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In this video I want to show you what I call the big gun solar heating solution
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and that's evacuated tube collectors. It gets its name from these individual
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tubes here and they're all connected by a manifold at the bottom of the
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installation and up at the top as well. Now I'm gonna show you how this works
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but just for now realize that a collector like this even on the coldest
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winter day where I live which could be minus 20 or minus 30 degrees can
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generate hot water that's anywhere from 140, 150 even 180 degrees Fahrenheit and
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the way it does this is with clever use of a vacuum. Now I'm going to start to
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draw a cutaway view of one of those tubes that I pointed out. So I don't have
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the manifold at the ends I'm just imagining that the ends are cut off
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The outside of each tube is clear glass and the inside the inner tube that the tube
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that runs inside the outer glass is coated. It's coated with something that
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has a high absorbency. When the Sun shines on the tubes it goes right
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through the outer glass and it touches the inner glass which is where some
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liquid passes through. This liquid can be water or it can be an antifreeze solution
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and it's cold when it goes in and it's hot when it comes out. The interesting
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feature of this evacuated tube is that the space between the outer glass tube
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and the inner glass tube is a vacuum. This creates a very high level of
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insulation so while the inner tube is collecting solar energy and it can
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easily get to be from 140 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit even on a cold day as I said
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the vacuum prevents all that heat from being lost or most of it. So just to
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recap evacuated tube collectors are really made of two tubes. There's an
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inner tube that's coated for maximum solar absorbency and an outer tube which
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is clear and the space between the two tubes is a vacuum for maximum insulation
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qualities and a liquid water or some kind of antifreeze solution circulates
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is circulated through the inner tube picking up heat as it goes and then
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going to an insulated storage tank from which you can use it for space heating
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So that's the Big Gun solar heating solution in a nutshell
