Solar Home Heating-  This topic receives the most enquiries from our customers.  As such I thought I might expand on this subject an open up a new blog topic dealing with solar home heating.

Solar home heating is very feasible especially with our TZ58-1800 30R heat pipe collectors that operate with high efficiencies in the winter even at minus 40 they produce hot water!   When desigining a home heating system in freezing climates you will need to use glycol water mixture as you heat medium and use heat exchangers to transfer the heat to your home heat source.  

You can integrate solar heat with an existing water boiler or an infloor heat system simply by placing a heat exchanger before the return supply line.  In this way the solar acts as a pre-heat, heating the water before it enters the boiler reducing the amount of energy the boiler must supply.  A home heat system can also be used by placing a heat dissipator (air to water heat exchanger) in the return duct work on a forced air furnace.  What ever type of heating system you have solar home heating can be integrated as a supplement.

A home heat system should always be used in conjuntion with another demand zone such as domestic hot water or solar pool heating.  This allows you switch zones to avoid over heating and manage your supply and demand.  Our SDS with the Resol BS/plus controller is ideal for a two zone home heating sytem.

An average 1600-2000 square foot home will require about 4 x TZ58-1800 30R collectors and a complete system with domestic hot water zone will cost approx $8500 with two zones.  However the payback can be substantial and a home heating system is elligible for the federal grants which can further decrease the payback period.  When comparing paybacks to other heating sources such as Geo Thermal, solar heating has a significant advantage in that as energy cost rise, its payback gets shorter.