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Day 9 – plumbing the pre-heat tank
July 31, 2006. Time Invested:
3:40 Plumbing in the new tank
1:00 Finding the leaky pressure relief valve and cleaning upAugust 1, 2006. Time invested:
1:00 Get replacement valve and installing it
I really should have started in the day time so I could have made a run to the hardware store if I needed something. Murphy rules when you are plumbing… I started at 8:00pm. It was pretty easy to get the pre-heat tank in place, it sits right up against the propane fired water heater. I set it on some lengths of treated 2X4s to keep it off the damp cement floor.
I used the revised layout that I got from Butler Sun Solutions that shows how to plumb in a solar pre-heat tank. I began by shutting off the water main and draining the plumbing from the bottom of the hot water heater. Oh, yes, before that I had shut off the gas and power to the water heater and I took a long shower to cool off the tank. I attached a garden hose to the heater tank drain, and ran it outside.
Note the unusual connections to this tank. I accidentally bought an electric water heater designed for mobile homes. It has connections on the side as well as the top, and no dip tube for the cold inlet at the top, so I had to use the lower inlet on the side for the cold feed.
It wasn’t too hard to plumb in the cold line. There need to be 3 shut off valves so that the tanks can be configured as a normal hot water heater, or fed through the pre-heat tank. The pre-heat tank also needs its own shut-off.I moved on to plumbing the wand outlet into the cold side of the propane tank using a T that allows that original water heater to be fed from cold, or solar heated water.
Then I plumbed in the tempering valve on the hot outlet of the water heater (upper left in the image at right). It is hidden by the white combustion exhaust pipe at the upper left of the image to the right. 3.5 hours – not bad!
Day nine continues tomorrow.
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