3 ms·

I didn't know they were solar water heating until right now. Barbados has been a cool case study of large scale adoption of solar water heating: https://cdkn.o

• whoisthemachine 3y ago
  I was just on vacation in Greece, and solar water heaters are on every home and building there.
  • tetris11 3y ago
    Everybody and their dog had a solar heater on their house in Cyprus, from 30 years ago. It was cheap deployable tech accessible to literally peasant farmers. I visited Sardinia recently for the first time, and saw the exact same type of houses built there, with the same climate, but not a single solar heater on their roofs. I wondered aloud why, but got no answer. My guess is that an energy company took an interest early on in Sardinia, and Cyprus was thankfully missed for a few decades.
• morkalork 3y ago
  In Canada it's not uncommon too see some homemade looking solar heating setups connected to people's pools. The coiled black tubing on shed roofs is very distinctive.
  • rootusrootus 3y ago
    I'm well below Canada's latitude, and it costs me $250/mo to heat a relatively small swimming pool (about 10,000 gal) ... in the summer. If I keep it warm enough to swim in October, it'll be at least twice that. The capital cost of the heater is practically zero compared to the fuel. I can totally understand janky DIY setups to try and defray that cost.
  • ok_dad 3y ago
    There’s a bunch of YouTube videos showing how to make them. It’s really easy, actually, and you can get like 250-500W of heating from what seems to be a reasonably small device.