SWH project part 16 - up and running

It's going! I'll be leaving behind a short list of outstanding finishing touches, and a couple of suggestions for future improvements, but in the meantime it's working: preheating the water for the laundry so the geyser doesn't have to work so hard, and thus saves fuel.

Solar Water Heater opening ceremony.  The first overcast day in ages, but was
actually just as warm and twice as humid.  Sweaty.

Some of my main helpers.

Re-fitting the heat exchangers (see here for why)

Lid back on after much intricate wielding of the hacksaw.

The brazing chap from Lahore was back doing some other work in the hospital,
so I got him to attend to a minor leak.

One last piece of colourful frazzled copper.

Snug as a bug in a rug about to chug a mug of... hot chocolate?  Glug!

SolarBot doing his thing.

Modest temperatures on a cloudy morning.  In the middle of a clear day the
panels hit 80°C, and the tank gets to 65-70°C.

Again, on a clear day the output beats 50°C.  This could be improved by
lengthening the heat exchanger coils, or by moving to a pressurised tank
with no heat exchanger.  The latter is almost certainly worth doing.  When
someone gets round to it...

Finished system.  For a given value of "finished".

Tank insulated and roofed.  Among the final touches I'm
leaving for the workshop guys to do at some point is to stop
the rainwater collecting on the platform and soaking into the
bottom couple of inches of insulation.  Preferably before the
monsoon starts in earnest.

Thermal expansion coupled with cycles of thunderstorms
followed by hot clear days has done for these strips we used
to hold down the glazing.  They'll replace them with some-
thing better and redo the seals...

(This one's an extreme example - the other nine seem to be fine!)

...which should hopefully stop this happening.  They'll also put some metal
sheeting along the top edge of the panels.