30 Tube Water Heater Collector 37° Frame Evacuated Vacuum Tubes SRCC Certified Hot

I've finally got the system up and running. I'm using a 50 gal hot water heater as a storage tank. I installed a tankless electric water eemax system on the outlet side of the 50 gal storage tank. The circulation is provided by a DC pump and 15 w solar panel, I installed a digital thermometer that is also powered by the 15 w panel. I'm getting a 50 degree rise in temp on a full day of sun. The system is working fine I only wonder what will happen when I go on vacation and several days of sun overheat the tank. I know the pop off valve will blow it out but wish there was a way to prevent that. Maybe dripping the hot water? I will cross that bridge at some point. This is a very cool setup. I'm estimating the payoff to be around 4 years. I did all of the labor and plumbing myself.

Come broken!.

mine arrived in 6 boxes; 4 with glass tubes, 1 with metal, 1 with headers. i found it easy to assemble.One issue is they only give you about 2" of copper stubs to make connections, fearful of what would happen to the foam insulation if I soldered, I elected to go the Propress route. I needed more heat transfer compound, what they provide is about 1/4 of what I felt should be used...get the NON drying variety of heat paste/silicone based.

deliver all broken

We have been off grid and using solar water heating for over 20 years. Our units are quite ancient and when one of them wasn't doing the job of heating the floor during cold months, we decided this DUDA unit might be the do. It came with one tube broken, but there were plenty of extra tubes. I wish the package had have included directions for installing the frame. The on line manual is not of much help in that regard. Note that it is very important to level and square the frame, otherwise when you install the top piece, the bolts might not fit in the slots provided. Ours is placed on a slope on the ground, which made this process a bit challenging and although we thought we did a decent job with the squaring and leveling, we still had to make some adjustments (took out some of the bolts and used a hammer) to get the bolts to go in the slots. Placing the top part on before everything was in place might have been helpful, but this idea was not in the on line directions. This is as far as we have gotten so far....but we wanted to start this review and add to it as we went along. We will be back once we get more done on it. Hope this was helpful to anyone.

First, this isn't my first solar hot water array install. This is actually much better quality than what was available 15 years ago. It installs easy but one complaint, the sizing on the stainless steel hardware is not of this planet. I had to use a combo of metric, sae, and freak sizes, but I got it done. On the positive they gave me a few extra tubes which more than offset the hardware hassle. I would buy again.

My husband was enamored with this from the start and did not want to hear that the basic design was flawed. This system doesn't heat fast enough for any size pool. After the initial burst of a few gallons of hot water, it did not have enough surface area to continue to heat up. We removed trees, covered the tubes so they wouldn't break (some still did) and babied this device until we finally gave up and got the heat pump that I wanted in the first place. The instant, steady heat of a heat pump was MUCH better. Don't waste your money the way we did.

I will not be installing these permanently until October, but I did assemble the rack and test the system with only five tubes. Even with that limitation I was very impresses with the amount of hot water I got. Over about five hours of direct sunlight and three hours of partial shading I got 10 gallons of 120F degree water. The starting water temp was about 72F and the ambient temp was between 80F and 92F. I used a 3 GPM 12 volt pump to circulate the water directly from a ten gallon tank through the panel and back to the tank.Duda Energy was great to deal with when I had questions and needed special delivery.