Solar Water Heater

[trawler]

Does any of the members know where to buy and have installed a solar water heater.I tried the company near the Prison but I needed two other contractors to do the job as well as them,so am looking for a one stop shop if possible.Grateful for any help/info.cheers

[mobile69]

Does any of the members know where to buy and have installed a solar water heater.I tried the company near the Prison but I needed two other contractors to do the job as well as them,so am looking for a one stop shop if possible.Grateful for any help/info.cheers

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There's a place on Hangdong rd. Heading south from airport plaza, on left side, not far along the road. Lot's of water tanks etc outside. Speaks good English. I noticed he had some systems on display.

[sabaijai]

The glass-tube-based solar water heaters made in China, available relatively cheaply in Thailand, are incredibly efficient.

[chownah]

The glass-tube-based solar water heaters made in China, available relatively cheaply in Thailand, are incredibly efficient.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Can you tell us a bit more about this type of solar water heater? Are the glass tubes filled with water, or what?

[tango]

The glass-tube-based solar water heaters made in China, available relatively cheaply in Thailand, are incredibly efficient.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Can you tell us a bit more about this type of solar water heater? Are the glass tubes filled with water, or what?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There is a new shop between Lotus(near Lanna Hosp) and the Chotana intersection selling these Chinese-made solar water heaters for about 39,000 Baht. The shop is amongst the many newly-built shophouses across from Lanna Hospital. Drive slowly as the vehicles parked in front of the shops obstruct your view. Head west from Lotus toward the Chotana intersection on the side road to the main Super Highway. Stay off the 'Super'. The product is half the price of comparable sytems now marketed in Thailand. I am convinced this is the solution to my heating neeeds for a new house I will begin building in the new year. As I will have 5-6 bathrooms and hopefully a pool ( gotta go see Ajarn's masterpiece one day, if he'd invite me..hint hint Ajarn.) the price is nearly equivalent to what I'd have to pay for quality, wall-mounted shower heaters. They also sell a heat-proof, white, poly water-pipe. They do get a little carried away demonstrating with a hammer, just how shock-resistant the glass panel is. Best to check this out yourselves, guys. Chinese-built products have come a long way.Cheers, Tango

[meadish_sweetball]

Wish I'd known/thought about this before I bought my 10.000 W heater a week ago.

[chownah]

The glass-tube-based solar water heaters made in China, available relatively cheaply in Thailand, are incredibly efficient.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Can you tell us a bit more about this type of solar water heater? Are the glass tubes filled with water, or what?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There is a new shop between Lotus(near Lanna Hosp) and the Chotana intersection selling these Chinese-made solar water heaters for about 39,000 Baht. The shop is amongst the many newly-built shophouses across from Lanna Hospital. Drive slowly as the vehicles parked in front of the shops obstruct your view. Head west from Lotus toward the Chotana intersection on the side road to the main Super Highway. Stay off the 'Super'. The product is half the price of comparable sytems now marketed in Thailand. I am convinced this is the solution to my heating neeeds for a new house I will begin building in the new year. As I will have 5-6 bathrooms and hopefully a pool ( gotta go see Ajarn's masterpiece one day, if he'd invite me..hint hint Ajarn.) the price is nearly equivalent to what I'd have to pay for quality, wall-mounted shower heaters. They also sell a heat-proof, white, poly water-pipe. They do get a little carried away demonstrating with a hammer, just how shock-resistant the glass panel is. Best to check this out yourselves, guys. Chinese-built products have come a long way.Cheers, Tango

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So, do these have glass tubes?

[Rinrada]

There is a place which looks a bit experimential situated on the left hand side on The San Kampaeng road just after the college, near Mae-on and before the new Highlands Golf Club.

I keep meaning to pop in and have a look but never have enough time.

Looks interesting

[tango]

The glass-tube-based solar water heaters made in China, available relatively cheaply in Thailand, are incredibly efficient.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Can you tell us a bit more about this type of solar water heater? Are the glass tubes filled with water, or what?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There is a new shop between Lotus(near Lanna Hosp) and the Chotana intersection selling these Chinese-made solar water heaters for about 39,000 Baht. The shop is amongst the many newly-built shophouses across from Lanna Hospital. Drive slowly as the vehicles parked in front of the shops obstruct your view. Head west from Lotus toward the Chotana intersection on the side road to the main Super Highway. Stay off the 'Super'. The product is half the price of comparable sytems now marketed in Thailand. I am convinced this is the solution to my heating neeeds for a new house I will begin building in the new year. As I will have 5-6 bathrooms and hopefully a pool ( gotta go see Ajarn's masterpiece one day, if he'd invite me..hint hint Ajarn.) the price is nearly equivalent to what I'd have to pay for quality, wall-mounted shower heaters. They also sell a heat-proof, white, poly water-pipe. They do get a little carried away demonstrating with a hammer, just how shock-resistant the glass panel is. Best to check this out yourselves, guys. Chinese-built products have come a long way.Cheers, Tango

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So, do these have glass tubes?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Just checked yesterday. No,no glass tubes; but several flat ribbons of black poly-whatever enclosed under unbrakable glass. Price is 38K including installation

[sabaijai]

The ones I meant have glass-lined collection tubes and a stainless steel tank, average cost around 6000-8000B. (I can't imagine a solar water heater costing 38,000B!)

Here are descriptions of a couple of fairly typical systems:

glass-evacuated solar water heater

glass solar tubes

Very compact, easy to install and will heat water hot enough to boil an egg very quickly, in full sun. In partial sun they are still amazing. This type of water heater is used all over China and is widespread in northern Laos as well.

Glass is the choice collector because of its superior heat-transfering properties and total corrosion resistance.

I'm sure someone in Chiang Mai must carry them but I haven't checked personally. I also don't own one, but I have a Canadian friend in Laos who distributes solar water heaters there, and he says the best and most cost-effective units are the glass-tube units from mainland China.

[Soph]

or you could make one - my Dad had homemade solar water heater panels all around the house and in the garden for as long back as I remember - he could possibly have even invented them without knowing about it!

[seeker108]

The ones I meant have glass-lined collection tubes and a stainless steel tank, average cost around 6000-8000B. (I can't imagine a solar water heater costing 38,000B!).

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

This is just the information that I have been waiting to hear for years. I was hoping that China or someone was going to come out with an affordable version. Thermomax Ltd, out of England were pioneers in this vacuum glass (quite similar to vacuum tubes for the long fluorescent lights), solar hot water technology.

http://www.thermomax-group.com/PRODUCTS/SOLAR/productsS.htm

And, sabaijai, if you think 38,000 baht is pricey, try 160,000 B for a similar unit installed in US or UK or EU.

Wow, 6,000 to 8,000! TIT on the positive side again. I hope someone here finds out if these are yet available in CNX or who is the main supplier for these Chinese units in Thailand. Heck, if no one else is doing it, I'll open the first shop in CNX myself!

Though hard to believe, from what sabaijai says, it seems that these Chinese units match the capability of the Thermomax units. Thermomax is very well known for being able to produce heat even on cloudy days. This is due to the glass tubes letting in maximum radiation and the vacuum keeping the heat from escaping, once in.

Thanks sabaijai for this info and thanks trawler for starting this thread.

meadish, any chance you can still return your water heater and get some kind of refund? This sounds too fabulous to pass up, especially with all energy costs on the rise.

[seeker108]

Has anyone tracked down these Chinese solar hot water heaters yet?

[babar33]

Has anyone tracked down these Chinese solar hot water heaters yet?

Hi everyone

New on this forum I read with interest all the post regarding this matter. I am also interested to add a solar water heater in our home, just bought.

I have had a quote from the following company: http://www.solarenergyasia.com

They answer me as follow: "This system can be roof or floor mounted and comes with a stand, the system is a 180 ltr tank and will cost 50,000 baht plus delivery and installation."

About this: The ones I meant have glass-lined collection tubes and a stainless steel tank, average cost around 6000-8000B.

It seems to be quite unrealistic ! I will be happy to have more information

cheers

Babar33...the wisdom

DAVID_stand_alone__2_.doc

[sabaijai]

I know someone who used to distribute the inexpensive Chinese systems in Laos. He doesn't anymore but he should be able to point you in the right direction. Send me a PM containing your email address if you'd like to contact him, and I'll forward it to him. Last time I checked they could be purchased in Laos, at least, for around 6000-8000B. That was 1-2 years ago, so it's possible the price has increased.

[p1p]

If anybody contacts Sabaijai's friend, please could you post the results of your enquiries here. Save bothering them with too many emails.

[sabaijai]

I received this email reply on the subject of inexpensive Chinese solar water heaters:

Hi,

I don't know what the deal with buying this water heaters in Thailand is. Many people have looked. You must be able to order them from the Chinese traders in Chaing Saen. I have helped Lisu Lodge purchase them from a Lao company and they worked out the customs issues themselves. The company is called Sunlabob (www.sunlabob.com). Andy Schroeder is the owner.

We can buy them for around $120 in China and a little more if we buy them here in Luang Namtha.

Hope that this helps.

Edited January 19, 2006 by meadish_sweetball

[mobile69]

Got this info from Sunlabob:

Yes we are deliver solar water heaters also to Northern Thailand.... We will

send the goods with a transportation company... Prices: 160L = 300USD, 200L

=360USD , 240L = 420USD.

Delivery time 2 days...

[jaideeguy]

Looks like the price in China [previously quoted at $120] has jumped a bit, but maybe not when you factor in shipping, customs and profit. I'm still interested and maybe can round up a few other friends and bring the price down more. but will they install and guarantee??? PM me if you want to discuss details.

thanks for your efforts.

jd

[seeker108]

Hi all,

I finally arrived back in CM, but have been busy getting settled in (Anyone have a decent but very inexpensive diesel truck or car they want to sell? I want to do a conversion on it to run on used cooking oil).

Anyway, I recently emailed Andy and told him I was interested in setting up a distributorship/dealership here and asked him for wholesale prices. Hopefully this will help to bring down the final cost here because of wholesale price to me and bulk shipping. I will train someone locally to do the installation here in CM. If it does not work out well through Andy then I will try another way of getting them. Hope this helps, though it may take me several weeks to get this all worked out.

Seeker

[jaideeguy]

mobil69,

had a hard time PM-ing you, so i have to make this public, but hopefully something good will come out of it.....

thanks mob, i and a few friends would be extremely interested, if the price is right and some kind of warantee and hopefully instalation is available. i could do it myself, but would prefer to have the vendors do it so as not to cause any problems in the future re the warantee.

please keep me posted....

jd

[sabaijai]

Looks like the price in China [previously quoted at $120] has jumped a bit

$120 is the current price in China, and they're available in Luang Nam Tha for a little more, which suggests they're probably available in other northern Lao towns like Luang Prabang or Huay Xai. Of course buying a unit in Laos or China and bringing it back into Thailand means you'd risk getting taxed.

Might be worth asking around in Tachileik, opposite Mae Sai. Lots of chinese goods there, and the Thais don't ever seem to tax anything you bring across.

Be great to have them available locally though, so I wish seeker108 the best of luck in his mission. I once bought a solar panel (to power my laptop when in the boonies) from Andy - he's easy to deal with.

[mobile69]

According to Sunlabob, "Import of RE material is tax free in Thailand".

They will install, if travel expences are paid. I wouldn't have thought installation was too difficult, especially if your house is in the building stage, like mine. Warranty is 5yrs, but of course I'm in Thailand, they're in Laos.

I've heard that the drawback with some of these systems is that as you draw hot water out, cold water replaces it immediately, thus reducing the temperature of that in the tank. If the family showers in the evening, how much hot water is there in the morning. A friend has a "vented" system, where you can control the inflow of cold water, maintaining the overnight temperature of the hot water. Mind you, he paid a lot more for his system.

If they're for sale cheaply in Laos, you'd think they'd be for sale in Nong Khai?

Edited January 22, 2006 by mobile69

[sabaijai]

According to Sunlabob, "Import of RE material is tax free in Thailand".

They will install, if travel expences are paid. I wouldn't have thought installation was too difficult, especially if your house is in the building stage, like mine. Warranty is 5yrs, but of course I'm in Thailand, they're in Laos.

I've heard that the drawback with some of these systems is that as you draw hot water out, cold water replaces it immediately, thus reducing the temperature of that in the tank. If the family showers in the evening, how much hot water is there in the morning. A friend has a "vented" system, where you can control the inflow of cold water, maintaining the overnight temperature of the hot water. Mind you, he paid a lot more for his system.

If they're for sale cheaply in Laos, you'd think they'd be for sale in Nong Khai?

Might be available in Nong Khai, ask at Mut-Mee Guesthouse - Julian, the owner, may know. The thing is you see a lot more Chinese goods in N Laos than in Vientiane. But worth asking around.

[chownah]

According to Sunlabob, "Import of RE material is tax free in Thailand".

They will install, if travel expences are paid. I wouldn't have thought installation was too difficult, especially if your house is in the building stage, like mine. Warranty is 5yrs, but of course I'm in Thailand, they're in Laos.

I've heard that the drawback with some of these systems is that as you draw hot water out, cold water replaces it immediately, thus reducing the temperature of that in the tank. If the family showers in the evening, how much hot water is there in the morning. A friend has a "vented" system, where you can control the inflow of cold water, maintaining the overnight temperature of the hot water. Mind you, he paid a lot more for his system.

If they're for sale cheaply in Laos, you'd think they'd be for sale in Nong Khai?

Might be available in Nong Khai, ask at Mut-Mee Guesthouse - Julian, the owner, may know. The thing is you see a lot more Chinese goods in N Laos than in Vientiane. But worth asking around.

Are there actually goods in Laos anywhere that aren't made in China......aren't most of the goods in Thailand made in China?

[sabaijai]

According to Sunlabob, "Import of RE material is tax free in Thailand".

They will install, if travel expences are paid. I wouldn't have thought installation was too difficult, especially if your house is in the building stage, like mine. Warranty is 5yrs, but of course I'm in Thailand, they're in Laos.

I've heard that the drawback with some of these systems is that as you draw hot water out, cold water replaces it immediately, thus reducing the temperature of that in the tank. If the family showers in the evening, how much hot water is there in the morning. A friend has a "vented" system, where you can control the inflow of cold water, maintaining the overnight temperature of the hot water. Mind you, he paid a lot more for his system.

If they're for sale cheaply in Laos, you'd think they'd be for sale in Nong Khai?

Might be available in Nong Khai, ask at Mut-Mee Guesthouse - Julian, the owner, may know. The thing is you see a lot more Chinese goods in N Laos than in Vientiane. But worth asking around.

Are there actually goods in Laos anywhere that aren't made in China......aren't most of the goods in Thailand made in China?

In Vientiane and Pakse you see lots of Thai goods, in Savannakhet you see Vietnamese and in the north a lot of Chinese. Take toothpaste as an example, you see Chinese brands in Phongsali, never Thai, while in VTE you see lots of Thai-manufactured toothpaste but never Chinese. Appliances like washers, stoves etc follow similar geographical trends, Thai-manufactured in Vientiane and Pakse, Chinese-manufactured in the north. Muang Khuwa, Sekong and Attapeu (all on or near the VN border), meanwhile, are awash in VN-manufactured good.

I don't think most of the goods in Thailand are made in China. Children's toys maybe.

[Mali_in_CM]

To run a diesel on 'used cooking oil' you don't convert the engine; you convert the oil.

[seeker108]

To run a diesel on 'used cooking oil' you don't convert the engine; you convert the oil.

Hi Mali,

That is also one option, but the better method is to do a modification on the vehicle (not actually the engine per se). The original diesel engine was actually designed to run on peanut oil until Dr. Diesel mysteriously died and it was redesigned to run on petroleum.

I promise to soon start a thread on just this topic of converting to run on straight cooking oil that has only had any water and organic matter removed. It is better for the engine than diesel or bio diesel and less polluting as well as a good use of what is currently a source of polution to the ground and ground water. Also it is less expensive than either diesel or bio diesel.

In the mean time if someone has an extra vehicle they would like to have converted, PM or email me and we might work something out.

seeker

[Rinrada]

From the Valleys a couple of year ago...bit of Info... ...it works but is it allowed in LOS

Fry and Drive Monday January 20, 2003.The Guardian

When staff at a Welsh supermarket first noticed dramatic increases in the sale of cooking oil, they thought the locals were doing a lot of frying. They weren't.

They were filling up their cars with it - not surprising, as it's only 42p a litre.

Trouble is, if you don't pay duty, it's illegal.

According to the manager of Asda's store in Swansea, south Wales, there was no reason to be suspicious that sales of the company's cheapest bottles of cooking oil were running 20% higher than the previous year, way above any other store in Britain.

"We just thought it was one of those things," .

Why should he and his staff have been remotely questioning, he suggests, if men in overalls and lived-in denims had started buying Smart Price vegetable oil in batches of six, eight and 12 litres at a time. When one customer came in and filled a trolley to the brim with plastic containers of the thin, urine-coloured liquid, the checkout operator barely gave him a second glance.

"Naturally, we assumed they were buying on price," says the manager, an Asda man to the soles of his own-brand brogues.

There was another reason that his staff were unlikely to see anything untoward in bulk-buying cheap vegetable oil.

"We just thought they were doing a lot of frying," he says.

"You have to remember, healthy eating has not hit Swansea in a big way."

The enterprising motorist was, so the reports suggested, running his diesel-engine motor on a mix of Asda cooking oil and standard fuel. At 42p a litre, the supermarket chain's oil is considerably cheaper than the 73p a litre that even a discounted retailer charges for diesel.

The astonishing thing was it worked. Without any need to modify the engine, the motorist could run his car on the mix with no discernible difference in its performance. What's more, instead of diesel fumes, the engine gave off a rather pleasing odour - like frying time at the local chippy.

And if Asda's sales figures were anything to go by, unless he was running a fleet of buses across south Wales, the driver who had been pulled over by the emissions inspectors wasn't the only one. Wind your windows down in a Swansea traffic jam last spring, the rumour went, and the chances were you would think someone was having a barbecue.

The local joke was that the whiff was particularly prevalent around the DVLC, the government's national car-licensing department, which is headquartered in the city. It was a nice irony, because, as the cooking-oil driver discovered when he was fined £500 and had his car impounded, the government is not amused by cheap alternative fuel.

Diesel is relatively pricey because a large chunk of the cost is made up by duty.

Cooking oil carries no such tax. But if it is put to use in a petrol tank, duty is due

[seeker108]

From the Valleys a couple of year ago...bit of Info... ...it works but is it allowed in LOS

Interesting question. Also interesting that they seem to ignore electric vehicles in the western countries which also pay no road fuel tax (unless it is done in some different way) and yet they are far more common than veggie oil vehicles.

Here in Thailand there is a general governmental support for renewable energy and in any case I do not think this sort of thing is in their mind as I have not heard of anyone trying it here yet. Anyone heard of anything here in Thailand along these lines?

Re the solar heaters, I have still not heard back from Sunlabob. I am working on several potential environmental development projects for a non profit organization and may need at some time a very large quantity of the best and most economical system of this type and so will be soon looking into this more seriously. I am most happy to share what I learn and even set something up to make this more easily and reasonably available here in CM.

I am just now waiting on information from a friend in BKK who recently researched many of the companies in China manufacturing these kinds of solar hot water heaters.