warm water

Someone said they heard we were still taking cold showers so I guess it's time to post. We've been using the single solar panel for a while now. It seems like at least a couple of weeks. Maybe 3. I just measured the water out of the faucet at 99f. With no solar heat it is 65.
To make this panel work I pulled the dual 4500 watt heaters, top and bottom, out of the water heater. Those used 1" NPT fittings and were tough to remove. The cheap tube derived socket lowes sells for removing these is worthless. It took a real 1.25" socket and breaker bar. I got a combination of galvanized and brass fittings to adapt those holes to 1/4ID tubing. That runs through a pump to the solar panel and back to the other hole in the tank. The pump is an old tuthill dc pump I took from a thermocycler used for DNA manipulation, which I approve of very much. It's a very small pump. I have it running at half voltage so there's just a trickle passing through. It has 1/8 NPT fittings to give an idea of how small it is. It takes very few watts. I haven't measured, but I'd guess 10 watts. Instead of running new wires through the house to the crawl space where all of this is kept I employed the unused 240 circuit that used to provide the 9000 watts to the heater. I took half of that (120 volts) and ran it through a 12 volt transformer. I used the center tap and one leg of the secondary on the transformer to supply 6 volts to a rectifier and capacitor to make DC for the pump. So now when I want the pump to run I just turn on the massive 100 amp dual breaker in the house breaker box and that tiny pump starts. There is no automated control to this yet. That's on the list. I can tell you that it will be done with an AVR butterfly, 2 or 3 thermistors and the open source GCC port for that MCU.