Solar water heating for a home

Question

I live in NY. I have a huge south facing roof with direct sun(no trees). I have. Abig house 3200 square feet. I spend around 800 month in winter months for heating. I want to eliminate this by installing some kind of solar. What do you recomment? I see demos of evacuated tubalar solar heating. Looked good. But the salesman was not that good. Any thoughts? Any web sited? Any place that cab educate me? I been reading books for a month and still confused on the efficiancy and etc. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I researched this some time back and NY is not the best place for solar anything. Not saying it wouldn't work but I doubt highly it would be worth the money spent.

Answer 2

It is expensive. It is not only the cost of the solar panels but there is the cost of a large battery bank ,and regulators ,it use it with AC U will need a large converter.

   If U go that way be sure and mount it to stand 100 mph. winds. I learned that the hard way.

Answer 3

you didn't say what kind of heating you have in your home. If you have hot water heat, a solar collector unit would be much cheaper than PV panels, and would probably provide a lot of hot water for heating as well as showering.

a nice system is solar hot water collector under PV panels, gives both electric and heat.

Answer 4

Hello.  Great. and thanks for trying to do something great for the planet also.  For electricity solar please go to www.jointhesolution.com/goodlight and check out what they have to offer.  It is a newer company that has a great way to put a person into using solar panels for power without all the great up front expense.  Get back to me after you look this site over and ill have looked up another solar site that offers solar water heating.  I cannot remember it this moment but they had some really great ideas also and were very affordable.  Look it over and please let me know C.

Answer 5

I believe evacuated tubing is the premium technology for heating water.  Did the salesperson have something more efficient?  Or was it just that their company didn't sell it?

In your area, you will need to be concerned with winter freezing.  You can still get hot water in the winter, amazingly, but at night, the system can freeze under some conditions.  There are several kinds of systems, some made for no-freeze (like those used in Hawaii), light freeze (they have a relief valve for the occasional partial freeze), or hard freeze (made to be drained, in areas where it will stay cold even in the daytime in winter).

To avoid the freeze issue, is it possible that you just want solar air heating?  I've heard of systems that run air through collecting panels to heat it.

I'm assuming that you already super-insulated your home, which is by far the best way to save money on heating.