Re: [papercreters] On demand water heater

Judith, I have a friend from Australia that is excited about solar water.  She says you can make a solar water heater easily and with easy to obtain materials.  And that it can deliver water near to the boiling point even in the deep winter.  I must confess with so many things to plan and prepare, I've pushed this topic to the back-burner.  It may have even fallen off the stove a couple of times, only to be put back on by my friend. ;)  Considering the effort she has gone through to educate me, I should go back and find those emails from her, and see if I can put together some information to get you started on the solar path.  

As to on-demand water heaters, I'm sure there are good and bad units.  Here where I work, the building owner installed them in the bathrooms but they hardly work at all.  Because of that I would imagine someone would waste a huge amount of fuel to get a tub of water hot but maybe I'm wrong.

There are some people on http://www.permies.com (Permaculture site, very very cool place, has forums and articles, videos etc.) who have built these cob houses using a "rocket stove".  They have videos on how to construct one, showing how the pipes are laid out and all.  They use this concept to put exhaust pipes inside a cob bench along the side of a wall that is used for sleeping on or sitting on.  The heat from the rocket stove radiates inside the cob bench and warms that before it goes outside.  It's very ingenious if you ask me.  Anyway, I am thinking that the same kind of concept in a general fashion could be used to heat water as well, perhaps by coiling a copper pipe right up against the stove.  Warm your buns with the exhaust and heat the water with the stove.  Just an idea.

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 8:31 AM, JUDITH WILLIAMS <williams_judith@hotmail.com> wrote:

 

Has anyone used an on demand water heater to heat a hot tub? Would this be wildly impractical? I would love to have an outdoor water feature where I could soak but am not up to figuring out solar or anything like that.

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