Bryan Hufford asked:


A few keyboard entries applied to your computer and the internet will hastily return an abundance of instructions on building your own solar water heater. There is certainly no lack of information pertaining to the subject.

One of the points that most people fail to comprehend is the value that is placed upon solar water for other then home use. Solar water heaters are excellent appliances when you plan a future camping trip to the wilds. You would not need to fabricate a huge stationary unit, but merely a small portable one where you can effortlessly transport it with you when you depart your campgrounds.

A small unit of this nature could be constructed in a matter of a few hours and with a bare minimum of parts. Although these particular home made water heaters would not be as efficient as their commercial counterparts, they are inexpensive to construct and they will do the task that you need them to do.

An idea that I personally have toyed around with is to construct a small portable heater on a set of wheels, complete with a handle to push or pull the unit. This, in my opinion, would make it much easier to transport it from one location to another. An alternative concept which I was considering is to rest the unit within a shopping cart configuration. All of these ideas would of course require flexible tubing to be used for connecting the inlet and outlet water supplies.

With a little imagination, you would be pleasantly surprised at what you can come up with in the way of beneficial solar water heaters. If you are looking to build your own hot solar water heater, just go ahead and have loads of fun doing it.

Chad Fisher asked:


These days, fuel costs are soaring, and people are worried about the environment. The old-fashion water heaters have the problem of having to heat and keep hot a large amount of water. Over time, that eats up a lot of energy, and that means raising your electric or gas bill. That is where electric tankless water heaters come in. They are also known as demand water heaters or instantaneous water heaters; they only provide hot water when it is needed. As a result, they use much less energy, which means saving you money, and they are much smaller than a conventional water heater.

Tankless water heaters are tankless because they heat the water each time you turn on the hot water tap. Thus they have no need of a storage tank, and do not lose heat. When you turn on the hot water, water flows into the unit, and is heated – either by an electric heater, or a gas one. Usually, the gas tankless water heaters produce hot water at a slightly higher rate then electric ones, but the latter has the virtue of versatility; you can put a small one in just about any room of your house. So, if you want to put a small tankless water heater in your kitchen – so you can get that single cup of coffee you need to start the day, you can install it right under a kitchen cabinet.

When looking to buy a tankless water heater, the type of fuel is the first thing you want to consider; electric or gas. When it comes to an electric model, you need to be aware of its voltage and amperage; and then check with an electrician to be sure your home can handle it. With a gas tankless water heater, you need to be sure you have the right type of gas – natural gas or propane, available before installing the unit. Also, the gas-types need to be vented, so keep that in mind when deciding where to install the unit.

Next, look at where you want to put the tankless water heaters in your home, and what sort of demand they are going to handle. A small unit under a kitchen cabinet can be fine for washing dishes, filling a cooking pot, or making coffee or tea. Now, if you want to heat all the water for your bathroom, that is going to require a still larger unit. If you are going to be servicing an entire home, apartment or condo, you will need a bigger heater. Normally, you figure out the size of the tankless water heater by counting up the number of fixtures in the room / house that will need hot water. Check with a plumber to get the gallons per minute for each fixture, and then they can help you calculate the total hot water demand.

Finally, you need to look at the application for your tankless water heater; that is, what does it need to do? Is it a Single Point Application – it provides hot water for just one fixture? Or, maybe you have a room that is very far from the main water heater, and the water tends to get pretty cold by the time it gets there. Well, then you can install a tankless water heater to serve as a booster. Of course, there is also the whole house type, which is rather self-explanatory.

Robin Green asked:


We’ve had some very frigid days in the northeastern US and Canada the last few weeks. Those of us who have a crawl space underneath part of our home have felt plenty of chilly floors underfoot and cold air on our ankles.

You may think that putting a heater in your crawl space will leave you with warmer feet. But in fact sealing and insulating your crawl space will not only address your indoor discomfort with cold, drafty floors, it will also avoid problems such as mold and rot in the crawl space itself, and will improve the health of your home overall.

For starters, let’s clear up a common mistake about the air flows in a crawl space. For many years, homeowners, homebuilders, and building inspectors have believed that a crawl space needs exterior venting on opposite walls, so that air can flow from one vent to the other, drawing out any extra dampness from the enclosed space. But the most recent studies show that ventilating a crawl space creates a very different result, known as the stack effect.

In a nutshell, with a good supply of outside air coming from your crawl space, all you need is a few cracks or hair’s width openings between the crawl space and the living areas, and a few drafts at the top of the house, such as old windows or a poorly sealed attic hatch, and your house starts acting like a giant chimney stack. Hot air rises, so the heated air inside your house works its way out the top openings, pulling cold air up from the crawl space.

The result is that the humidity and cold (and mold spores and dust) from the crawl space get drawn into your home, raising your heating costs and endangering your well-being. Ironically, the better you ventilate your crawl space, the more heat gets drawn out of your home through upstairs cracks.

Even in warmer months, when there is no stack effect from a crawl space, ventilating both ends of the crawl space doesn’t actually do much for airflow or humidity. There is no effect of rising heat to make the air flow through the vents, if they are both at the same level. And this approach basicaly amounts to treating the symptoms – poorly at that – instead of curing the disease. The disease, in this case, is excessive dampness and air entering the crawl space, and excess heat transfer during colder times of year between the crawl space and the outdoors.

You may find that your builder scoffs at the idea of insulating and sealing a crawl space. It defies conventional wisdom – and it also contravenes many local building codes that were developed from that conventional wisdom. But you’ll improve your indoor air quality, cut heat loss, and resolve any problems with humidity, mold, or rotting wood down below, if you set this out-of-date belief aside and do what recent research shows is most effective.

To properly seal and insulate your crawl space, start by removing any sharp objects such as old nails, glass shards, or sharp stones from the crawl space floor, so that you don’t hurt your hands or knees as you work (it is a “crawl space” after all). Also, you’ll be placing a plastic liner on the floor and you don’t want any sharp objects to push through the barrier and cut it as you are installing it.

Buy a liner made specifically for the task – or look for a suitable, thick polyethylene plastic. Not the 6 mil typically used for a vapor barrier – you need to go to 15 or 20 mil thickness if you want a liner that will last. The liner should be large enough to cover the whole floor along with the walls – preferably without your having to cut extra pieces for the walls. The best way to compute the size is to add twice the wall height to both the width and length of the floor, and then add 10% extra to account for the slope of the floor. So if you have 2 foot walls around the crawl space and a 15 x 20 foot space, you’ll need a sheet 21 by 29 feet. It’s better to buy a bit too much liner than to find yourself having to cut and tape on small pieces when you find out you didn’t buy enough to begin with!

Close off any ventilation openings, and for crawl space windows, either replace them with energy efficient ones, or at least ensure that they are not cracked or drafty. You may want to cut out rectangular sections of foam insulation to close off the window areas, as this will add an extra level of insulation to windows as well as cut down on drafts. Also check that any doors to the outside are also well weatherstripped.

If part or all of the walls are wood framed, place batt insulation against the wall between the studs; if you have masonry walls, use foam board. Be sure that any large gaps in the walls are patched first – any place where you can see outdoor light shining in from the outside.

Lay the liner over the crawl space floor, and up the walls. Trim the excess pieces off where the wall corners meet. Staple the vapor barrier to the studs, and seal all staple holes and any cuts or breaks in the poly with mastic tape.

Don’t do just part of this job. If you seal the ventilation without adding the vapor barrier, or put in the liner without insulating, you will run into trouble later on. And do it all within a week or two – don’t make this one of those projects thattakes months or years.

Once you have properly sealed and insulated your crawl space, you will find your home much more comfortable in winter. Your floors will be warmer, you’ll have fewer drafts, and your home will be safe from the health effects of crawl space mold and mildew. In fact, so will the crawl space itself.

And remember the notion we started with, that a crawl space heater might solve the problem of cold on your floors during this chilly winter? Well, if you follow the guidance above, you won’t need such a heater. We sealed the crawl space below our breakfast nook a while back, and the breakfast nook became so much more comfortable, we were able to disconnect the baseboard heaters that had been installed in the kitchen extension when it was built.