Here is my home made heat
exchanger. It consists of four 50 foot rolls of 3/8
soft copper tubing plumbed in parallel. This is
attached to two four port headers. The flow is
reversed on the bottom header so each coil see even
flow. As you can see from the photos I straightened
out the tubing and recoiled it around a 5 gallon
pail. The 4 rolls of tubing and prefabbed ebay
headers all cost less than $200 including all the
fittings. I think this is a fairly economical way
to make a domestic hot water heat exchanger for a
unpressurized tank. With my tank at 130F and water
entering the exchanger at 50F the water comes out
at 118F. This is with a flow rate of 3.5 GPM.
Here you can see how the foam
insulation is scored to allow it be coiled in the
Soft Tank. I used 6 sheets of 1 inch for the sides
and 2 sheets of 2 inch for the top and bottom. The
sides have a bit more insulation than the kit
requires, so the finished volume is around 160
gallon with an R value of 30 for the sides and 24
for the top and bottom. Shown to the left without
the liners yet installed. The tank kit uses two
liners each having 2 layers fusion welded together.
Below is the tank with the liners installed and
filled with water. The solar side of the system is
double pumped though two plate heat exchangers, one
side is tank water the other is the solar
water-antifreeze mix. I went this route because I
already had the heat exchangers and the pump on
hand. I am hoping that this set up will work well.
I will be logging the data from the collector, the
tank top , the tank bottom and the out door temps
and compare them to older data with my 60 gallon
tank. A quick look at recent data shows about 12K
BTU per hour and about 60K total for a days
collection. The daily total was limited by the size
of the storage tank. This where the new tank should
help.