I am developing a solar water heater product that will convert a standard tank water heater to use solar energy. You can see a schematic of my product at solarstocker.com.
One of the problems that I anticipate is sizing the collector to match the households hot water demands. It is not a good thing the have the collector too large because the excess heat must be dumped by boiling water. It is also not a good thing for the collector to be too small because it will not make enough hot water.
So I thought it would be a good thing to have a low cost data logger that can be left with a new installation that would monitor the performance of a newly installed solar hot water system over a 30 dayvperiod to be sure that the customer will be satisfied with the system performance.
I want to measure the temperature at the top of the collector, at the top of the storage tank and at the bottom of the storage tank. This data-set of three temperatures would tell the story of the system performance. The temperature sensors in my controller run on 5V and have an output of 500mV @ 0 degrees C and 1500 mV @ 100 degrees C. I figure that at a sample rate of 1 data-set every 5 seconds the memory would hold 30 days of data.
So here are my questions about he uLog:
- Can the uLog keep accurate time over 30 days?
- Can the uLog be programed to take a data set every 5 seconds.
- Will the uLog run for 30 days on three AAA batteries?
- Can you assemble everything that I need into a package? ie: 1. uLog, 2. USB interface, 3. Open source software to download the data into a 30 run chart that plots the three temperatures.
There is a lot going on in this market right now. The federal government is offering a 30% tax credit for solar water heater for the next six years. This something that every installer should have in his tool box so it will likely be a decent market.
Right now I have a full plate with other developments and I do not have the programming skills.
Can you put this package together for me?