chiron
Innovator
Probrably being primed to be sold for cheap and the prime real estate and copper cabling should be enough to cover the cost.
Chinese Alternates
- Thread starter thedeadghost
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Probrably being primed to be sold for cheap and the prime real estate and copper cabling should be enough to cover the cost.
thedeadghost
Explorer
I agree Indian products have a serious quality issue. I guess they do not have a quality dep to check at all for most products. Especially with electronics and hardware. On the other hand products like soap, shampoos, food products have a good market. I guess we can start to prefer those over foreign products. I see here in the gulf many Indian especially Ayurvedic products sold at sky high prices.
I do not think any of these companies actually make everything in India. We used to have a Venus Geyser installed in 1976 that ran well for well over 30+ years. Ever since the children took over from the parents they started importing from China and put the Venus brand name on it. The quality of Racold is even poor. I spent almost 48K on a 200 L Solar Water heater that can withstand pressure pump. It hardly ever produced any hot water and often I end up using the heating element in the storage tank of the water heater. The element itself was costing around 3.5K and would last no more than 1 year. The quality was so poor that the outer casing made of some kind of PVC came off due to wear and tear. Imagine buying a 48K Solar water heater and then paying 3.5K every year for element replacement! They did not even bother to use UV resistant outer casing.
Racold do make the welded tank, heating element in india, thermostat is imported from italy for some models.
Regarding solar water heater, I too was considering buyng racold but hearing negative reviews, I decided against it.
Instead I bought a made in bangalore, solarizer pressurized. I do have a pressure pump connected set to max of 2.2bar. I have not connected the heating element, only on cloudy days do I use my racold electric heater, the output of the solar water heater goes to input of my electric water heater. So even on a cloudy day or rainy day, the warm water stored in solar takes only 5 min to heat in a 25L electric water heater. Even on rainy days, the water stored in solar tank is insulated, compared to the overhead tank which can be as low as the ambient temperature.
In june, I measured water temperature at 61 to 65c temperature it was even hotter in april/may.
Using the solar heater inbuilt electric heating element is a waste of electricity, since lets assume today its cloudy and next day its sunny, you would have wasted electricity heating 200l vs a 25l electric geyser which wouldn't have to heat all of the 200l
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Actually the solar heater itself is a waste of money in multi story buildings. My Solar heater was around 38 ft above ground level. Imagine all the pipes the water has to travel through before reaching the first and ground floor. I guess by the time it reaches the ground floor almost 40 liters of water is wasted before I get the hot water. (assuming 80 mts of 1/2 pipe). First I need to let 40 liters of water to waste and then get the hot water of which I hardly use 15 to 20 litres. Unless someone is going to immediately use the hot water I will lose 40 liters of hot water in the pipeline as it gets cold in an hour.
For me it has to travel only about 25 feet, could have place it at 35 feet but I didn't want the shade from solar heater to fall on the future solar photovoltic panel install, I calculated that I could get an extra 30min of sun light on photovoltic panels.
To minimize the heat loss, I installed as much CPVC pipes as possible, I also made sure that the output and input pipes going to solar water heater are shade free in the roof, even before installing solar I used to get about 10 liters of water at 40C from the water stored in the pipes exposed to sun light in summer. So on the floor below the roof, I get hot water almost instantly, may be a mug of cold water at max. On the ground floor, i get about 3 liters of cold water early morning. To combat this further I plan to insulate the pipes.
Also since the water coming from solar goes to racold electric geyser located on the top most floor, so due to this the water pipe length going to the ground floor is not one single span, the water going from the insulated racold geyser acts as a hot water buffer.
Agree with everything you wrote. I use a solarizer 400 liter as well with 2.5 bar pressure from our community pump. It works most days when there is partial sunlight. I use the bathroom geyser only for 5 mins on days when there is no sun. The heating element in the solar heater has never been used to date. In fact it is disconnected.
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