Hi Folks,
I hope this is the right place to ask a question like this.
I am building a solar heating solution for my workshop. It consists of a heated cavity, a series of pipes and fans to push the air down to the heat store (large volume of stone) and another fan to return the air to collector as it will still be above ambient temperature.
All things equal, I was wondering about the fans: There will be two working together; one pushing the into the store, one pushing the air back into the collector. As this is a (mostly) sealed system, these fans will compliment each other. The plumbing is 68mm PVC gutter downpipes. I chose that because it's wide ID, cost and east of use. As it happens, I have a couple of 60mm PC style fans
The fans have the following job:
1) Push cool (heavy?) air up from the store into the collector. This is a head of about 1.7m (About 5"6). 2) Push hot (light?) air down into the bottom of the store. This would be around 1.9m. Also, a small amount of pressure is needed here as it has to force the air through a series of holes.My question is this: If I find the fans do not have enough muscle, would simply adding another fan at each end, in series, help? The reason I would like to do this is because it's simple. Simply shoehorn another fan into the pipe. Drawback is double the current. As this setup runs on batteries and a solar panel, I need to be conservative.
My second option is to build a box which will house a bigger fan and connect that into the pipe. This is not ideal / neat. Also, larger fan still means more current.
Finally, does proximity matter if in series? Butting the two pans together, they become very noisy. Turbulence I imagine. Spaced around
100mm apart, they become "normal" noisy.Thanks for any feedback.
Cheers, Crispin