Scorchio!

Bob, having visited Turkey and Spain onemof the things I noticed that they had solar water heaters on the roofs and in gardens.

These solar panels and tank follow the pattern of the Israeli ones, a sloping panel with tubes against a black panel and a header tank piped down to the house, all very free and neat apart from the initial cost.

Edited By Clive Hartland on 23/07/2022 08:41:48

One of the most useful things we could do right now is plant trees along walkways and on any spaces in our cities

Basically create as many tree lined places as possible because trees absorb huge amounts of energy

But councils are cutting inner city trees down because they claim they are too expensive to maintain, and when a tree gets in the way of a building project a council muppet declares that this tree has sponylitis zenomorphis and down it comes, easy peasy

The system will never work properly while you have a bunch of moneygrubbing crooks self declaring themselves as the responsible persons in charge

Its currently at around 39C in the shade outside our house right now (Romania) - not uncommon for the past 4 or 5 years. We use the siesta method to avoid the worst of the heat, and also keep all doors/windows/curtains closed during the day, followed by everything open overnight from late evening - living room is currently at 26C, having heated up from 22 to 26 in 6 hours from 8 o'clock to 2, so reasonably tolerable.

We also have a water heater system similar to that described by Clive Hartland above - this is simply a header tank for 15 concentric glass tubes - its installed on our woodshed roof, with the pipes down the roof - this is connected to one of the indoor boiler heating spirals, and flow assisted by a small pump (about 10W). This provides us with more free hot water than we can use at up to 75C - and has been doing so since around late April (and will do until at least the end of September - after that, it continues to provide "pre-heating' for the electrical or wood-burning heater until maybe early December. Cost of this system was around 150 pounds sterling, and easy to install.

4 Solar panels driving a 5 kW inverter provide most of the electrical power we need during the day. It has a 'pure sinewave' output at 235VAC, so is able to drive electric motors, unlike the 'step waveform inverters', so this takes care of the washing machine/fridges. This has several deep-discharge batteries also attached, which provide electricity overnight.

Result of all this is that our electricity bills are negligible from April to October, and we have halved the consumption of firewood (the only viable heating medium where we live) over what we used before installation of these systems.