Solar Vacuum Tubes

The data below shows a couple of live solar hot water monitoring systems on a residential homes in Calgary and Vancouver.

1. The Calgary System (30 Tubes) was installed on the 4th Feb. 2011 so there is nearly a years worth of data there now.
2. The Vancouver system (90 Tubes) was installed mid august.  With the help of the Apollo we could see the data was not right (ie showing 300,000 BTU per day) which helped trouble shoot the system to get it working correctly. To help you understand how these reports can show you if your solar system is working correctly read this document - Solar Thermal System - Normal vs Abnormal. The vancouver system is oversized for the house and one collector remains covered up during the summer months to reduce the power output.

You can use these to scroll back and forward through the months to see the solar energy produced by a single 30 tube collector in Calgary. The pages are interactive so you can click back and forward between the days.

 

---

The downside to these is the price, they are expensive, the Apollo 1 unit (which is running the system below has a retail price of about $800 + Tax and shipping, the commercial unit, the Apollo 2 is about $1600!

There is an alternative to these which will save you a lot of money and it comes built into and included in the cost of our Sorel solar controllers.

See our store for more information.

---

Vancouver Live Solar Energy Monitoring - see below.

Calgary Live Solar Energy Monitoring

The real time weather in Calgary can be seen on the Weather Network image above.

Full information about the technical details and Sunreports prices of the Sunreports Solar Energy Monitoring Systems can be found on the Latitude51 Solar web store.

 

Notes about the Calgary Residential solar energy monitoring system

The Calgary Solar system below is installed on a house in Calgary, Alberta. This system (1 x 30 tube collector) was installed as a simple Preheat system where the solar collector is heating a 40 Gallon Water Tank. This tank then supplies the preheated water to the existing residential hot water heater.

When you look at the data on the calgaryhome during winter you can see from the image below that even on a cloudy day in Feb, the collector is producing over 5000 BTU per hour. However this screen shot shows the BTU per hour drops very fast at about 3pm when the trees by this house shades the collectors. this is why it is important to try and put the collectors where there is no shading.  In summer the shading will probably not matter too much bu in winther it will.

The plumbing layout can clearly be seen in the diagram below, and the temperature of the collector and the water tank are displayed.

 

For live data of this system you will need to click the small image below here.  The data updates every few minutes but you will need to refresh the page to see the data changing.  Sorry we know this is a bit of a pain but thats the way it works!  It also opens up in a LARGE window.

As the sun comes up in the morning, the collector will start heating the water in the tank with free solar energy. You can see the heat the collectors get to throughout the year. Thistank of water has already reached temperatures of over 90 DegC or 197 Deg F.

Even in December this collector was heating the water tank to over 50 Deg C or 113 Deg F when the outside temperature was - 40 Deg C.

During the day the Collectors temperature is nearly always hotter than the tank temperature as the Collector heats up the heat is transferred to the Preheat tank. This way at the end of the day when the family comes home and uses hot water, it is the solar hot water that is used.

To refresh the page and see new data, just reload your page and the image will update (if there have been any changes in the temperatures). The data will update every few minutes or so.

You can compare the collector temperatures with the actual weather in Calgary. Even on cloudy days you will see the collector temperature much hotter than the outside temperature (from the weather network).

This image below is live - just click the page refresh to update the image below. The system updates the temperatures every 3 minutes.

This page is not part of the Sunreports system. It is created by a Resol Solar Controller sending data to a custom drawing showing the system layout.

The temperature sensors on this are in different places to the Sunreports temperature sensors above but it enables us to record a lot of Solar Energy Monitoring information about our solar collectors.