Solar water heaters are the heaters that heat water by utilizing the suns heat. They are made up of collectors for collecting the sun rays. These collectors are responsible for catching the sunlight and retaining the heat and passing it to the liquid to heat it. Different forms of solar collectors are used for this purpose some of which are ICS or batch collectors, flat plate collectors and evacuated tube collectors.
ICS or Batch CollectorsICS or batch collectors are designed to store the heat that is acquired from the suns energy as well as the heat inside the water tank. The ICS solar water heaters have a glass topped box into which the water tank is encased. This lets the suns heat inside the tank.
 To decrease convection and radiation, the other walls on the box are thermally insulated. To keep the heat by means of reflection, the inner walls are built with a reflective surface. Encasing the water tank into a glass topped box helps in cutting down the loss of heat from the tank.
Flat Plate CollectorsThe flat plate collectors contain an insulated weatherproof box into which there is a dark absorber plate which is placed under one or more clear or translucent covers. Flat plate collectors look somewhat like a glass topped box with a network of water pipes. The water gets heated up as it flows through the pipes usually around 1cm in diameter giving a good surface to volume ratio. This helps in increasing the efficiency of heating.
The flat plate collectors are the most commonly used collectors but when compared to the efficiency, they are not as efficient as the evacuated tube collectors. These flat plate collectors perform best only in the presence of sufficient sunlight.
Evacuated Tube CollectorsEvacuated tube collectors comprise of rows of parallel glass tubes. These collectors are developed in such a way that they absorb the maximum amount of sunlight and the heat loss to the surroundings is greatly diminished. Since the heat loss cannot occur through vacuum, a vacuum is used to reduce the loss of heat to the environment.
 A vacuum is much more difficult to generate between two flat glass sheets. Therefore two      concentric glass tubes are used to keep the vacuum. On the inner tube of this is a coating of thermal absorbent material that helps in absorbing the heat from the sun. This collector is much more efficient than many other collectors.
Solar hot water heaters are perhaps one of the most efficient ways to help get a person to a sustainable lifestyle. Among all the solar options they typically pay themselves off the fastest.
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