Jan mentioned this morning “Darling we haven’t cleaned the air conditioning filters for two years!” Using the small stepladder I removed the six filters from the three air-conditioners before taking them outside to clean. Something must have happened with my brain this morning as I remembered not to clean them under the pergola where Jan had the clean laundry drying.
Moses, they were choked with dust!
One on the left has been cleaned
If this is what the filters look like after two years of intermitted summer use I dread to think what my 70 year old lungs look like!
Back to the pool water heater project. I’ve solved the plumbing problem and the noisy pump. The latter was fixed by replacing the cheap eBay pump with the spare from the boat. I also fitted a tap into the cold inlet on the panels which will enable me to drain them. The boat pump has been temporarily plumbed into the system enabling me to do some testing.
Next I removed the jumper lead from the Thermocouple and wired it (the Thermocouple back into the system before covering the terminals.
The water in the panels wasn’t sufficiently hot to make the electrical connection in the Thermocouple. You may recall I wired the Thermocouple into the photovoltaic solar panel to act as a switch. A combination of hot water and sunlight would activate the switch and power the pump.
In the above photo you can see only the12V battery icon with a voltage of 13.2V.
When the water reached the required temperature the Thermocouple made the connection for the solar panel which then activated the pump.
Might be hard to see but to the bottom left of the screen is the solar panel icon. In the middle is the battery icon and to the right the icon showing the load (pump) is connected. Everything worked fine and the pump pushed cold water up into the panels displacing the hot water (very hot water). When the water temperature dropped the Thermocouple cut out stopping the solar power. Thais is when I realised I had a second problem. The pump kept running drawing power from the tiny battery. If I allowed this to happen then the battery would quickly be flattened and eventually destroyed.
After some thinking I’ve decided to re-wire the Thermocouple. Instead of it switching the photovoltaic panel I’ll have it control the pump. But not today as it’s back to being very hot.
There is yet another issue. The spare pump from the boat was being used as my camper trailer shower pump. Can the cheap eBay water pump be used instead?
I don’t want to spend money on this and rummaged in my “might come in useful box” looking for bits.
Now need to do some testing!
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