Green Living
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Solar panels for a boiler and hot water heater?
Okay, so we are thinking about buying a house that needs to be rehabed in the Detroit area. It's a fairly large home, and the price of gas is crazy expensive, and I wouldn't want to rely on electricity to heat this home. So we were thinking about putting solar panels on the roof, not only to save on electricity, but to also see if the hot water heater, and the boiler(because we would be using steam heat) could also run off the panels rather then hooking them up to the natural gas line? Is that even possible? Or are we just to have to bite the bullet and go the gas route and just have the panels for straight electricity for extraneous household use? TIA!
Re: Solar panels for a boiler and hot water heater?
DH has been reading about this recently and he said it's best to buy dedicated solar hot water heaters. Otherwise he read you'd have to get an average of 18 regular solar panels to generate enough energy to heat your water. And that's here in Hawaii with our sun.
I was just lurking, but we have a solar hot water heater. They come with boosters for those days when there is just NO sun at all.
When we first moved in, we didn't realize our tenants had left the booster on. The first quarter we used 175 kWh of electricity. Once we turned it off (and cleaned a few years worth of dirt off the panels) ... we used 0.5 kWh of electricity. The hot water comes out at almost boiling. I can fill an 8 litre pot with hot water from the tap and have it stove top boiling in under 5 minutes.
Yes, I live in Australia, but the last quarter was during our wet/cyclone season and we had more cloudy/rainy days than not.
Solar hot water panels would be the way to go. They have the shortest return on investment of any other renewable energy source. Depending on how much space you have in full sunlight you won't be able to heat much more than your water heater. Typically they are installed on the ground because they are heavy with all the water in them. Adding in a boiler is possible but will complicate the controls unless it is on a separate system.
The next best thing would be a geothermal system. They have better ROI than solar panels especially in MI. We replaced our inefficient fuel oil system with a high efficient geothermal heat pump and love it! It will completely pay for itself in 8 years according to my calculations and it cost $22K for a 4 ton 3 vertical bore system. The most basic solar panel systems start at $40K installed and will only cover a fraction of the energy your home uses.
The other thing you should look at is just insulating your house and sealing up as many leaks as possible. We took our attic from R-11 to R-38 and it paid for itself in less than two months. You can read about some of the stuff we've done so far to save energy here. We're also going to be adding more rigid insulation on all exterior walls when we reside the house. It will be a big pain but worth it in the long run!
I agree with FoxinFiji. I am a home energy auditor and I can't tell you how many times people call wanting solar installed while their home leaks like a sieve. Look for a Building Performance Institute (BPI) certified Building Analyst in your area. You can look up certified professionals on their website, www.bpi.org. Tell them what your goals are. They will direct you to the easiest, cheapest and most effective ways to seal your home. Then, once you have your energy bills as low as possible, you can put your money into solar thermal or solar electric. Solar thermal water heater will by far give you the fastest return on your investment. And you do not want to use solar PV panels to run an electric hot water heater.
The most common areas I find that homes are lacking are: insufficient attic insulation, leaky ducts and registers (seal where the register comes into the floor or ceiling), and leaky windows and doors (caulking where the trim meets the wall will do wonders).
As far as the solar thermal, most systems will have a back up to compensate for cloudy days. People have very elaborate set-ups to utilize the thermal energy, but overall you just want to eliminate as much electricity as possible for the hot water.