Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Simplest Split Solar System Ever?

As you may know, I was originally trained as a Solar Engineer (solar water and air heating).  In the early 80's, we learned a lot of things on our own because:

1.  Manufacturers supplied only components, not complete systems.

2.  Because every house is different, every installation is unique, causing mistakes and "issues".

In my opinion, the solar water heating industry has still not  matured.  Because systems currently cost too much, they aren't being installed as often as they should (which is on every house in the Denver area).  For high volume uptake to occur, NREL says the installed price needs to be between $1,000 and $3,000, not the $6,000-$11,000 that you typically find.

Recently, I've been back to learning things on my own, and collaborating with folks like genius Steve Baer.
Some of us have been working on solar system simplification.  One simple domestic hot water system that  has tested successfully is depicted in the video on YouTube below.   If your house has the right configuration, I can install this system for you for $1850-$2600 with a 5 year warranty.  It may be simple, but it requires some high tech to succeed.  The collector we must use has the lowest heat loss coefficient of any mass marketed panel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5rKLsJl3cY

2 comments:

  1. Nice! I wondered what that was on the side of your house -- looked like an overgrown piece of fence from my car...

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  2. Thanks Neighbor, it's just "temporary".

    ReplyDelete