Solar Thermal (Solar Hot Water)

 

UPDATE

 

You can now receive a payment of £350 towards your Solar Thermal installation

 

CLICK HERE to Register for payments from the Energy Saving Trust for Solar Thermal and Biomass.

 

    • Enjoy free clean hot water, generated by the sun.

    • Link the heating and hot water systems in your home.

     


    • Prices from £4,000 - £8000 depending on size and specification.

Solar hot water systems are a sustainable, clean and highly efficient way of using renewable energy from the sun to provide hot water.
Utilising radiation from the sun, known as ‘solar radiation’, solar collectors (liquid filled tubes in an insulated box known as the panels) absorb this solar radiation, which is circulated to heat the water used in the home via pipe work connected to a coil in your hot water storage cylinder.


In most cases you will need a new hot water storage cylinder with a solar thermal installation as you need an extra coil to transfer the heat coming from the solar panels. Therefore, the prices we quote are normally inclusive of a new hot water cylinder.  The new cylinder (if required) will be connected to your conventional boiler to ensure you have sufficient hot water available during the winter months or to backup any shortfall during the summer. It is often a cost effective option to link this with a wood burner and we specialise in designing these integrated systems.

 

The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) is a new scheme to support the generation of heat from renewable sources. The government is expected to introduce this scheme December 2011 for commercial and 2012 for domestic. If the scheme will be introduced as expected then it will give a very significant boost to renewable heating technologies such as biomass heating and solar water heating. More info available on the "Centre For Alternative Technologhy" webpage.

Unlike previous grant schemes which made up-front, one-off payments to help with the initial cost of purchasing renewable heating equipment, the RHI will make regular payments over the whole lifetime of the system, based on the (estimated, or "deemed") amount of heat produced from renewable resources.

 

Active Indirect System

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How does solar water heating work?

 

A solar water heating (SWH, sometimes called solar thermal) system consists of three major components:one or more solar collectors (tubes or panels, usually mounted on a roof), a pump connected to a controller and a hot water cylinder with two heating coils (twin coil cylinder).

The collector uses the solar energy from sunlight to heat a thermal fluid (water with antifreeze). If the fluid in the collector is hotter than the water in the cylinder then the controller activates the pump to pump the fluid through the coil in the cylinder, thus heating water in the cylinder for showers and hot water taps. The second heating coil in the cylinder is connected to a back-up boiler (e.g. gas boiler) to provide hot water when there isn’t enough sunshine.

How many solar water heating panels will I need?

 

As a rule of thumb, under typical UK conditions you will need about 1m2 of solar water heating panel area per person to produce around half the hot water we use in the household.

Of course, this will depend on a number of factors, such as the orientation of your roof, the size of your hot water cylinder – and on how much hot water you use!

Collector panels are usually between 2m2 and 4m2, and a typical house usually has either one or two of these panels.