DIY Pool Heater - $50 Solar Heater

all right just start out with a shot of the final product here so you can see what it looks like i think of about 400 feet of tubing the roll came in a 500 foot roll and i think i have about 100 foot left the entire cost here was around 50 bucks for the tubing and the boards and this little wrap so not very bad on cost and took me a day or two to build so in the end you'll see i'll do some temperature readings when i get everything built to show you exactly the inflow and the outflow temperature of the project so i hope you enjoy give us a thumbs up like and subscribe we'll see you in the next one so i ripped a 2x4 in half to start out so that my entire box is just an inch and a half tall and i just have a quarter inch plywood underneath so it's all fairly lightweight all right so i've got this little uh 4x8 sheet this is actually just i think three eighths inch plywood or something actually this is a scrap piece i got for free so these i've just ripped in half like you saw uh on the table saw if you don't have a table saw you can always just buy these they sell them uh one and a half inches just like that so i'm just going to kind of build this little frame like this so i'm just going to screw all the ends in and then screw the back to it and then obviously one coil is going to go here and one coil is going to go here so we'll screw all that together on time-lapse all right so you saw us kind of screw that down so we flipped it upside down flipped that over and now i'm just going to lay a bead of glue down and then we'll screw that down on the top and then flip it back over so i'm going to glue it because i actually want it to be fairly air tight just so it can get as much heat as possible in this little box so let's glue it and screw it built and i'll screw together now i'm going to get this tarp paper it's the same stuff that they put on roofs like underneath the shingles like that so i'm going to line the bottom with that black tar paper to have an entire black coating it's super cheap i've got some actually left over when i did my shed build video to build this very shed right here so do this in the shade because this stuff does get hot so we stapled down all of that plastic stuff now the plastic has a black tarp paper towel paper and it gets really hot when you touch that edge in the sun it's boiling hot so hopefully this works really well so now we're going to do our two coils and then we'll put the little plastic on top and give it a test this is the tubing we're going to use it's half inch it's just that irrigation tubing you can buy your hardware store like home depot or lowe's or something it's super thin walled it's half inch i have a 500 foot roll here i think it was 37 bucks for 500 feet so i'm gonna do my two coils i'm going to have both of my contacts going out at the top you'll kind of see how i'm going to hook it together so here i am rolling up the second loop and just kind of using a two by four as bracing okay a little quick update here so you kind of saw me winding that up on time lapse actually had the big roll on my shop stool over there so with an unwind easy it was a little bit tricky to unwind so i had to get a little help i wasn't sure a better way to do that you can kind of see the layout here so i've got again two inlets uh so i'm gonna have a big hose that's gonna anchors is going to go out down into these half inch hoses my pump on my pool pumps out quite a bit of water that's why i'm doing two loops so it'll go in this first loop and you can see i just did a little elbow there that's going to go out warm water into the pool and the second one comes in goes in the second loop warm water out to the pool so if the water is not hot enough what i can do is up on this joint right here i'll just put an elbow t just like i did right there right here and that will have one continuous loop so i'll just come in on this bottom one here it'll do this loop go up here it'll do this whole loop and then it'll just come out hot water on that end so i'll do a couple of tests when i get it in to see how hot it is but that's kind of how i designed this up on purpose so i could actually do one continuous loop if i needed so once i got the coils down i screwed in these little cross pieces just to hold everything down flat like that after a couple of tests i may end up doing another one right here and right there so i'll do kind of an x or a t to hold those down if one's not sufficient but that's pretty much it for that so next i'm going to wrap the entire thing in plastic so the x-rays will come down from the sun and they'll kind of get trapped and bounce around to even heat it up more and we'll kind of do our little first tests so we are here back testing our little water flow so we have it all rigged through you can see i put an elbow on this so i'm sending it into the water through both loops we'll do a little temperature test here in a second all right here's our first temperature test a couple of things you saw me wrap this uh in the saran wrap this because i got the little bag and put over it and i was actually like six inches short so you'd have to buy a little bit bigger bag those bags are only like six dollars so i might do that later date but i ended up just wrapping it with this for now to do a little test also our sun isn't at an ideal angle um you should see we should have this thing kind of tilted like this but for this little test we're gonna leave it on the ground and let's give it a whirl so this has been going now for 20 or so minutes so all the water is sort of stabilized we have this coming in from the hose directly from the hose and it's pumping in through both and out the end there where my sun is so we're going to first test this side so you can see here i'm going to hold this up and we'll watch this so it's going to start to drop a little bit here the temperature outside right now is around i'd probably say it's in the 90s all right 77 it's not changing so let's come over here to the outflow end so it's going through that one we have our elbow right there and then it's going through this one and then here we're filling up this little bucket you can see on the outflow in we'll pop that in there and we'll kind of watch this outflow and it looks like so that's 12 degrees difference is getting heated through that so i ended up buying this hard corrugated plastic because i wanted to do a test on this so i'm just screwing that down here for my final test okay final update here so you can see i have got this thing all mounted up and i tore off that saran wrap because i wanted to try some hard plastic this is the cheapest stuff i could find this clear plastic that's kind of corrugated so i'm just getting a little ridiculous here but you can see i've actually got this thing on hinges underneath so i can just you know i can lower this thing down all the way like that angle i can bring it up flat and i can even take it as an incline for when the sun is over in that direction so i can kind of face this wherever i want towards the sun let's try to break another one so here's the actual main unit that reads these little side ones so it's 79.1 it claims in there right now we'll see how hot it gets in five or ten minutes and my thermometer just quit it says off it got up to 139 so i think when it hit 140 it shut off so i actually don't know how hot it will get in here but at 140 it won't read anymore so here i've got the water going through the heater it's still very hot it's been going through for five minutes but we're at 120 135 130 so 152 it's still climbing so this water coming out is crazy hot scalding hot so it looks like about 152 we're getting so i'm gonna let it run for another 10 or so minutes and i'll give you a reading again okay this is our final test here so i'm going to place the thermometer in and [Music] so that i haven't seen it get below 77 so that is the temperature of the water coming in let's come over here do our last test so i'll pull the outflow so this is the water coming out we'll stick it in our bucket here fill this up and then grab a temperature reading on this so this is just how hot the heater is working so this isn't hot pipes this is just the true test here oops i just turn that off there we go so we are at 84 86. okay last video i promise so i've actually taken my pump i don't know if you can see that i dropped it down into the pool so it's now pumping straight cold water and because it has to pump up and through the cycle it actually runs out a little bit slower i want to show you the difference in temperature just by having the stream a little bit slower you can kind of see the difference there between what it was doing before so i'm going to fill this up whoops i have to cover the camera hard to do i need one extra hand here so i'm going to fill this guy up take one last temperature reading and you can see that just how much difference just turning the water flow down just a little bit will make on the degrees so i wouldn't say it's coming out half as slow but maybe a quarter slower or something like that the water flow probably is than what it was before so i'll fill this entire pitcher up pull it out and we'll do our last little reading here so i'll just kind of pop this right here and let's see what this is okay so we're at it was at 87 before if you remember and you can see it's already two degrees warmer um just from coming out a little bit slower and so i tested it just a second ago and it was actually 91 and jumped two more degrees by coming out a little slower so you can see you get two four degrees um easy just by turning that down a little bit slower and your temperature so i hope you enjoyed it caleb was excited to build this this was a lot of fun doing the water heater we got a little crazy with it but hopefully that makes the pool a little bit warmer and we can go swimming because the girls are ready again okay we'll see ya say bye bye all right thanks for watching if you like this video give us a thumbs up subscribe and share it with all of your friends and if you dislike this video share it with all your enemies

Channel: Do It Wrong Yourself

Views: 699,361

Rating: 4.8595805 out of 5

Keywords: diy, pool, heater

Id: PyE9dJaqDnU

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020