Solartwin - silicon tubing eaten by mice !

[Worcester]

Anyone else come across this yet?

Thanks to another member of the forum we attnded a call out last week to find out why a solar thermal system was leaking. first time I'd seen a solartwin install, and took a while toget my head around how it worked.

Basically it reverse cycles water through the DHW cylinder using a very low powered dc pump. On the day we attended the cylinder was up to temperature by the boiler so was cycling warm water around the collector...

What suprised me though was that it was all connected up with 10mm dia silicon tubing.

After reading through the detailed install instructions off the solar twin website, it turns out that the pipes should have been encased in normal PEX water pipe, precisely to protect them from our rodent friends!

So we've got to go back and do a permanent fix on the system, - we have two choices
a) repair the chewed section and then encase in PEX to avoid a recurrence
or
b) replace the silicon tubing (approx 15 metres each way) with 10mm copper microbore.

Both would seem to be satisfactory solutions - for those of you with experinece with solartwin (aka Thermatwin) systems - what would your favoured option be?

 

[Gavin A]

can't use microbore copper as it's designed to be freeze tolerant as it's heating the water directly, so no glycol.

I've worked on a few systems, and can't say I've seen any cased in PEX.

 

[Worcester]

I realised about the fact that it's designed to allowed to freeze.
The reason for considering putting it inside a pex pipe as an option is it is actualy what is supposed to be done as per the "manufacturer's" instructions - Guess they couldn't be bothered in most cases..