Pictures from the solar water heater project

Here are pictures of the solar water heater project...

This is the old solar heater on the roof of the shower room at the campground.  It was damaged by hail, and it was not made to withstand the winter temperatures in Nangi.

Removing the old solar heater water tank.

Opening the box with the new solar water heater.

Getting the poly tank on top of the tower.  It wasn't that heavy, but it was very awkward to get up there.

This part made me really nervous.  Toya is up pretty high and not secured at all while he is connecting the piping to the tank.

Setting up the frame to hold the solar tubes.

This is the tool that they use to connect piping - no, they don't use a wrench...  They build a fire wherever they are, and they put this disk into the fire.  When it is hot, they stick the ends of the plastic tubing on it to melt the ends, and then they join the two ends together.

Putting the solar frame onto the roof of the shower room.  This part was frustrating for me.  The frame is made to be on a flat surface.  Since the roof is sloped, we had to figure out a way to either lower the back end or raise the front end.  I thought that cutting the frame to lower the back end would be better, but I was told that doing that would void the warranty, which we didn't want to do.  So instead everyone insisted on building concrete posts and setting the front end on the those posts.  This makes me nervous, but I gave in to what everyone thought was best...

Chitra pouring water on the concrete pillars.

This shows that open pipe that was recommended to us as a safety relief device.  Uuuummmm...  no...

We took hot showers and are clean!!!  Just a few small things to do still in the campground, but basically it is finished - hooray!

Now for the solar heater for the volunteer house...  There was no real existing structure to put the solar heater on, so we had to build one.  We need to get the solar heater up high enough so that it can gravity-feed into the shower.

They have filled two footers with concrete and rebar and are working on the other two footers.

Mixing up the concrete for the footers.

The bottom legs of the platform are done...

This was as far as they had gotten when we left.  Once the concrete has had time to fully set, the poly tank will go up on the top section and the solar heater will got on the lower part of the platform.

Tomorrow I am going to post pictures of the scenery and sights in Nangi...