Solar non-electric Air Conditioning

[Shah24]

Hello All,

Has anyone come across a system which can run off hot water and produce air conditioning for a house?

Thanks,
Shah.

[Sunking]

Not hot water but you can boil ammonia to make refrigerant. Most large scale commercial freezes use an ammonia systems. Very lethal if a leak occurs. The other option is using natural gas engines.

[Shah24]

Thanks Sunking,

Yes amonia is very lethal so do not want to use it. I do not have gas available either!

I was reading somewhere that the adsorption rather than absorption can be used at low temperatrues to chill water and then for air conditioning.
During the summer temps here go upto 45C and the whole summer it will average at about 35C. I can get a few solar trough collectors to make the hot water and then a heat exchanger of some sort could work?

Thanks,
Shah.

[Sunking]

Shah I think physics is going to bite you in the butt. Solar hot water is not my thing, but here is the challenge. How many solar thermal panels does it take to generate 12,000 BTU's/hour. That translates to 1-ton of cooling which is enough to cool 1 small well insulated room. Something tels me that is one massive thermal solar hot water system. something tells me it would require something much larger than the building itself and ver expensive.

[peakbagger]

Absorption coolers use hot water and produce cooling. They use a fairly nasty working fluid (lithium). The smallest I have heard of is a 5 ton unit that was made by Yazaki?. The COP is real low compared to an electric chiller but makes sense for certain applications where there is waste heat available. There are also natrual gas driven chillers that basically replace an electric motor with a natural gas engine. They have a similiar COP as an electric chiller but obviously burn natural gas to do it.

[Sunking]

The COP is real low compared to an electric chiller but makes sense for certain applications where there is waste heat available.

That is what I was driving at something like a pipeline pump station with large deisel motors and using the heat to cool down or heat the control house. It takes a lot of heat or BTU's to do that. For residential I just cannot see it working as the panel array could need to be a city block in area.

[Shah24]

Thank you both.
Yes it will be expensive. I got in touch with a chinese supplier and they are offering 10RT system for about $36,000 . Well at least it is possible . It will need about 2300 tube collectors!!! (162 m square). So I would need to look at other options!!!