Bending copper tubing solar hot water heat exchanger Detailed Version

hello I'm your host and robots in this video I am going to be showing you how to bend the copper tubing to make a heat exchanger for a water heater like this something that can actually fit down inside of the small holes and allow you to either make the solar electric hybrid whatever or you can do shapes like this something for no lens to focus on this is copper tubing you get at Lowe's or Home Depot it costs about nine twenty dollars for a 25 foot section depends on which one you get it is for the water inside of your refrigerator if you were to just try to bend this around something you will flatten it kink it whatever there's different methods out there where people will fill the with wet sand all kinds of stuff what we're gonna be doing is filling it with water so this is the copper tubing I'm gonna measure it out and cut it with a pipe cutter you don't want to just crimp do like a cut it a bad way because you'll end up with a mess we're gonna notice I have bolt cutters you can use crimping tool appliers whatever but these work really good because they allow you to and you can crimp the tubing it closes it but it doesn't cut through so it creates a seal now that seal might hold you might get lucky but I have this cute pink hot glue gun belongs to my mom I don't really do much hot gluing so anyways this is an electrical device so be careful with the water which I'll show you in a minute but first thing what you want to do is submerge this in water and create a siphon because what that does is that gets all the air out of it because we need this to be completely filled with water so this is my clear basin of water all you do is submerge both ends so that's what you want right there make sure you have a safe and cover both ends with your finger fingers and make sure it's submerged so now we have this the next step is make sure they stay underwater you want to take your crimping tool and go about maybe three-quarters of an inch down and do both sides alright you want to keep it on your water at this point because that is a decent seal but it's not perfect so here's where the hot glue comes in and the shock hazards and you know just make sure you're not like grounded and all that stuff so you want to just kind of lightly take this dump the water out of the end and for some hot glue in that end piece and then do the same for the other side and put it back down and you don't need your hot glue anymore so what this does this gives you your initial seal okay it's not gonna be perfect it's not gonna do any but if you flip it upside down and no water comes out like that you're good to go now what you do is you come in and you put your real crimp right here so this plugs it up and prevents it from if this isn't perfect it prevents it from like squirting out because you're going to be putting water does not compress and since we're using water to turn to act as what's inside well this is going to be under a lot of pressure and it'll actually slightly deform the copper even this process and I'm just gonna grab it by the end that way I know there's hot glue in there and I'm gonna pinch it so now what we have is this but there's hot glue stuffed in there so any pressure the hot glue is gonna act as a block and its really quick I've seen people do it with solder solder whatever you want to call it that works but this is a little bit easier than screwing with all that so we should have a nice seal and if you think you might have missed it go ahead and give it another extra crimp just fish-safe and whatever you do don't be overly aggressive with this because you can actually tear it right there all right so we should have so if you flip it and no water drips out you want to get the water off of it but if no water drips out then you know you're good to go and you'll feel that this is colder and it also becomes more difficult to bend so you're going to figure out about halfway and at this point you can start to straighten this out and if you ever see water dripping out of the ends of these then that means that you messed up so you need to just cut it shorter and repeat the first step that's why I said that you probably when I go with a little bit longer of a piece because worst case scenario is you waste few cents of copper but you gradually just bend this I'm just gonna use something around this as a broken ratchet so we've got this and then you want to straighten these back out again we're gonna bend this all the way keep in mind I'm gonna show you how to turn this on a pipe and how well it works but this is a much harder thing to do because even with the water in there you can end up with a mess and at this point when it's the size that I know is gonna fit inside the tank go ahead and start to take these and wrap them now it gets very difficult to turn this as you start to stretch the copper because the water's not compressing in there this gives you a little good strength so that way there's less of a chance that you screw this up and I'm gonna put this in there one more time and just bend it across there like that okay so we've got that set up and we're gonna test it to see if it fits in the tank if you did it right it should just drop right in there now make sure you don't drop it in and lose it because that would suck but see this one hits the bottom of the tank so now what we're gonna do now that we have that let's go ahead and just make sure these are nice nice and together the more copper tubing you have in there in the more surface area so you could twist this really nice if you want but this is pretty much all you need so I bent that one back and I'm just using the pipe cutting tool the first one came off and the fact that no water comes out right now is good that means that it's sealed inside once I cut this the water should just flow right out there you go now you see the water flowing out so if I if I blow on this one in the water comes out so that means that that water kept this from kinking there and it's not damaged so this is good this would be a good element at this point you want to be careful doing any bending because now you can really damage the pipe know that it are the tubing now that it doesn't have the safety of the water in there but now what we're gonna do is put one of these on there the next step would be to put one of these on here this is 3/4 inch CPVC it's not regular PVC it's designed for high temperatures for your hot water and this is a pipe threaded piece that slips on there and then on the end is an end cap that I drilled two holes in let this stick set up so this part is where your hot exchange fluid it could be water it could be whatever goes in and out and transfers the heat through this through the tanks the tub tank of water is here I'm going to show you over on this so let's pretend this is the inside of your water tank right here this would sit inside the water of course it would be all the way up here and this would seal off to the top of the tank so your house water pressure is here and this goes in there now this tube your exchange liquid water or whatever you decide to use goes through here and it does not drip into your water it just transfers the heat outward so this is sealed however you can see that those late because because these holes they are I think they're 5/16 of an inch but they're just a little bit bigger to get the pipe through so you've got that going on so you want to fill this end right here with like get some silicone up in there and let it cure you want to make sure you get it all the way up in there if you do the silicone what you want to do is as you add it to this input like a shop vac vacuum hose on this end like wrap these two around and seal it here that way the suction goes through there even though they're tiny little holes and you'll make sure that you get the silicone you actually want to see it starts squeezing out this in I'm using a UV cure resin that I've used it's kind of a fiberglass resin in previous videos and I have a little m EK which I'm not gonna put in the syringe now because it would harden the whole thing in a week or whatever but just to make sure that in case light doesn't get down there we can get that process going I'm gonna do it two ways I'm gonna put a few drops down there just like this and then as I work I'm gonna add it too so you just want to go real slow with this so that way you don't create a big air bubble now you don't want to get your silicone and stuff on the threads because then you've basically rendered this used useless you'll never be able to get it to screw in there so that should be good a couple things to keep in mind with the UV cure resins is that you do want to cure it in sunlight or a UV lamp but you don't want to cure it in sunlight what do I mean by that well you notice this is in the shade so as the process starts you want this - you can see it's dripping out through the holes which is good that's what we wanted that means that it's all the way down in there but what you don't want to do is put this right out in direct sunlight because the heat generated from the curing process will create large bubbles and that'll screw you up so you put it in the shade it takes about 10-15 minutes here or even 20 we're gonna do other things let it do its thing and then when you're sure it's kind of hardened then you move it out to the Sun for like an hour and that ensures that it's completely done because this doesn't have surface area to the light like it might get blocked in there that's why I added some of the Mak which will add like maybe cure it in 30 minutes or so if you're looking for a particular shape that's larger there's lots of options out there that are already done on the internet you can find them on eBay people do them for different things this one it has this shape here this goes into the vacuum tubes the solar tubes this goes inside of one comes out the other inside of one and comes out the other and this was already done so our curve is a lot tighter than this this would never fit in there you have to really go more aggressive with it you just want to make sure you have good flow through there and you're good what I have over here this is really interesting I think I paid fifty or sixty bucks for it this is stainless steel tubing I believe it's similar to brake line this is too cool wart or for homemade beer oh there's like something was gonna wait I'm not gonna show you this and tell these guys get out of there somebody made a nest thing at me anyways this is a chiller to say you don't so you can drop the temperature right away you run water through there to a water hose that's got water hose fittings this is an awesome heat exchanger in a perfect world you could just drop this in there but then you'd have a big-ass hole in your tank I put a clamp here to hold it in place what I found works really good is you get the area that you don't want curved use some electric tape so once you have it about like that you could clamp it to if you happen to have a really big clamp my experience with this is when it's full of water it actually takes a lot of force to do this so I'm just gonna slowly go try to do this as nicely as I can when it's full of water like this it doesn't pick anything like it normally does and you notice no water is dripping out if you have water dripping out that means that you're you screwed up so you just cut your electric tape off with a carpet knife I went ahead and then it back the other way look at that that's pretty good that's the second time that I've done it and this is still completely full of water so now we can we've got something that we can run our hose through in both directions or this can sit down inside us something we're gonna give you a close-up of it so that's what I just made and you can see that there's no water dripping out so you just the hot glue acts as a plug and enables you to do this look how pretty that is you try and do that without water and you can have a mess or if you use one of those pipe bending to bending things forget about it best way to do it fill it with water plug them with hot glue takes no time to setup you just need a preferably pink hot glue gun just kidding but it worked great now that you know how to create this the next video I am gonna be explaining water heaters the heating elements coming up with a way to show you how to convert it to a solar electric or just solar all by itself and also go over some options for hurricane preps there's some ways to heat water that you never even thought of this is the easy way to bend copper under whose sandal thank you for watching and enjoy our videos

Channel: GREENPOWERSCIENCE

Views: 657,802

Keywords: greenpowerscience, solar thermal, heat exchanger, copper tubing, bending copper tubing, fresnel lens, parabolic mirror, hot water, solar hot water, solar water tank, DIY, Solar Hot Water Heater, solar power, solar

Id: UV6EVAeeovQ

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2019