Cansolair installation in Ottawa

I installed a Cansolair solar air heater for a customer on a house in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. This was done working with Isolara Energy Services. Note that Cansolair is often misspelt Cansolar.

The Cansolair in place. The customer said that since it looks so nice, it makes the rest of the building look horrible by comparison!

It took three to lift it to the wall (I'm taking the picture).

From indoors - the bottom contains the fan for sucking the room-temperature, indoor air into the Cansolair panel and the top is the hot air returning from the panel back into the room.

How it works.

According to Cansolair's website, they use Lexan^TM, for their glazing. Lexan is a polycarbonate and resin material that is very strong and flexible. Rather than being flat, the glazing on the Cansolair is rounded so that it wraps around the unit a bit, catching the sun for more hours of the day. You can see this roundness in the pictures above.

Another interesting feature of the Cansolair is that they make the air flow inside the air flow chamber in a turbulent manner. Instead of being nice straight flowing air, the air actually spirals or vortexes. The reason for this is to make ALL of the air contact the surface of the air flow chamber as much as possible, thereby heating all of the air and making the air spend a longer time in the chamber. Cansolair is so named because the air flow chamber is made up of pop/soda cans stacked one on top of the other. Where one can sits on top of another, one of the cans has been cut such that it has vanes. So when the air passes from one can to the next in the stack, the vanes make the air vortex.

More details of the Cansolair design can be found by examining its Canadian patent number 2393273.

Relaxing after a job well done.

The Cansolair still working 5 years later.

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