Domestic Hot Water

Water heating is the third largest expense in your home. It typically adds up to about 15 percent of your utility bill. For a typical U.S. home a family of four, each showering for 5 minutes a day, uses 700 gallons of water a week. Showers use up 37 percent of the home’s hot water, washing clothes takes 26 percent, the dishwasher uses 14 percent, the bathroom uses 12 percent, and sinks use the final 11 percent.

Solar water heaters have been around for more than 100 years. A solar domestic hot water (DHW) system can be the most cost effective solar investment you can make to meet your home’s energy needs. Evacuated tube heat pipe technology has made solar water heating systems even more efficient while making them easier and less expensive to build and install.

How it works

In the simplest terms, we use a collector to harness solar thermal energy in order to heat water. One or more collector units use evacuated tube technology to heat water that is circulated through a heat exchanger manifold at the collector and sent to a hot water storage tank. In cold weather climates where freezing is a concern a heat exchanger and antifreeze is used to transfer thermal energy to a storage tank filled with potable water.

A 110-volt pump circulates the water-glycol through standard copper tubing just like those found under your kitchen sink. An electronic controller-unit regulates the flow of solar heated water to the storage tank. The storage tank is used as an auxiliary tank that stores the preheated water that is feed to your existing electric or gas heated water heater tank. The gas or electric hot water heater acts as a backup to provide hot water when your solar system cannot.