Hi everone, I wanted to include some articles about a few of my hobbies and pictures from them. I've actually published a few articles on my website about these projects, and so I figured I'd provide some details on them here at steemit as well.

HowTo and DIY Articles

One of the great things of the internet and I hope to see more of on steemit, is how to articles and do it yourself (DIY) articles. I do a lot of my own building projects and since there are a lot of people interested in renewable energy and solar online, I figured this might interest people to do something themselves that costs very little, is easy to build and fun to see the free heat you can get from the sun!

Introducing the DIY Pop Can Heater

So if you are wondering from that picture if those are pop cans in the heater, then yes, you would be right. This heater can be made from old pop and beer cans, some basic plywood/plastic panels and or insulation panels.

So, to build this, there are many ways, but the basic operation works by:

1. Air flow comes in at the back at the bottom of the box
2. The air flows upward through and past all the cans heating up because the cans get super hot in the sun
3. The air exits nice and hot at the top of the heater
4. A 12 volt computer fan helps to force the air through the heater and it gets much air flow, and much more heat exchange.

So, to build this, you will need to:

• collect enough pop / beer cans to line a box entirely with the cans
• cut the top & bottoms of the cans to allow air flow through them
• glue the cans end to end with high temp silicon
• build a simple box to hold the cans out of plywood or signboard
• make extra room in your box at the top and bottom where you won't put any cans, so it works as an air manifold to easily allow air to spread out to / from all the rows of cans.
• get a piece of glass (tempered) to handle the heat and cover the front of the ox and seal the air flow through the box

So, this is the plywood box I built, from the back. You can see the hole at the top of the image (which is actually the bottom of the box), which is the air intake. I left this open, but I should have put a screen over it to keep bugs out, since I ended up getting a lot of spider webs built inside the lower area of the box. At the top of the box, you can see the rounded exhaust hole, which I put my 12V computer fans over and screwed them in place.

Here you can see how I've torn out the tops and buttons of the cans to allow air to flow through. I spray painted these with a high heat automotive paint, because unless you use high heat paint, it will quickly chip off in the sun when they get hot. And they do GET HOT!

The final things you need will be a computer fan and a 12V power supply so that you can hook it up to either a small solar panel or an outlet to move the air through the heater. I used a couple of small ones and they were powered from a small 12V supply I got on ebay ($9), as well as an inline snap disc from ebay ($2) that activates at 30°C. This enables the fans to automatically switch on when the heater reaches a temperature above 30°C.

To finish it off, I used some furnace pipes and duck tape to connect it up through a hole I cut in a wood insert, which I was able to slide in place in the window of our barn, where my heater is hooked up.

Results

Overall, this technique works extremely well and is very affordable if you are willing to build it yourself. I've since built 2 more large panels for heating my barn and house.

This heater is just under 1 square meter, and the sun's heating power is about 1000W per meter squared. So, this is about a 800W sized heater. If you build an insulated box and it is sealed well, you can get 80% efficiency out of a solar heater, and so I estimate this heater was close to 600W of output. This unit would operate continuously for 5 hours on a sunny day, and where I live, we get over 150 days of sunshine in the cold months that I use this.

So, as an estimate, 600W for 5 hours for 150 days, is around 450KWh of power per year, which at $0.12/KWh which can save $54 of what is otherwise heated by electric heater.

If you'd like to read a bit more on how I built this, I have a previous article I wrote about building a DIY solar air heater which might give a bit more details about building one. You can also find many videos on youtube for other solar air heaters.