Advice on Solar water heating

wiredup

Hi
I'm interested in getting a solar water heating system installed and have a few questions.

Firstly, costs? I'm looking at the solar unit and instillation. I also want a larger water tank fitted. At the moment my current one holds about enough for 1 bath. Any idea of what litre capacity I would want. There are only two of us living here.

Grants. Are there any and how much?

Installers. Is there a list of qualified installers. I'm in Mayo. I see there are lots of different products but I'd like an all in one package really.

Any advice appreciated.
Thanks.

kerrymaninld

The grant information is well covered on sei.ie and if you search you'll find it here too... You get 300 euro per sq meter of panel. Yes an installer list exists but anyone with a tax clearance cert can get on it, without any formal training or qualifications.

If there are only two of you in the house, and you are not planning kids then I'd be asking if this is worth your while. Your current tank is probably the standard size (110l or 120l) - are you really using all of that every day?

Do you have electric showers today? If so, are you planning to rip them out once you install the solar water heating system? If not, you'll still be heating water for those with an 8kWh heating element so you should really re-look at this investment...

wiredup

kerrymaninld wrote:

The grant information is well covered on sei.ie and if you search you'll find it here too... You get 300 euro per sq meter of panel. Yes an installer list exists but anyone with a tax clearance cert can get on it, without any formal training or qualifications.

If there are only two of you in the house, and you are not planning kids then I'd be asking if this is worth your while. Your current tank is probably the standard size (110l or 120l) - are you really using all of that every day?

Do you have electric showers today? If so, are you planning to rip them out once you install the solar water heating system? If not, you'll still be heating water for those with an 8kWh heating element so you should really re-look at this investment...

Hi, as I say we'd get one bath out of our tank. Be nice to have enough to washup after a bath or have two baths. Currently to get the hot water we have the boiler has to run for about 4 hours, it does heating while it's doing that but that costs about 200euro a month!

Re: showers, we have 1 electric and another shower waiting to be fitted which if we were to go solar would not need to be electric.

My feeling is oil is only going to get dearer and at 200euro a month I feel i'm burning money for not a lot of hot water. To install a modern new boiler is going to be too costly. If I could get a solar system I'd be doing my bit for the environment and I'd have free hot water.
Thanks for the links, will check them out.

Oldtree

thats an aful lot of money to burn.

We have a firebird and about 1 hour heats the tank, Less if the emersion is switched on as well. It may be cheaper for you to heat your water with electric, or even to stick to electrically heated showers, or replace the emersion heated in the tank. I try to achieve a balance between oil and elec depending on the time of year. At €200 a month a modern boiler will pay for itself before you pay off the loan for it.

Check that you do not have an air lock in the system. Swith it on and wait for the pump to kick in and loosen the air valve on top of the tank. If you do have an air lock it would need to be bled regularly

Pataman

What sort of temp does the typical solar panel output? The reason I ask is would it be suitable to keep a shed heated by just running 1 panel with 1 rad inside the shed?

kerrymaninld

You can get water @ 50-60 degrees out of solar between late April and end of September. Solar space heating does work, but one panel won't get you very far, particularly when you need it most (i.e. in the winter). The solar space heating applications I know of in Ireland all have 8 or more solar panels. If you do go down this road you might consider a Hydrionic radiator (e.g. solo rad) to get more out of this.

Keeks

kerrymaninld wrote:

You can get water @ 50-60 degrees out of solar between late April and end of September. Solar space heating does work, but one panel won't get you very far, particularly when you need it most (i.e. in the winter). The solar space heating applications I know of in Ireland all have 8 or more solar panels. If you do go down this road you might consider a Hydrionic radiator (e.g. solo rad) to get more out of this.

Any links for such systems?

gorm

Keeks wrote:

Any links for such systems?

You could start here with their Solar heating products
https://www.rvr.ie/default.aspx?subj=news/NewsArticleList

Do-more

Keeks wrote:

Any links for such systems?

kerrymaninld wrote:

If you do go down this road you might consider a Hydrionic radiator (e.g. solo rad) to get more out of this.

http://www.lowenergy.ie/solo.html Suppliers list

Solo's should be able to provide you with useful space heating once the water temperature off your solar panels is above 34 deg C.

I'd suggest you contact them directly and they should give you the outputs and the water flow rates required so that you can size your solar panel requirements.

Pataman

thanks for the help guys, i will chase them up to see.