Anatomy of a Solar Water Heater – Part I

Hello there! Welcome to the very first blog post of our company, Sun Photonics! Interestingly this is also our first Solar Water Heater project!

Let’s begin from the beginning.

Last week we got a project from an Industrialist from Faridabad city having a few manufacturing plants here. The project is for putting up 2 Nos. of Solar Street Lights and shifting a Solar Water Heater from one of his plant premises to the other.

This blog post is about the first half of the shifting of the Solar Water Heater, i.e. dismantling the Solar Water Heater from the roof of the first building. Re-installing the water heater to the roof of the second building will be done in a few days.
We will keep you posted on installation of the Solar Water Heater and also of the Solar Street Lights as we do them in the coming weeks.

Let’s focus on the dismantling of the water heater.

So this is how it looked like before the dismantling process began:

Solar Water Heater as on the roof before dismantling

Solar Water Heater as on the roof before dismantling

As you can see, it belongs to a company called King Sun. After 3 years of installation and not being used much, the material is completely rusted. While this does not usually happens in so short a time, it appears whoever did the installation 3 years ago didn’t quite do the research very well.

Anyway so today afternoon we started dismantling the water heater, one item after the other.
A solar water heater comprises of three major components: 

• The cylindrical tank where the water comes from (the inlet) and from where we take out water to our tap (the outlet).
• The evacuated glass tubes which does the magic of heating the water using sunlight.
• The steel stand which supports the water heater and which also ensures appropriate angle for the water heater.

The dismantling process began with the removing of the Evacuation Tubes from their place. These are glass tubes and hence caution need to be taken while taking them out. The tubes are taken out one-by-one and are put separately as shown below:

Glass evacuation tubes being removed from the Water Heater

Specialist putting glass tubes at a safe place

Evacuation Tubes

These are 15 tubes which are primarily responsible for heating the water in the tank. Check out this space in a few days to know more about the functioning of a Solar Water Heater.

Next comes the turn of the Cylinder. 

Specialist getting ready for dismantling the Cylinder

The Cylinder just before the pipe wrenching

Top side of the Cylinder after removal from stand

Bottom side of the Cylinder after removal from stand. Note the holes for the tubes.

Note that the Cylinder has holes for fixing the evacuation tubes. These are the holes through which the tubes heat the water in the cylinder.

Finally the removal of the stand from its place.

Specialist removing the stand

Stand lying on the wall after removal

Other part of the stand lying on the ground after removal

Removing the stand was a fairly simple task, mainly opening the nuts and bolts.

After removing the entire system from its place, this is how the roof finally looked like:

Roof after dismantling of Solar Water Heater

What we realized was that the stand was too rusted to be used again for re-installation at the other roof. Hence the process had to be finished in the middle.

A new stand is going to be prepared in a few days, after which the re-installation process will resume.

We will most likely do the re-installation in a few days. As that happens, we will keep you updated of the process of re-installing the solar water heater.

Until then, have a good Sunny time!

Regards,

Team Sun Photonics!