Solar Energy: Solar Water Heating Goes "Lite" (press release)

Saturday, July 02, 2005 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: solar water heating, solar power, renewable energy

https://www.naturalnews.com/013483_solar_water_heating_power.html

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The Los Angeles Air Quality Control Management has stated, "next to car pooling, solar water heating is the most cost-effective way to reduce air pollution." Each solar water heater installed saves about as much energy as an economy car uses in a year.

With 4 to 5 times the energy density of solar photovoltaic (PV), solar water heating has always produced the most solar power for the least cost. So why hasn't it caught on? There are several reasons but the big one may be its weight.

For over 30 years, the traditional solar water heater has been a big and heavy affair. An average 4 foot by 10 foot collector weighs in at over 150 pounds making it quite a chore to get up on a roof and to install. Many solar dealers just found it too much work to install solar water heaters. When energy prices rose, they installed solar electric "PV" systems without much thought to its more powerful cousin, the solar water heater.

SolarRoofs.com feels that with the much higher power density of solar water heaters, there is no need to make them bigger. The questions were asked: Why not make them a similar size to PV panels so PV dealers are comfortable with them? Why not make them easier to install and more attractive?

SolarRoofs.com thought the answer was in its 38 pound "Fireball 20-01 collector. At 20 square feet, it is one half the size and about one quarter the weight of a conventional collector. Being much easier to install, it is a popular collector. However, with its 12 foot length, it still needs to be shipped by costly freight. The 10-01 takes this concept one step further and makes solar water heating collectors truly easy to handle and ship.

In addition, SolarRoofs.com is the only company to offer 27 architectural trim colors and a clean design that is much less obtrusive on the roof. System integration, making the entire solar water heating system complete and pre-assembled, is a SolarRoofs.com specialty. This further contributes to the ease of installing solar water heating systems.

In the ever increasingly competitive PV market, SolarRoofs.com sees its lightweight solar products as a perfect complement to PV systems. It hopes that solar PV dealers will see the Fireball collectors cost to energy advantage as a way to gain a strong competitive advantage. It may soon happen that PV dealers will need to offer solar water heating to remain competitive.

The Really Big Picture
Solar Water heaters could reduce California's (and the Nation's) energy consumption by over 2% and do enormous good for it's economy and environment, now that's power.

A MACRO use of solar water heaters would not only reduce energy demand and pollution, but millions of them installed to supplement gas water heaters frees up large amounts of natural gas to be used to create electricity.

When gas use is reduced, the gas thus displaced is available to be used efficiently in gas turbines to produce electricity. Thus, albeit indirectly, solar water heating can be used to create very significant quantities of Electricity while cutting Pollution in half.

Solar Water Heating is ideal when combined with Photovoltaic (PV) panels. One 40 square foot solar system produces an average of 10kWh of energy per day, either by displacing electricity or gas use.

Solar water heating is the perfect complement to a Photovoltaic system because it can double, the energy output of an average 1 to 4kW system at a fraction of the cost.