Solar Water Heater

A 3 square metre evacuated tube solar hot water system mounted on a roof with 20deg inclination and South orientation.
  solar, water, resol, cambridge, uk
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MATLAB Analysis MATLAB Visualization

Current Temperature (degC)
Collector and Store Temp
Water Heater Visualisation
Field 2 Chart
Field 5 Chart
Field 1 Chart
Field 3 Chart
Channel Location
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junk151516 over 8 years ago
HI, how do you do the image of water heater visualisation?
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chrishayhurst over 8 years ago
The image is a MATLAB visualisation.
First I pull the data from this channel and from several websites that provide today's weather and sun orientation.
I then construct the image using MATLAB line and patch commands and allocate a colour to each of those shapes depending on their temperature using a colormap
An example of one of the drawing commands is:
line(Pipe1(:,1),Pipe1(:,2), 'Color',PipeColor,'LineWidth',5);
Where
Pipe1 is a list of coordinates of the pipe
PipeColor is a [1 3] vector describing the color of that piece dependent on its temperature
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kiks01 over 8 years ago
Hi,
Would you please comment on how do calculate sunshine % and efficiency % on a visualization chart?
I'm also interested whether evacuated tube solar collector does any good during winter.
Thank you.
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chrishayhurst over 8 years ago
Efficiency is calculated in MATLAB by working out the angle between the solar array and the sun as it tracks across the sky. If the sun is exactly normal to the array then it is 100%.
Sunshine % is data gathered by MATLAB from another website (a weather station in the same city as the solar array). They publish the number of seconds of unobscured sunshine and I am able to regularly check that to get an hourly sunshine %
These data are then added to the MATLAB visualisation using the text() command.
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chrishayhurst over 8 years ago
Evacuated solar tubes do work quite well in winter. My system raises the temperature of the 210 litres of water in the tank by more than 10 deg even in the middle of winter. From April to October the solar system provides all the hot water.
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q2pilot over 5 years ago
Really good job on your system. I have a hot water system on a Solar Hot tub... I got to get monitoring it! I have a PV system that is currently monitored you may like to see...
https://thingspeak.com/channels/34247
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cjstapels 7 months ago
Nice work, I like your use of gages too.
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