It's certainly gotten better in recent years, as the costs of the panels have come down. But last time I looked, what you say is true. Without subsidies, it's not cost effective as a replacement for grid power. But for a dedicated app, like just running the pumps, it would be worth looking at the actual numbers. I've only looked at whole house type, not scaled down, dedicated type. I know at least one company makes solar powered pool pumps.
Agree. That's a whole different ball game. Classic example is solar heat for a pool. Again, from the sketchy info here, I don't know what exactly it is she's doing. But the solar panels used to heat water for a swimming pool are cost effective. Problem there is they are not freeze proof and also won't be effective in winter. You'd need the way more expensive evacuated type to generate heat in winter.
I'd have to look it up, but I think the latent heat of fusion is 86 BTU per pound, and the heat of vaporization is about 550. But, it's been a long time since I needed that.
I don't know anything about farming fish, but don't you need some water/air exchange to keep the oxygen level tolerable to the fish. If you just block the surface, what keeps the fish alive?
So, where do the bubbles go? Wherever that is is where the evaporation goes. The bubbles assist evaporation. The air flow also carries away the heat you're trying to contain. Best way is to use thick insulation and seal the area between the water and the insulation. But you can't have bubbles if you do that. You have to do the thermodynamics math for the whole system. It's very easy to spend a lot of money optimizing one thing, then ruin that optimization by some other optimization decision.
The bottom line is that you have losses from the system to the environment. You keep the temperature stable by adding heat equal to those losses. If you do that, what goes on inside the system is largely irrelevant when it comes to operating costs.
Anything solar only works during the day. But your greatest need is at night. Managing that requires the same amount of heat, but you need to store it at a higher temperature during the day and release it at night. That means you can't use the huge amount of water in the fish tank as the thermal mass...unless you like your fish well done.
Any electric heating element is 100% efficient in producing heat. If that aquarium heater is producing X heat for Y KWH, any other electric heating element you replace it with, if it produces
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