How it is used

Details

Published on Monday, 21 December 2015 12:36

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The solar collector are a set of frames where air runs trough a series of soda cans that together make a sort of painted mat black tubes. This air gets heated by the sun, and then the air is guided trough a tube into the house for heating. The controller is used to control the airfan automatically; While in heating, the fan will only start if the air at the output has become warm enough for heating. The controller decides that if the outgoing temperature is above 25 Degrees Celsius.

The user can visualise, check and control the collector by means of any recent web browser, by just accessing the build in webserver. Therefore any smartphone, PC or tablet can be used to access the controller. There are no special plugins necessary, if you have the IP-address, just type it in and you will see the status.

This is what the main page looks like: you can see if the fan is running (if it spins), and you can see the in an outgoing temperatures at the bottom. The graph in the middle is showing the temperatures on the hour, for the last 24h. The points after the current hour are actually the point on the hours of yesterday.

In the summer the collector can be used in reverse by setting it to 'cooling' mode. Then the controller will start the fan only if the outgoing air is cool enough. Obviously this will be during the night. The effect of cooling is not just by the venting itself, but in the dark, the outgoing temperature is actually around 4 DegC colder then the environment temperature. How exactly it works is hard to explain, but it does. It has to do with the same reason heatsinks are black, and it is mentioned it has to do with 'principle of detailed balance'.

The modus to go for heating or cooling, and to manually control the fan, can be set in the page as show here below (after a username/password has been entered).

Furthermore it is possible to look at some statistics in the statistics page, which looks like this;