Sunday, September 18, 2011

Painful Shopping Day

   Gave myself a three day weekend to make progress, but I am afraid that all I accomplished was updating my model and shopping.  And boy did I spend a lot of money.

  $200 at Home depot for the 1" L copper tubing.  I know that getting the thicker (L versus M) and the larger diameter (1 versus 3/4") would cost more, but boy.

  $74 for a Caleffi expansion tank.  I already have a new Watts tank and planned on using it.  But the Caleffi pump station is setup for a 3/4" straight fitting and I couldn't figure out how to adapt it to the 3/4" NPT on the tank I have.

  $329 at PexSupply for all the 1" fittings that I need and I am also ordering 2 more Taco Zone valves to put in parallel with the ones I already have.  The taco valves are not "Fully Port" valve and have a great restriction which may kill the flowrate (GPM) in the panels.  On Taco valve is equivalent to adding 45 feet more pipe in the system.  Putting two in parallel should at least cut the resistance in half.  I won't know if this is worth doing until I get the system up and running.  Decisions, decisions, decisions.

   $400 at the Alt-E store,  $200 for the high temperature/UV resistance (armacell Solaflex HT) pipe insulation and $200 more for four gallons of propylene glycol.  So the contents of the pipe are $200, the pipe is $200, and the insulation is $200.  I didn't expect it to be this expensive.

   Getting close to the end.  I would still like to have HT 625 armacell adhesive and most importantly a $2000 hot water tank that I still cannot decide on.  It turns out that some of the good tanks have very high flow resistance through their coils.  Now I need to rethink.

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