High Rise Apartments With Solar Domestic Hot Water in Saranac Lake, New York

On November 19, 2008 in water heating

Lake Flower Apartments in Saranac Lake is a high rise apartment building (~9 stories tall) that provides housing to elderly people.

Here is a link to a little information about Lake Flower Apartments, although there doesn’t seem to be much out there on the internet about the place.

What is very cool about the building, is that they installed a 48 collector solar domestic hot water system in March of 1987. Why they did this is anyone’s guess, but it was certainly a great idea.

The history of the system is a little fuzzy but essentially it was used to an unknown capacity from 1987 (when installed) until sometime in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. In 2006 the system was drained and refilled, and some maintenance was performed by another contracting company. This included replacing some insulation as well as rerouting some piping and installing a propane fired on demand water heater as a backup to the solar system.

The solar array on the roof preheats cold water before being sent to the tankless propane fired water heater which will heat it up the rest of the way if needed. From here it goes to a series of three 100gallon storage tanks and then is distributed amongst the apartments in the building as needed.

The building houses 78 residents and with staff, about 90 people total. Between the solar hot water system and the propane tankless water heater, 100% of hot water demands are met.

The solar hot water collector array consists of 48 collectors in groups of 3-7 collectors each. Each group of collectors is connected in series, and the separate groups are then connected in parallel.

I was lucky enough to get a tour of the building and the setup by the maintenance guys, which was coordinated through one of my college professors.

Here are some pictures of the setup for your viewing pleasure.

Click on the thumbnails to make them larger.

First is a picture of the building itself from the gas station across the lake. You can see the collectors on the roof, and they are really not that unattractive or intrusive.

The collectors are mounted on the roof in what seems to be the best setup for space maximization

The mounts are rather straight forward, and the condensation you see here in the panels is normal.

The panels were mounted on trusses that went the span of the roof and attached on the ends

I believe these are 4′x8′ panels but did not actually measure them

Collectors in each group are connected together like so:

There are vents in each collector to let moisture from condensation out as they heat up:

And each foot for the mounting has rubber underneath. This is to keep the two dissimilar metals (steel and aluminum) from causing corrosion.

Air vents on each group of collector were closed. The maintenance people said they were advised to do this for some reason or another, and it hadn’t caused any problems yet.

The view was simply amazing.

As suggested by many, the pipes connecting collectors are insulated, and the insulation is covered in an aluminum sheathing to prevent UV degradation

Most groups of collectors had a thermometer installed in the outlet. This one was reading 90 degrees fahrenheit.

As you can see though this was a rather complicated setup. Much more so than most of us will ever have to endure when setting this up on a residence.

Here is a picture of the SRCC rating label on the collectors. Good stuff, I had no idea SRCC ratings were around in the late ’80s. If you want more information on SRCC ratings, check out solar-rating.org

Some of the insulation was degrading. This is an insulated Tee fitting with some kind of plastic around the insulation

Some of the insulation in the panels was degrading too. There was also some corrosion. I still don’t think this is bad for 21 years of service

Here is the only “shady” part of the install (no pun intended). This is an old barrel they put up here to collect any glycol in case of a pressure related blow out.

Here is the Resol differential controller and the Rinnai tankless propane water heater controller (the brains of the operation)

And a large storage tank

And here is the Rinnai tankless propane water heater

A close up of the Rinnai connections:

If you have any questions about the system, feel free to leave a comment here and I will get back to you. We will be doing some data logging to actually figure out how effective this system is.

I also have some diagrams of the system I will scan and upload in a few days.

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