It has taken quite some time, however, my solar collectors where finally delivered on Monday, June 4th picked up at the Yellow Freight Terminal this afternoon (June 14th). It is long and sorted tale, but the end result is what is important. Behold!
Last week, I spoke with a person at AET, the manufacturer, who said they have a huge demand right now for solar collectors. There are only about five manufactures of thermal solar collectors right now, so if you are looking for a growth industry, that may be it.
Bosch Group, a leading European manufacture of solar thermal panels is planing to increase its production by 60 percent this year. That kind of news is encouraging. The increased use of solar energy for water heating, space heating and electrical production, means less use of fossil fuels, and thereby less pollution. Additionally, direct heating methods such as space heating and domestic hot water applications are much more efficient than photovoltaics.
The five US manufactures of solar panels that I can find are:
If anyone knows of any others, let me know. I will be posting about the installation in the future at some point. I need to finish some of the other projects around here, such as the deck, before I tackle this one. In the mean time, there is some good reading at the Whole Building Design Guide website.
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Congrats. I was talking to my father about our old solar panels and he said he loved them. I always thought he didn’t like them for some reason. He said the water got over 200 degrees.
Can you use that hot water in baseboard heat as well?
Yes, you can use it for baseboard heat, but there are some caveats. First, at the time you need the heat the most (winter) the sun is shining the least, so your collector area needs to be larger than if you where just heating water. Secondly, baseboard hot water heat, also known as hydronic heating, usually requires that the water temperatures be 140 Deg F or higher. It may be very hard to reach that temperature on the coldest days, even with a huge collector array.
What many people are doing now is using radiant floor heating with solar panels. In this case, the water temperatures are much lower, on the order of 80 deg F or so, just enough to heat the floor and have that heat move from the floor into the air in the room.
In both cases it is advisable to have a backup heating system of some type for those prolonged cloudy periods.
Like a pellet stove!!!
Actually, you may want to consider a furnace instead. A pellet stove is not something that you can automatically set to come on.
Just did a search and found your blog. :) Regarding the comments, there are pellet stoves that work just like any other furnace with self regulation, self start, thermostats, etc. They work very very well and I love that they use waste that would just have gone to a landfill as fuel. :)
Hi Rachel, welcome to the blog. Jay is a big proponent of pellet stoves, he has a good post Installing our new Harmon P38 pellet stove. I myself have a Jotul woodstove, as I have a ready source of firewood for free. Interesting point on the use of wood (or other) waste material to make the pellets, I never thought of that.
Great stuff. Thanks!