Solar Thermal Systems-gctid52483

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Solar Thermal

   The sun is hot, almost too hot to imagine. Diamonds burn at 1,500°F and the surface of the sun is about 10,000°F. The sun is also very large. If you smashed together Earth and all of the other planets, plus the moons, asteroids, meteors and dust in our entire solar system, the resulting giant lump would represent less than 1/500th of the mass of the sun. There is a truly staggering amount of solar energy available to us from this incredible ball of fire, and most of it comes in the form of heat.

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Solar Cooking
The average american home produces about 500 pounds of CO2 per year - from cooking alone. That’s almost two freight shipping containers full of pure CO2 released to the atmosphere annually. Solar cooking is a viable alternative to using fossil fuels and it is one of the simplest examples of solar thermal technology. Solar ovens can be built from a wide range of available materials and some reach temperatures of 400°F or more.

Solar cookers can cook and bake all types of food, as well as pasteurize water. A similar concept can be used to dehydrate food in a solar food drier and distill water in a solar still.

Solar cooking is a more involved process than cranking up a gas oven, but it is often more rewarding. We will revisit solar cooking in the upcoming Renewable Energy in the Developing World lesson - where its usefulness really becomes apparent.

The same principles used in solar cooking can be used to heat water in a system as simple as a solar swimming pool heater. These consist of black piping run across a sunbaked roof. Cold water passes through the sunheated pipes and flows warm into the pool. It’s such a common-sense process that this has become the most widely installed type of solar thermal system in the U.S. Solar pool heaters are cheap, simple, non-polluting and they work reliably for years without paying for fuel. It’s no wonder propane pool-heating systems are being replaced by solar thermal at a rapid rate.

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