slope becomes pretty noticeable as your runs become longer and longer. Now in order to overcome the initial vertical head we use a double pump system or a single pump that has a variable speed function. When you put two pumps in series you essentially double the head. Not double the flow but you double the head. That’s what the issue is with breaking gravity getting the flow from the drainback tank all the way to the collectors is like turning on a fountain pump. So it has to be able to overcome that vertical head. Now once the siphon is created so once we’re able to flow the fluid across the collectors and then fall back down. Then you count on the effect of gravity and that second pump can then go offline. Or a single larger pump would be throttled back. Now like I mentioned by taking the drainback reservoir and mounting it as high as possible you will loose some of the friction head because there’s a much shorter flow path. So if you have the opportunity to raise your drainback tank up to in an insulated space up to the point where just before it becomes non-insulated then you can dramatically reduce the amount of friction you have to overcome and take out the effected gravity. There are many questions about how to pressurize drainback systems. It’s got to have at least fifteen PSI in the system in order for the siphon to take effect. What’s going to happen if you start off with just fifteen pressure at the pump by the time you move to the top of the system the pressure will decrease. If it drops below atmospheric pressure then the boiling point is going to drop as well. It’s going to begin disassociate the… Yes, that is correct. So anytime you are introducing air into the system. You have to use stainless steel or bronze pumps. Now proper sizing for drainbacks in order to maintain a two foot per second of velocity in some cases a larger diameter pipe although it will reduce your friction will prevent siphoning from happening. So you have to be able to maintain a minimum velocity in your system. And velocity is going to be directly related to the volume and your pump speed. The volume is related to obviously to the diameter of the pipe that you choose. So for systems that require for example one point six gallons per minute we can go down to half inch type m copper or type l and that’s going to maintain two foot per second. If we need a gallon and a half a minute and we use three quarter inch copper then our velocity is going to be less than two feet per second. Which means you’re going to have a hard time maintaining that siphon. So the rule of thumb is you want to try to have the smallest diameter pipe possible while still maintaining a certain velocity. That minimum velocity is two per feet per second and the maximum velocity is five feet per second. So we want to try to maintain at least two feet per second in the lines and not to exceed five feet per second. So again by reducing the velocity you put more stress on the pump to maintain that siphon. So you have a better opportunity to create that siphon if your velocity is above two feet per second. You can use this chart to help guide what volume of piping I should use while maintaining two feet and not to exceed five feet per second. There’s many different options for drainback storage. There are ten, twenty, forty and eighty gallon tanks often they need to be mounted on top of an existing top. Or they can be mounted as I said in a larger space up in the attic. Some manufacturers have large eighty gallon tanks that eliminate the need for a separate tank all together. So most often is the case that the installers will choose a separate drainback storage tank that may or may not include a coil heat exchanger. Many times when a coiled heat exchanger is included in a drainback tank since it’s such a small volume. They increase the surface area by using thinned copper or dimpled copper to help increase the heat exchange capacity through a smaller coil. The UniMaxx drain back is ten gallon tank that uses a double pump. So we’re pumping through the collectors and a separate pump is going to re-circulate from the drainback tank into an existing tank with the use of a raised plate as opposed to an internal coil. There are many manufactures of stand alone units. We are just now bringing one to market that includes all of the components built in. Similar to a pump station but as you see on the left here it’s a pump station that stands up on it’s own with a separate drainback reservoir that re-circulates into an existing tank. A couple very important considerations before I close here. Is that all horizontal piping must be sloped and one of the challenges for many installers is to design a system that is both aesthetically appealing and can drain properly. So by looking at the lay out of the roof and the runs of the pipe. You have to be able to visualize every single horizontal of pipe needs to be sloped. In some cases it just doesn’t fit the aesthetics of the house so installers will choose to go with a closed loop glycol. Another important factor to remember is velocity must be two feet per second. Also often pumps come with check valves built in. I know Takeo and Burnfoss the standard pumps that might come with a pump station. Whether you get a pump station from SunMaxx or whom ever else often they have check valves built in. Now Takeo check valves are very easily removed with a pair of needle nose pliers. Never the less you need to be sure that your system does not have a check valve that’s going to prevent the fluid from draining back effectively. Many of the controllers now have a high limit shut off. Not only do they shut it off but they will keep it off. Now make sure your controller has this function enabled especially with evacuated tube drainback systems. Because as your pump shuts off because the tank reached a high temperature. If there’s a load on your storage tank causing the storage tank temperature to drop maintaining a delta t between the collectors and the tank. The pump is going to want to turn back on again. If this happens if your collector field is in excess of two hundred and fifty degrees you’re going to get some flash steam. Which isn’t necessarily a problem but it’s something you want to avoid having happen consistently every single day. It’s going to put undue stress on your piping and fitting and valves. So the controllers are designed now a days for drain back functionality where it will turn off the pump when the tank reaches maximum temperature. It will keep your pump off regardless of your tank temperature if the collectors exceed a temperature it’s typically set at about two hundred and thirty five degrees. Which in the case of evacuated tubes and flat plates as well…. When the pump shuts off in full sun those collector temperatures can climb up to two hundred thirty or two hundred forty degrees in a matter of minutes. So that’s a very important function to make sure is enabled. Also you need to maintain a minimum pressure inside the system to help enable that siphon. With lower pressure in the system you’re going to increase the siphon requirements. In other words you’re going to lower the vertical height that siphon can still occur at. So the more pressure in your system the higher the total vertical head can be while maintaining that siphon. And you don’t need an air vent. In fact you don’t want an air vent in the system. Obviously drain backs have no need for expanse state. Hi Pete. Just wrapping it up here. I am actually going to be done. I’ve gone two minutes over. If anyone has any questions I welcome you to bring them to me now. Otherwise I’d like to conclude and I hope to see you again perhaps next week. I’m glad Pete joined us maybe….Now would be a good time to bring it up Pete. To clarify the pressure I’m certain that you have something to say. But from my understanding the lower the pressure the lower the total vertical head that we can accomplish and still maintain a siphon. So I believe at one atmospheric pressure in the system we’re only going to be able to get about thirty to thirty five feet of head before the boiling point is so low. That we begin to break the siphon as the water moves over the top of the system. So by increasing that pressure it allows us to attain a higher vertical head and maintain that siphon. Okay. Well if anybody else has any questions I’d be happy to answer them now. And otherwise I wish you a happy solar day and hope to see you again. Take care. Bye.

Mounting Strategies 10.04.2010

SUNMAXX SOLAR HOT WATER SOLUTIONS MOUNTING STRATEGIES Date: 10/04/2010 I’d like to welcome you again to another edition of our SunMaxx Solar Hot Water Solutions webinar series. Today we’re going to be talking about mounting strategies for both flat plates and evacuated tube collectors using some of the best practices that we’ve seen. And I’d also like to introduce our new set of mounting hardware solutions that I think you’ll find very effective in both structurally, but also cost. Can anyone confirm for me please that they can hear me? Okay good. Alright, so as always you have a chat box and I welcome you to type in any questions that you have since it’s a small group with us today. I can very easily respond to your questions, try to do it immediately. So, without further ado we have just a half an hour and I try to be punctual. The new mounting hardware that is included with our collectors is really its custom designed for each job. We designed it so that it was universal. Okay, so as you can see the same hardware used at a very large job that was recently installed in hardware with 150 flat plates, uses the same hardware in a slightly different configuration. So, what we have to offer you is a customized solution based on a universal set of materials, hardware. Alright, as you can see in the picture, the rails that were used in a harder job run from the top of the collector down to the bottom of the collectors and with smaller residential jobs, as you see in the picture photo on the right, that the rail is used horizontally, okay. So let me go through each of these components piece by piece. It really begins with our roof penetrations; this roof hook system that we’ve developed. I think you’ll find there are similar products available, but at a much higher cost. So a couple of things I’d like to point out about this roof hook with flashing is that you don’t need to pre-drill any holes that the screws, the lag screws that are included are self tapping or self drilling screws. So, once you’re able to find the rafter, then all you’ve got to do is center your roof hook over the rafter and drill those two lag screws and those are high sheer strength lag screws, directly into the rafter itself. We don’t recommend that you need any other waterproofing sealant. Some installers prefer to use tar or rubber with every penetration, but this is designed so you don’t need that extra barrier, okay. So, you see a flashing that’s going to slip…your gridlines represent your shingle patterns, the flashing will slip up underneath the shingle on top of your roof hook and bolts. So, the strength that comes with this system like this, I believe it can support 400 pounds of uplift and 400 pounds of down pressure as well as 120 mph winds and 180 pounds of sheer strength. So, it’s an extremely strong roofing strategy. Now, from this main roof hook we’re gong to attach a rail. The rail, as you can see in two different depictions here, is threaded. So, you notice the Allen bolt gets threaded directly into the rod. So, what you’re seeing in the picture on your left is that roof hook gets bolted directly into the side of the rail, okay. And that can be mounted anywhere along the rail. We recommend that you don’t space those roof hooks more than 48 inches apart, okay. So, you’re not limited to the location of your rafters, really, if they’re not perfectly two or 16 inch on center, you can mount your roof hooks anywhere along that rail. And then all you need is an Allen screw and you can connect the bolt directly to the rail. On the picture to the right is the clip that’s going to be fastened to the rail to mount, eventually, to your collector, okay. So, with the titan power plus collectors you have a threaded well that will accept your Allen bolt in that slot on the top of that clip, okay. So again, it gives you a lot of flexibility in lateral movement of your collectors and you can be symmetrical. You can line it up perfectly in the center of the roof if you like. You can move it to the left or to the right. Now, these rails come in five, seven and eight foot lengths, okay, and all of which we have in stock ready to ship. So, I would recommend that you converse with your sales rep. Your sales rep has a software that’s going to design the components required to accomplish what it is that you’re trying to do in terms of your mounting. Now, should you need to put several rails together, we do sell two different style rail. The one on the left is the newer rail that has the threaded channel. And that union has four, all the bolts are included, it has four Allen bolts that will thread directly into the rail. And then on the right the “T” profile, this is a rendering of the “T” rail, there’s a simple clip that will secure with ridges and pinch down and fasten the two rails together, okay. So again, regardless of your placement, we recommend that you don’t space the roof hooks more than 48 inches apart. Now for back legged frames, for if you’re going to do a tilt mount or on a flat roof, you’re going to connect the rail to the back leg using these simple clips, now again, with the stainless steel Allen bolts, will thread directly into the collector frame. Now, in terms of the feet for… Why I get a “no” from you is you’re having trouble hearing, I presume? Maybe you can work that out, try to refresh. Now, the feet will again, mount anywhere along the back leg. So depending on, if I go backwards for a minute, depending on the length of the back leg required, all you have to do is cut the back leg to your designed length and the foot of that rail can move up the back leg to the desired, so that you can set the desired angle, okay. So as you notice, there are the threaded receptacle always goes on the outside to accept that bolt and then you install this stopper that will allow your collector to sit right in place and fasten at the bottom of the frame, okay. Now, for flush mounts, what you see here are a total of four roof hooks with their associated flashing, and you see how the rail connects to the roof hook with the clip that I showed you before and then the collectors mount to the rail with the collector clip. Now, that collector clip has got to only be spaced the appropriate distance to meet the threaded well to accept the Allen bolt, okay. The only consideration you have to make when setting your roof hooks is the height of the collector, okay, not necessarily the distance between. So, you set your roof hooks at 48 inches and you have your height, which should be pre-determined. Okay, can anyone else hear me? There appears to be a little difficulty, so if you wouldn’t mind just confirming if someone can still hear me. It never fails there always a bit of technical difficulty when trying to pull this off, but I think we should be all set. Okay, thanks Dennis. Alright, well, okay well, in terms of quality of audio I can make some adjustments after the fact, but now we’ll just have to run with it. So, for the flush mount you’re going two rails. You get two rails and four roof hooks with the flashing and then you mount the rails directly to the collector. It makes it very nice, clean look. These rails are aluminum all the other hardware, the bolts are stainless steel, so there shouldn’t be any corrosion issues. The collectors, as you might remember, are also stainless steel framed so you have stainless steel mounting directly to the stainless steel. The space underneath the collectors is about only two to 2 ½ inches between the bottom of the collector and the roof. The space between the collectors is going to be about 1.5 inches, okay. So you do get, with a flush mount flat plates, you get a real nice clean look, almost like a skylight. Now, in terms of a flat roof mount, like I showed you before, you’re going to have these feet in place of the rail. Now, there’s two ways to use the back rail. One would be using the back rail for your feet now unfortunately the location of these feet, as they move down toward the roof, do not align themselves perfectly with the rafters. So, if you would like to have that added precaution, where your collector leg is mounted to a rail rather than the roof, you’re going to use, obviously, this rail again, with a four foot roof hook spacing and then you can move your rail laterally. You can also mount these directly to the roof with other methods, for instance, and I’ll talk about them in a minute, a spanner method. So, whereas you know, you can find your outside legs can certainly mount directly to a rafter, but then the other two legs will have to be mounted to the roof decking with a toggle bolt, with a block between the rafters or with a spanner rod that’s going to connect right up through your roof hook, okay. So, in this case you have six roof penetrations as opposed to four roof penetrations. So, going back to the rail we’ve got the same square footage of collector, but we’re using only two roof penetrations for the bottom rail and only two roof penetrations for the top. And should you decide to not use a rail you would save yourself a bit of money, probably less than $50.00 savings because you’re going to have to buy two additional roof hooks, but now you have six roof penetrations, okay. So, you really want to try to minimize the number of roof penetrations. In the end it’s going to pay for itself. Okay, now there are several different ways to penetrate the roof, all of which should include a flashing. And the flashings can be made for asphalt shingles as well as cedar shake shingles, or ceramic tile shingles. Unfortunately, there’s no real good flashing for metal roof, but in the case of metal roofs, we use a rubber washer similar to the way the fasteners connect the roof to the rafters. The fasteners are designed to withstand the weather using the rubber washer on the top. So, we can recommend that same. When you use this type of system, where you have a flashing, you’ve got to be sure that your flashing extends up into the shingles at least four inches, okay. So, the only recommendation is that you choose your movement, your vertical movement, the location of your point of penetration, should allow for four inches of penetration up underneath the row of shingles above it, okay. Okay, now there’s five general methods that are tried and true for connecting directly to the roof, right. These have been in practice for quite some time. A spanner method with a threaded rod, this allows you to locate your points of penetration, regardless of location of the rafter. Okay, so the only draw back is you have to have access to the rafters, so for method number one, using a spanner will allow you to locate your point of penetration anywhere on the roof, but you have to have access to those rafters and you can simply put a block between the rafters and then drill up from the bottom, through the roof. That’s going to be your point of penetration. And rather than using a lag bolt you’ll use a threaded rod, okay. Now, in terms of a lag bolt with flashing, I’ve already spoke about that, but you do need to find the rafter, the exact location of the rafter because you’re going to want to split the rafter. Bosch makes a very nice rafter binder and I believe the cost is somewhere around $200.00, but that’s going to give you a very nice image with the exact locations of the rafters so that you can split and so you don’t jeopardize the integrity of the rafter. Another one is the “J” bolt. “J” bolt does the same as a lag bolt would do it’s just that the “J” bolt is to the side of the rafter rather than in the center of the rafter. Now, you still need to use a rafter finder or you can have access to the rafters and drill up from the bottom. Now, in terms of using this on a metal roof, these will all work on a metal roof, and metal roof manufacturers now recommend that you do not drill through the ridges, rather that you drill through the valleys of the middle roof and you use a rubber neoprene washer between the metal roof and your metal washer on the lag bolt. Okay, so you can in fact, use these with metal roofs, but as I mentioned, it’s very difficult to flash unless you build your roof around those. So, rather than using flashing, you’ll use a rubber washer that comes with our lag bolts, okay. So we sell separate lag bolts, they’re about 10 inches long, and they have the lag threads, wood threads, on the bottom with a double nut on the top separated by a rubber washer. So, you can fasten them directly down through the valley of your metal roofing as you would your fasteners. Greg that’s a great question. I’m not positive that the Bosch rafter finder works on metal roofs. I would have to guess that it would, although I cannot confirm that. Okay, now moving on to give you an idea of the “J” bolt detail, the “J” bolt, like I said, you have to locate your points of penetration directly next to the rafter and you have to be able to find the rafter. You’re going to drill from the bottom up through the roof rather than drilling from the top. This allows you to insert your “J” bolt up from the bottom and in the “J”. Part of that bolt will connect it with the rafter, okay. Now, when it comes to mounting the vacuum tubes to the roof, just like the flat plates, they don’t align themselves perfectly with the rafters. The points of penetration should really align themselves with the rafters. So, in this case its better that you use the rail system, okay. The rail will allow you to mount directly to the rafter and then if you see this photograph here, the feet of the evacuated tube collector, which are included, alright, so with a vacuum tube collector, you get the entire collector frame, some of which you may not need, but the details from the rail down will be the same for flat plates and evacuated tubes. The only difference is the connection between the vacuum tube collector and the rail will be accomplished by the feet of the collector, whereas the connection between a flat plate and the rail will be accomplished by a separate clip that comes with your mounting hardware, okay. Now, flat plate flush mounts are probably the most aesthetically appealing. And for those of you who have been through our level one training, you do recognize and you should remember that the performance losses from a decreased angle, are really quite minimal, okay. And so it’s hard to be exact without using a specific example, but for example, we have a roof pitch here that appears to be about 30 degrees. So, these collectors are mounted at 30. Knowing the location, presumably in Upstate New York, just I recognize this install in Syracuse, the angle, the optimum angle for this installation would be 42. So, they’ve lost 12 degrees in their angle by mounting them flush. What does 12 degrees do to the loss in performance? It turns out that they should have expected loss and performance of less than 6%, okay. And so what is the payback on that 6% in terms of aesthetics and also ease of installation? Flush mounts are much easier to install and they look much nicer, okay. So, please remember that many of your future jobs will be referral based, and most referrals, whether we like it or not, will be based on the aesthetic appeal, not only internally of the piping and tank and pump station arrangement, but also on the aesthetic appeal of the mounting, even more so because people will see those a lot more readily than they’ll see the internal guts of the system. So, please do consult with your sales rep or if you have specific questions you can email me regarding your losses and from, you know, a 30degree angle versus a 42 degree angle, would have a significant difference on aesthetic appeal. Okay, now in terms of mounting “T” profiles to the roof, the “T” profile is another option for using the rail system. This is a more cost effective approach, but the strength of these rails and versatility of the rails are less. So, SunMaxx has decided to go with a much more universal and versatile system, but we do still offer this “T” profile as they’re very cost effective solution for flush mount systems, okay. And what you see here is a photo of our hanger bolts that are mounted directly into a rafter with a piece of flashing and you see the black rubber gasket. Okay, the “T” profile is going to mount directly to the collector. You see the bolt being inserted into the manifold, err, I’m sorry, into the collector frame. This piece that you see on the roof here, it would be the top. And then for the bottom rail the orientation would be the opposite. So, most of the weight of that collector would mount on the bottom rail. Using the hanger bolt you can see a nice clean look. The rubber washer that you see here, in the case of a metal roof, would sit directly on that metal flashing or directly on the roof, okay. And these little clips secure the “T” rail to the hanger bolt. So, the amount of installation time required for this new system and the difference between the “T” rail is minimal. Both the roof hooks and the hanger bolt option is going to take you, honestly less than two minutes per penetration. Okay, so once you find the rafters, the penetration is securing the roof hook or the hanger bolt is less than two minutes. So, it’s quite easy to do. I want to point out a couple of variations in collector mounting, especially for the vacuum tubes; you can see a high degree of reflectivity is going to increase the performance upwards of ten to fifteen percent. And I’ve even seen collectors that are performing 20% more than what we would anticipate because of that reflectivity, okay. With a flush mount system reflectivity is very easy. You can simply paint the roof. One thing that we discourage is by adding too much behind the collector on a tilt mount because you’ll increase the wind load. Okay, SunMaxx has decided that the value in reflectivity, by including a reflective surface on the collector itself, reflectivity does decrease dramatically. And so you’re better by increasing the reflectivity of the roof rather than increasing the reflectivity by adding a structure to the collector because you do add a significant amount of wind load. Sherwin Williams, for example, makes a highly reflective roof paint that is sold at $30.00 a gallon and you can simply paint your roof as this photo on the top portrays here. With those three collector in series the roof has been updated to become highly reflective. Another consideration is mounting these collectors miscellaneous in moveable array, although in theory, may provide an added benefit by decreasing the production in the summer and increasing it in the winter, which is what you’d like to see for systems. It takes a very, very special design and in some cases may not be worth the cost because as you know, angle of inclination there’s a high degree, about a 30 degree window before you begin to suffer any serious losses. When mounting this system on a ridge, as you see here, will increase the performance because if the house if oriented from north to south with the ridge line, then your options, other than doing it on a ridge would be to face the collectors to the east or facing the collectors to the west. And again, if the house is oriented magnetically north and south, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be that far off when you compensate for the magnetic declamation. So, you might not lose as much as you think by mounting them to the east or to the west. Richard, we don’t have a solution for ridge mount systems. A lot of it is going to be custom design. Now, I can tell you this, the hardware that is included with both the flat plates and the vacuum tubes, is universal and fully adjustable. So, with the additional purchase of a few extra rails and clips they can all be interconnected so that you can custom design a ridge mount. I will probably not recommend the ridge mount for flat plate collectors due to the significant wind load that would be involved there, okay. This is some examples of ground mount systems. Alright, the hardware that is included with the vacuum heat pipes, can be fully adjustable for ridge mount for ground mount. So, you notice the back legs are used to cantilever the bottom off. Okay, again, there’s very little wind load. So the frame that’s used to hold these collectors up really just needs to be designed to support the weight, okay. And the weight is only about 7 pounds per square foot, 5 pounds per square foot for flat plates. Flat roof installs with vacuum tubes are very easy to do. In this case we have very low wind load. So, these collectors are simply mounted or ballasted onto the roof with concrete pads, little concrete pavers to be exact and tapcons that are screwed. So, there’s no roof penetration. So, this is a gravel roof and basically the collectors are setting on the gravel roof with no penetrations at all. In the case… You have a little bit of shading. So, collectors can be used on apartment garages for shading. Richard, all of our mounting hardware is up to U.S. building code standards. So they are suitable for engineer stamps. Every piece that we use in our system has ratings that exceed required values. So, you could very easily get the engineered stamp with the hardware that’s included. Okay, and here’s another example of ridge mount rather than mounting it transverse along the ridge, it’s mounted parallel with the ridge, but the back legs are on the north face of the ridge and the front legs are on the south face of the ridge. Okay, this allows you to get a steep angle and disperse the weight of collector back on to both sides of the ridge. Again, you can do this effectively with vacuum heat pipes because of their low wind load. Okay, another example flat roof installs we do recommend that you bring the collectors up off the roof a minimum of one foot. No, I really don’t have anything at this point for awning mounts, although if Richard, if you email me I can give you a couple of examples. Okay, so we recommend that you bring your collectors up off the roof a minimum of 12 inches to get them out of the snow if you’re in snowy climates. And if you’re not in snowy climates then congratulations to you, although you probably do miss, or you would miss the snow, I think I would for all of its drawbacks. Okay, you can always increase performance easily with vacuum tubes as I mentioned by increasing the reflectivity and also by allowing any of that diffused radiation to strike the collectors on the back. Pole mounts are also a very good solution and… Okay, good thanks Richard. Pole mounts in some cases might be cost prohibitive. The photo on the left probably cost a considerable amount of money to get that south facing slope whereas if they had mounted on the east or the west they might not have lost as much as they think. In this case the collector, that single collector unit, is supported by a pole that houses the supply and the return. Concrete standoffs can be used on ground mount or roof mount. The picture on the left shows the concrete standoff being used on a gravel roof. And this is the Wallkill Prison job that has recently been completed, which is 18 inches up off the ground. Okay, and these are glued together. And then you fasten the feet or fasten to the concrete directly. I’d also like to point out summertime production can be decreased by mounting vacuum direct flow vertically, which gives you a lot of wintertime gain and then the photo with this installation where the gentleman built a roof so that both his rows of collectors are getting the wintertime gain, but the bottom row loses the summertime production because of the high angle of the sun. Ground mounts are easy to work with. If you decide to go with a ground mount you will have an easier time at washing your collectors, maintaining your collectors and also covering your collectors should you experience overheating system. Okay, drain backs to remind you, need to be mounted at a ¼ inch a tilt per foot. Both are flat plate titan power plus. And our vacuum tubes are suitable for drain back. Okay, in this case we have a rail mount using hanger bolts and the threaded rods; the double nut system is just used to create that angle on both the front and the back. Okay, to wrap it up a couple of important considerations that I want you to remember, that the universal mounting hardware is designed for any type of roof, not just any type of roof, but you can use them with any of our collectors, flush mount, tilt mount, flat roof mount, ground mount, ridge mount. It’s designed to be very customizable. And when you do decide to place an order with your sales rep be sure you know how you’d like to mount these collectors so they can very easily customize your mounting solution. Also, to remind you that our hardware does meet all the U.S. building codes, so you will be able to get engineered stamps with the use of our system. And not to preach to the choir, ‘cause I’m sure you know this, but it’s very important that you make every precaution to be sure there’s not going to be any water penetrations on your roof, okay. Your system will speak for itself and in performance and so will the lack of phone calls for service speak at your ability to install a system. So, please do make precautions that you don’t get a phone call during a rainy storm in the middle of the night. And also, know your local building codes. Your sales rep can forward to you our technical data sheets for all of our collectors that will include the information that might be required. Some building codes do require a very significant amount of detail for every single component and some don’t. So, you have to look at your own building codes. Okay, now, with that I’d like to thank you for joining us for this short discussion on mounting strategies. I welcome you to continue to join us. Hopefully you were able to pick up on some information. Stay tuned for next weeks solar webinar series and give us feedback, if you have any. I wish you all a great day and I thank you for your attention.

Solar Thermal System Commissioning 9.20.2010

SUNMAXX SOLAR HOT WATER SOLUTIONS SOLAR THERMAL SYSTEM COMMISSIONING Date: 09/20/2010 Okay. Well I’d like to welcome you all to another installment of our SunMaxx solar hot water solutions webinar series. Today I’d like to talk briefly about solar thermal system commissioning for pressurized glycol systems. This is a really a much longer detailed process. But I will try to cover as much as possible within the next half an hour. Likely to go a little bit longer. I’d like to remind you if you have any questions. Please feel free to type a question in the chat box. And I will do my best to answer them accordingly. So as we go through this I would like to point out that all of these files have been archived and you will see some links. Hyper links to some of the texts. Which means that if you want to learn more about that particular topic. You download the PDF file from solarwebinars.com. Which is going to be newly updated probably by the end of the day. So download the archive and then you’ll have those links available to you. So the first thing I liked to discuss real quick is just the basic procedures for system commissioning. I’m going to go into a little bit more detail on all of the following mounting the collectors, setting the pipe runs, installing your storage tank, placement of the storage tank, piping of storage tank, pump station connections, mounting the pump station properly, expansion tank and then the controller. Programming the controller to do what you need it to do. Many of the controllers these days particularly the IntelliMaxx series of controllers allows a lot of flexibility in your system design. So it’s really a matter of choosing which array works best for your particular needs. Also pressurizing the system setting the line set and pressurizing that system. Flooding the system with water. Filtering it and purging it. Making sure there’s no air and no leaks. And then proper performance assessment. I know that many people will install a system and then move onto the next. But one of the most important things that most people forget is how to educate your client or at least see for yourself how we can do a performance assessment just using the gauges and a simple calculator. Then I’ll talk about some of the operations and maintenance things that should happen over the next few years to maintain a long system life. And prevent any future failures because as you know your success in this industry is going to be referral based. So you want to pay particular attention to the details surrounding operations and maintenance. Now safety is…There’s a few things that you’ve got to be sure of. I just highlighted a couple here for example. But just to remind you OSHA Standards must be observed and practiced. If you download the archive this will take your right to the OSHA website where those standards are in place. So this is an example when you see a light colored purple word with underlines that’s a hyperlink. All you have to do in the PDF is click on it and it will take you to the information to learn more. So the US solar code as well as OSHA states that you must wear gloves when handling non-tempered glass. So the evacuated tubes are non-tempered so therefore anytime you have those in your hand you have to have gloves on. Also harnesses are required any time your six feet off the ground. This is just an example of practices you must follow. But please look at the OSHA website for further clarification. Now when it comes to mounting the collectors. This is really just system commissioning. We’re not going to talk about sizing and orientation. But both of these links the technical manual. The technical manual lays out in very good detail proper orientation and inclination and shading and different roofing strategies. So I strongly encourage you to download the SunMaxx technical manual linked here for both the titan power and thermal power. Now with the flat plates for proper ventilation they really need to be mounted between thirty five and ninety degrees off of the horizon. For those of you who are in latitudes less then thirty five degrees there will be a very slight performance penalty less then five percent. If you are fifteen degrees off of that. But for good ventilation that is you want to remove all the moisture that might build up on the inside. The design of our titan powers is such that it eliminates any of that calcium build up you’ve seen on some of the other flat plate collectors. So our ventilation system works really well but they need to be mounted between thirty five and ninety. There’s such a low pressure drop between the collectors because they’re internally piped in parallel. That we can put ten of these in series. The installation time is minimal. You use compression fittings and the space that you can count on between one flat panel and the next is about an inch and a half. Now we have two different types of mounting hardware for the titan power. You have to decide whether it’s going to be a flush mount or a tilt mount. So for example a flat roof installation at thirty five degrees will be a tilt mount hardware. So your sales rep will be sure to have all the necessary components. And it is a very, very slick mounting hardware. But you have to make it clear with your sales rep whether you’re going to do flush or tilt. I’ll go over some of the details about that a little bit later. Thermal power again download the technical manual. These have to be mounted for performance wise between fifteen and seventy five. As some of you might remember the convection and the buoyancy of steam relies on a angle of fifteen degrees but no more than seventy five. In order for that steam to work it’s way all the way into the condenser ball. There is a significant amount of pressure drop in these evacuated tube collectors because there’s a lot of turbulence. And turbulence is good for heat exchange inside the manifold. But it limits the number that we can put in series. So two hundred and ten is the maximum number. There are always exceptions but as a good rule of thumb you don’t want to go more than two hundred ten. One for pressure drop reasons but also because you’re going to reduce your delta t between the heat transfer fluid and the manifold and thus reducing your heat exchange. Typical space between the collectors should be about six inches. That accounts for the one inch brass nipple and the one inch brass union. Between one manifold and the next. The hardware that is included with your thermal power is fully adjustable. So whether you’re going to do flush mount or tilt mount or compound or straddle the ridge. The hardware is included. So unlike the titan power the hardware for the thermal power are included. Titan power you need to clarify with your sales rep whether you want to do flush mount or tilt mount. Can I have a confirmation that someone can hear me? It’s coming through on my side. Now the titan power it includes a quick connect…Thanks Kevin. The titan power includes a quick connect adapter set that is required for each array that you have in series. So for example if you order one flat plate like this. You’re going to get this kit which includes all these brass components that you see. If you order two or three or five up to ten you’re still going to get that one brass connection set. Okay so you need one brass connection set for every row that you have in series. Now breaking down this brass connection set. You have your return side on the bottom left or the anatomical right with a plug on the top and bottom of the elbow. Your quick connect fittings the flexible stainless steel will connect right to the three quarter inch. The fittings that labeled return on the bottom left. That’s a three quarter inch mpt. A compression fit will fit right down on that. On the supply side on the top right there’s a manual air bleeder. So during system purging someone will be up there with a small wrench opening up the manual air vent. Allowing for the release and purging of air. Then there’s a sensor port that’s a dry well. So it’s a tube that the sensor will fit into which essentially creates a direct contact with the internal manifold. The heat transfer fluid will flow across that sensor port. You see a discolored fitting that screws into the sensor port. There’s a rubber washer in that. So as you tighten down that sensor port it secures it grip on the sensor cable. Then just like the return three quarter inch mpt the supply will also connect directly to your pipe threads. So on the top left you have a plug and on the bottom right you have a cap. So the fittings are included with the collector. Just to point out and remember you need one connection set. This isn’t really a decision that you have to make your sales rep will do it for you. Just so you know you only need one of these connection sets for every row that you have in series. All right now setting the pipe fronts. We strongly recommend if possible that you use a flexible stainless steel. It cuts down on your installation time. Its pressure and temperature ratings are equivalent to that of a type l copper. It comes pre-insulated with your sensor wire included. So you want to be sure one of the most important things that you can do in your system design is that the return side. The side that’s going back to the collectors is the longest side. The supply side should be the shorter side. As soon as you collect and gather the Btu’s from your collectors you want them in your tank as quickly as possible. So that’s a very simple a single decision design that you have to make. The return side is the one that’s going to extend the furtherest on the roof. Now with the flexible stuff you can manipulate the angle and the direction.

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