Hot water heater
It costs the average person over 500 dollars a year to run a standard hot water heater. That's about 40,000 dollars in a lifetime. The majority of that cost lies on your SEF (solar energy factor), and your fuel cost. By cutting down your fuel cost, you would be able to drastically drop your annual cost to run your water heater. By cutting down your fuel cost, you are not only saving money but you are being cleaner for the environment. As of today, our atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is at about 400ppm. By the year 2100, it is projected to be at about 1000ppm, and the reason for that is humans. We have to clean up the mess that we are making, or Earth could very well become near unlivable. Cutting down your fuel usage helps a lot, and makes for a much cleaner environments, and not to mention, it saves money. It's a win win.
The way that our class decided to go about this problem is with a solar water heater. This means that the water would be heated 100% by the sun. The sun's surface is about 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, that heat has to travel 92,956,050 miles before reaching planet Earth. By the time it reaches us, it is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. This would take a long time to get water really really hot. And that was the problem that we were given: What could we make to heat water in the most efficient way possible using only the sun's heat? Our main focus was working on concentrating the sunlight as much as possible. By doing this, you are taking those 70 degrees, and putting all of it in one particular spot, thus making the heat extremely intense. To do this we used a magnifying sheet. This sheet was able to heat things up very fast. What we decided to do, is lay it across the top of our box. Inside the box is copper tubing. Our goal was to heat up the copper tubing and let the water run through it. The bottle fed the water to the copper tubing. The bottle was insulated using cotton. Cotton makes for a good insulation because there are a lot of holes, and it is really bad at conducting. After passing through the heated tubes, the water will flow into a cup, and will be pored back into the original bottle. The reason we put foil inside the box is so that we could reflect the light all over. We had a saran wrap cover to keep the heat inside the box. For the most part, our group ended out with promising data. Our overall water temperature increase was 8 degrees Celsius. This equates to an increase of about 16 degrees Fahrenheit. This happened in a matter of 15 minutes using nothing but the heat of the sun. Considering the scale of our hot water heater, I would say that that's a pretty good difference in temperature. The water was steadily getting hotter and hotter as the minutes went by. Had we left it out for longer, we could have had a much greater temperature change. One thing that we could have done better is we could have taken more time on choosing the angle that we set our box, in order to get more direct light. I think that we would have been able to bump the temperature u pa few more degrees if we did that. |