New Homes Take Well to Solar Water Heaters

As with any other kind of solar heating, solar water heaters are at an advantage when planned for a new home, because the design can incorporate them efficiently.

In the passive house at lower right, for example, the water heater’s design benefited from the house’s design flexibility, and vice versa, to their mutual advantage. The dormer on which the collectors are mounted lifts the roofline of the house, allowing extra headroom in the second-floor family room behind it. The heavily insulated water-heater storage tank was positioned against the far wall of the family room, close to the collectors to insure efficiency of heat transfer, but also near the upstairs bathroom and directly above the kitchen, again allowing short piping lengths and a brief tap warmup period. Pipes from collectors to storage travel up through the dormer roof and down the inner wall between the family room and the bathroom, so any heat loss goes to the house, not the outdoors.

The house with the trellis was designed to use its efficient copper collectors for both space and water heating: solar-warmed water goes first to the solar tanks, then to the gas-powered water heater, which boosts the heat, if necessary. The hot water may then be drawn off for showers, laundry, and dishwashing, or it may be sent through a fan-coil device or baseboard radiators to heat the upstairs rooms of the house as required. At this point, the architect/homeowner concedes that he cannot expect to shower while solar- heating the bedrooms; but even tually he hopes to supply all his heat with a larger solar system.

Active Water Heaters: First-class for Retrofits

Older houses offer many obstacles to solar heating retrofits, but active water heating systems are just compact and adaptable enough to squeeze into some very uncompromising situations.

One of the two retrofits shown here (at lower right) includes an indoor hot-tub/whirlpool as well as the water heater. Water from the collectors on the roof above has arrived in the house as hot as 140°F. However, an installation error caused some early problems: due to a misplaced sensor, the differential thermostat gave no signals to turn the pump off. Consequently, water continued to circulate through the panels at night, giving off much of the heat accumulated during the day, and the backup electric heater was forced to take over. A simple repositioning of the sensor corrected the problem.

The second retrofit presented more design obstacles, but the installation went smoothly and the system performs well. Since the slanting roof offered no collector area, the panels were mounted on freestanding brackets on the flat roof peak, tilted at 45° from the horizontal and rotated to face true south.

The house was being remodeled at the time of the solar installation, making it easy to run pipes through the yet-unfinished walls, down to the storage tank.

This particular water heater was sold as a kit, including panels and 82-gallon tank complete with prepiping and insulation, mounting brackets for the collectors, and an instruction manual. An experienced handyman could install the kit himself, but to avoid risks these homeowners hired the manufacturers to do the installation.

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