I want 100% solar.
I frequently get asked if a person can get 100% of their heating and hot water from solar. I always answer with a story.
Let’s say you need 500,000Btu (500kBtu) per day for heating and hot water in the dead of the winter. So, we size a solar system to produce 500kBtu on a clear day in February.
This means on Sunday we collect 500kBtu of energy and everything is fine. However, if Monday is rainy and cold, we don’t get any energy from the solar system. That means we have to go back to Sunday and double the size of the system to collect enough energy to cover Sunday and Monday. Well, what about Tuesday? It could be rainy and cold on Tuesday too. Back to Sunday we go and triple the size of the system to cover Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.
By the time your great uncle tells you about the blizzard of 1935 which lasted for two weeks, you have now increased the size of the solar system by 14 times and it costs more than your house.
Obviously, this is not the right approach. We need a different perspective. We need to think of solar energy as an irregular source of energy. We collect it. We store it, and we send it out to heating and hot water. When it is gone, we wait for some more and repeat the cycle. We can’t turn solar energy on in the middle of the night like a furnace.
Over the course of a year, we can collect and use a significant amount of solar energy. That energy directly reduces the amount of energy we have to buy from the electric, gas, or oil company to heat our homes and water. The utility bill at the end of the month tells the story. We are harvesting a free resource that reduces our energy expenses.
There are several key things this story teaches us about solar energy, some of which have been mentioned before. Solar is a supplement to a full capacity conventional heating system, whether for space heating or hot water. Solar reduces the energy used by the other appliances, thereby reducing total energy costs.
A little considered fact is that if the furnace only runs 60% of the time because of solar energy, it will last 40% longer. Not only does the solar system provide free energy, it extends the life of heating equipment by having them run less. This rule does not apply to water heaters whose their lifetime is based on rusting out, not whether it is running or not.
Solar energy is free, right?
Yes and no. Sunlight is free, unless you neighbor builds a 40 ft building next to your solar system, but that’s another story (see history of solar above). Yes, sunlight is free, but the equipment to capture and distribute it is not. That means solar is basically a capital investment for a “power plant”, with low operating costs. In many cases, a solar system will produce 2000 times the energy needed to run the pumps and controls.
Consider the typical water heater. It costs a few hundred dollars to buy and install, but a big chunk of change every month to run it. Solar costs thousands of dollars to buy, but small change to run it. Owning your own “power station” can be very rewarding and cost effective.
Over the years, customers from all over the country have called or emailed me for a replacement part, whether a pump, or control, or corrosion inhibitor for the tank. The following email is from one such person in Massachusetts. I got a chuckle from the comment at the end.
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Ben:
In thinking about the message I sent to you earlier today, describing my pleasure and satisfaction while pulling together a bunch of information about our project for the class I was asked to teach, it occurred to me that I never explicitly said 'thank you' to you for the elegant simplicity of the system you sold us by way of ASG in 1985. To those of us who have been through this, that message of appreciation can be discerned in between the lines in some of what I said to the kids about 'keeping it simple' but the truth is that I did not appreciate the importance of that elegance and simplicity at the time.
So, an explicit 'thank you!' for building a system so elegant and robust that it would function virtually without anything beyond routine maintenance (and not much of that) day in, day out, year in, year out through 20+ New England winters and summers, just dependably doing its job.
(Clearly, in the unlikely event that Holocene ever needs any testimonials, I'd be more than happy to oblige.)
--Chris
Christopher Wm. Smick
Covertlea
Pine Street
Medfield, MA 02052
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Another note from an HVAC contractor in Danville, VA
I will be glad to discuss the Astron system with anyone. I can even show them a 20+ year old system that is still going strong. My hot water heater sprang a leak a couple of months ago and I was so busy with A/C work that I did not want to take the time to change it, so I just by-passed it and we have had all the hot water we needed.
Don Gunnell, Progressive Energy Systems
Danville Virginia
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The little old lady in the mountains of Virginia
I got a phone call one day from an elderly lady in the Blacksburg area of Virginia. She got my phone number off the company sticker on her solar tank. When I answered the phone, she introduced herself, said she was 80 years old and had one of my solar systems, and it had quit working.
As a manufacturer, I didn’t have contact with most of the end users of my systems, so I have to establish some basic information to be able to help. I asked her how many collectors she had and she didn’t know. I asked her if she had just hot water or space heating as well. She said, “I heat my house with it and its not working”. I said, “OK, tell me how you know it is not working”.
She said, “I have a heat pump and when it runs by itself, the air coming out is not very warm. When the solar is working, the air coming out is much warmer. I haven’t felt that extra heat in a month and know the solar is not working”.
I called a friend who was a solar installer to go see her system. Sure enough, a control had gone bad and needed replacing. The lady was right!
There are several morals to this story. One is that there always must be a conventional heating system to carry the load when the solar system has run out of energy, or needs repair. This way, the owner always has hot water or space heating.
The second moral is about orphan systems. When the solar industry crashed in the late ’80s, there were many orphan systems with no support or maintenance. Many systems were removed when they quit working, even if a simple fix would get them going again.
Holocene is committed to full service on all Holocene solar systems. No more orphan systems!
The Plumber
The phone rang. It was a plumber in Arkansas who was having trouble with a small domestic hot water system he had installed. The collector pump got hot and wouldn’t pump. After discussing the system size and equipment, I said maybe a piece of solder had fallen from a pipe joint down into the pump and jammed the impeller. Indignantly, he said, “I am a good plumber, I don’t do things like that”. I asked if he had a hammer and he said yes. I said “are you next to the system”. He said “just a minute” and I could hear him clomping down the stairs to the basement. “OK”, he said.
I told him to turn the system on and take the handle of the hammer and bang it against the pump body several times. I could hear some mumbling, then bang, bang, whizzzz! “Golleeee!”, he said. A mother knows her own.
