wrote in message
oups.com...
Pet @ www.gymratz.co.uk ;¬) wrote:

I was contemplating a project for a long time in the future, and
stumbled upon an idea...

Our boiler MAN (ecohometec) can use pre-heated water to reduce/eliminate
required heat boiler input into DHW. Logical use of this is a Solar
heated water bank thing before the boiler. That's the easy bit.
Next idea was on Wind power. Our home is in an ideal location to catch
the SWesterly winds blowing up the Bristol channel see S.W. picture
he http://www.gymratz.co.uk/pete/sunset1.jpg

So, assuming I could get planning to erect a 2.5KW turbine, the ideal
scenario would be have the turbine feeding an immersion heater in the
heat bank (something like the following:
http://www.eco-hometec.co.uk/solar_cylinders2.html
So Solar by summer and wind by winter, but with the magical bit
happening when heatbank/store is satisfied....

Electricity being switched by tank thermostat and divered into ring main
as per usual method.

Can anyone see a possible flaw in my plan?
Currently we wouldn't be go the solar route as we only have East/West
sloping roof but that can be sorted with a future flat roof replacement
over the garage.

As it is, it's a "hmmmmm....." plan with much smaller things to be
sorted first, I thought I needed to get some thought on the idea before
I waste more time on theoretical pipe runs and Mast locations etc.
:¬)

Cheers
Pete


You can do things these ways if you wish, but in neither case will it
give you anything close to the best possible payback ie max energy
harvest from the equipment used. Solarthermal technology is at the
point today where it takes proper design effort to make a system that
can pay its way in the long term. Slap it together designs like this
just dont pay back.

Details:

First solar hw collector efficiency depends on water temp, the colder
the water being heated the more energy is harvested. So the idea is to
put them in the coolest part of the system where the output will be
useful. That means either heating the bottom of the hot tank /
heatbank, or running ufh, or using a solar preheat tank.

2nd windmill heating HW is using high price energy (electricity) to do
the job of low cost energy (oil & gas). This step alone divides your
payback by about 3.

3rdly, solar dhw just doesnt compare to solar space heating. Space
heating is much cheaper, more efficient, yields far more energy
payback, and costs in the region of a tenth the price to install. If
you want good payback, solar space heating is the way.

There are newsgroups with expertise on this stuff, alt.solar-thermal
and alt.solar.pv.



It is best he does what I suggest.