Beer Bottles Used to Create a Solar Water Heating System

June 4, 2008 / 5 Comments

Beer Bottles to Create a Solar Water Heating System

In the do it yourself category we have Ma Yanjun, a farmer in Mizhi county, Shaanxi province in China, that managed to build a solar water heating system using empty beer bottles. The reason he did it, was to allow his 73-year old mother to take a warm bath every day.

Since there was no warm water in the area and he couldn’t afford paying the big bucks for a hi-tech solar panel, Ma had to be innovative and instead of photovoltaic panels he used dozens of beer bottles. He finished work in 2006 and ever since, he attracted the envy of 20 other local farmers, which needed his help and skills.

We don’t care who emptied those beer bottles and want to congratulate Ma for his achievement.


5 Responses

  • shabazz / June 5, 2008 at 12:39 pm

    i have seen this article plagiarized across the net like it’s some big thing, so the old drunk put his recycling on his roof, so what. did it work? did it work well? did alex properly cite references? it looks like he had to puncture the bottoms of each glass bottle, how? is one bath a day the most it can do? anyone got a schematic for a similar system

    come on green zombies, if you are going to steal content at least try to add something original. I google searched a sentence from the above article. first page came up almost all copys of this article. this one,

    http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/283635/66_beer_bottles_land_son_in_hot_water.html

    is almost a year old. Alex Ion turn in your press pass on your way out the door. no more fluff pieces please.

  • Alex Ion / June 5, 2008 at 6:10 pm

    The news is from chinadaily and was hot the other days so I had no idea it was an article about it one year ago. The only sources we had were panasianbiz.com (where i first found the article) + chinadaily.com and that’s what I came out with. I hope you will come back for more of our articles and you’ll see we’re not stealing content, we’re just trying to inform people.

  • David Mackey / June 15, 2008 at 12:08 pm

    Pretty cool news. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how zoning committees in the U.S. would take it if we began doing the same.

  • William R. James / November 1, 2008 at 10:18 am

    Being that it’s China, I suspect the 73 year old woman is forced to climb to the roof and individually fill each bottle every morning, the climb up there again later to get the bottles of warm water to make her bath. If she complains, she’ll just be executed for making trouble for the system. Or perhaps she’ll just be given a warm glass of milk… with the same results. :)

  • Regni / October 7, 2009 at 10:58 pm

    W R.J is tipical arogant ignorant.
    Yes considering China’s conditions, people are taking are taking advantage of them..until zoning laws will be more creative..

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