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Comment by interestica | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know they were solar water heating until right now. Barbados has been a cool case study of large scale adoption of solar water heating:

https://cdkn.org/resource/cdkn-inside-story-seizing-the-suns...

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I was just on vacation in Greece, and solar water heaters are on every home and building there.

Everybody and their dog had a solar heater on their house in Cyprus, from 30 years ago. It was cheap deployable tech accessible to literally peasant farmers.

I visited Sardinia recently for the first time, and saw the exact same type of houses built there, with the same climate, but not a single solar heater on their roofs. I wondered aloud why, but got no answer.

My guess is that an energy company took an interest early on in Sardinia, and Cyprus was thankfully missed for a few decades.

In Canada it's not uncommon too see some homemade looking solar heating setups connected to people's pools. The coiled black tubing on shed roofs is very distinctive.

I'm well below Canada's latitude, and it costs me $250/mo to heat a relatively small swimming pool (about 10,000 gal) ... in the summer. If I keep it warm enough to swim in October, it'll be at least twice that. The capital cost of the heater is practically zero compared to the fuel. I can totally understand janky DIY setups to try and defray that cost.

There’s a bunch of YouTube videos showing how to make them. It’s really easy, actually, and you can get like 250-500W of heating from what seems to be a reasonably small device.

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