The $30 Water Heater That Runs on SUNLIGHT

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com You have already built this once, by accident, and it burned your hand. A garden hose lying across the yard on a July afternoon. You squeeze the trigger without thinking and what comes out is hot. Properly hot. You let go of it and say something you would not say in front of your mother, and then you stand there while it runs cold and you water the beans and you never think about it again. That hot water was free. Nobody burned anything to make it. And you poured it on the ground. The hose was the whole machine. Black pipe, a little water inside it, and the sun. There is nothing else to it. All anybody has ever done since is make that accident happen on purpose and keep what comes out. My grandfather is the one who pointed it at me, and he enjoyed it a good deal more than I did. I was nine or ten and had done exactly that out by the pump house, and he stood and laughed at me until he was finished. Then he picked the hose up himself, held his hand under it, and said that was the cheapest hot water on the place, and I had just thrown four buckets of it into the dirt because nobody had told me to put a bucket under it. The sun is already heating it. The only question is whether you kept any. What we go through: The whole build: a hundred feet of black poly pipe, a board, and a hose fitting The mistake almost every version of this makes, and why you must never close both ends Where to stand it, why it leans rather than lies flat, and the tree that will shade it by June Why black and why coiled, and why the shape matters as much as the colour How to run it through a day, and why opening the tap at noon starts the afternoon over How hot it really gets, and the burn that happens in seconds rather than minutes Why it must have cold to mix against, every time, with no exceptions for children The number nobody gives you: what a hundred feet of pipe actually holds Why that makes the bare coil a wash and not a shower The barrel in a glazed box, what size to use, and why flat black and not gloss The thermosiphon: how to make it circulate itself with no pump and no power at all Insulating the run and tilting the glass The one use I would put first on a farm, which has nothing to do with washing Warm standing water, why a shower is the riskiest thing on the list, and the two ways to deal with it Why this is wash water and not drinking water How to drain it properly, decided when you build it rather than on the night of the first frost Two things I will say plainly because the cheerful versions of this video do not. The water gets hotter than people expect, and hot water hurts faster than people believe. At a hundred and forty degrees it takes the skin off an adult in seconds, quicker on a child, and a glazed one of these passes that on a clear day without trying. I have seen it presented as a selling point that the first water out will make you jump. That is backwards. That is the hazard, and it is the only genuinely dangerous part of this build. And a hundred feet of half inch pipe holds about one gallon. One gallon is hot water to wash in, a bucket to scrub with, a basin to shave at. It is not a shower, because a shower uses a couple of gallons a minute. If you want a shower you are building the barrel, and the video says so. This is also not new. Clarence Kemp patented a commercial solar water heater in 1891, black tanks in a glass topped box. William Bailey separated the collector from an insulated tank in 1909 so there was still hot water after dark, and those sold in the thousands until cheap gas pushed them off the market. Everything on a roof today is running the same idea. Tell me in the comments what you would put the first one on. And if you are new here, tell me roughly how many clear sunny days you get in a year, because that number decides whether this is a toy where you live or a tool. Next time, the other way with water, into the cold, because keeping a trough and a line from freezing without a heater in them is the other half of this and it comes round in about six weeks. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #OffGrid #SolarWaterHeater #DIY #Homesteading #SelfReliance #BatchHeater #Thermosiphon #OutdoorShower #SolarThermal #OffGridLiving #OldWays #NoPowerBill #Camping #Cabin