DIY Solar Air Heater
This is a pretty neat solution I came across recently while looking for simple & cheap DIY solutions to cut down the heat bill now that the winter is coming. I plan to build one like this within the month so I guess I have to increase my beer consumption!
Let me know if you know of any other similar cheap DIY solutions for "free" heat. I would love to check them out ^_^
So you will build it yourself?
Nice initiative.
Yep, just waiting for a friend who has all the right tools to return from his trip abroad :D
I wonder if you could fill the cans with a substance that would hold heat to help retain some more heat
well the air passes through the cans in order to get heated so that sounds a bit tricky .....
you coule drop some pieces of steel tubing down in the cans so air still passes through but it would create much more surface area and steel tubing holds heat in great. you would effectivly increase you surface heating area by at least 10 fold easily
Well I suck at physics but I think the most important thing is to increase the surface that comes in contact with light. And of course to increase light absorption, e.g. that's why you got to paint em black. I don't think what is inside the cans actually plays much of a role :/
But you also need something that easily convects temperature. Probably why black colored aluminum works best if you have the budget of a homeless person.
I always learned that:
aluminium slow to acquire heat, fast to release.
copper fast to acquire, slow to release.
the amount of surface area is what limits your amount of air you can flow over it. It is like when you check heater output in a car. it will always be hotter on speed setting one than speed setting 4 because you are trying to transfer heat over a certain area and as the airflow increases you can not transfer as much heat from a heater core. Same principle with our race car radiators. we can use the exact same size radiator but we make it a dual pass or even a triple pass radiator to cool the coolnat down more.
If you have more metal in the box it will hold more heat. The black will heat it up but the metal inside the cans will hold the heat and retain it longer. thick tubing is much harder to cool down that a tin can that is very thin
So you would put it out there with the fan off for a bit to build heat in the box then turn the fan on and it would hold temp much better
Now I really want to build one of these and see If I can get it so hot it catches on fire.
Amazing! I want to see yours soon so, start drinking!
Already am :D
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Well now, this is a simple DIY to add to my list. Wonder how many variations are out there. And what the different efficiencies are.