Things That Go Bang! in the Night

Our solar hot water system has been out of commision for a while now. It had been doing just great – until one cold night this past winter (-32C plus a nasty wind) we heard a loud bang: the system had frozen and burst, despite the glycol in it (a biodegradable type of anti-freeze).

Of course we had to wait repairing it until the frost was gone (which took well into June this year!), and then we just got too busy to actually get to it. But yesterday we finally got up on the ladders, took the solar tubes off and temporarily stored them (picture below) and took the manifold down for a closer look. Frank Ilczyszyn (below, right), who designed and installed our entire solar and wind system, was once again our go-to guy to help out with this 2-person job.

Fortunately the damage wasn’t all too bad, we should be able to repair it later this week. I'm looking forward to get the system up and running again, it does a great job at producing hot water from the sun, even on overcast days. Last summer we used solar hot water exclusively, it was so efficient we could simply turn our conventional water heater off. I got quite a kick out of that. I'm telling ya, nothing beats a steaming hot solar shower in the morning!