It was probably just as well as an annoying intermittent electrical fault plagued me for a few weeks! This meant several fuses blew, some 3 amp from the fused spur supplying the TD3 controller, along with a couple of the special fuses in the controller itself. Thankfully the guys at Navitron posted several spares at no cost. Finally I tracked down the power spike to an extra 'stat that I'd wired up, thinking it would give me additional control. The TD3 came with three sensors (1 for the panel, 2 for the cylinder; top and bottom) but I thought it'd be good to use a spare mains 'stat that was supplied with the cylinder. It appears that this was producing a power surge every time the water temp dropped below 60C, blowing the fuses.
All this has coincided with weekends of visitors and a weekend in Dorset so there's not been much DIY time for a while. The last weekend was the first opportunity to fiddle with the system once more, adding a high temperature automatic air vent at the high point, before finally installing all 30 tubes. This proved to be an easy task, just as in the Youtube video. Interestingly it was overcast when I put a batch of 10 tubes out on the roof, and the 15 mins or so it took me to nstall them was long enough for the copper tail on the last tube to be hot to touch, so definitely not something to do on a sunny day.
The last thing I have to complete is installing the final few reflectors, strips of aluminium that clip between the tubes to bounce light onto the back of the tubes to increase the system efficiency. This evenings rain stopped me from doing this. But this is just a final tweak as the system is up and running, generating our hot water for the rest of the summer, and hopefully well into Autumn. So the biomass boiler has been switched off and we can now enjoy 'free' hot water. The TD3 controller keeps a detailed tally of how much energy the system generates, so I'll have to give an update in a few weeks on how quickly (or not) the system will pay for itself.
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