Preheating hot water with solar in summer and wood in winter?

[nanama72]

Has anyone had any experience, without using a wood boiler, with how to preheat water for hot water baseboard/radiant heating systems in the winter? I believe you can preheat water for heating with geothermal or solar and then use that water for heating, but of course in New England in the middle of winter it might be hard to get those systems to do enough. Any ideas?

 

[steam man]

There better experts than me on this forum but I have a solar system planned for the near future. A solar heating system will work best with low temp radiant flooring rather than high temp baseboards. It is generally not recommended to design a solar system for 100% of your heat load since you will have to deal with the excess in the warmer seasons. There will be times when you just won't have sun for long enough periods so an alternate means of heat will be needed at times. I am looking at designing for 9-10 months of solar heating and then using wood/coal for the rest of the peak heating times. I may push the envelope a little more if oil prices continue to rise. You probably could do it all but the economics are hard to justify. I don't know about Geothermal. Isn't there a church in the middle of Boston that uses it?

 

[renewablejohn]

convertingtowood

very big in europe I would suggest going on the navitron forum which will answer most of your questions

www.navitron.org.uk/forum

 

[Telco]

You might find this link interesting. From the looks of things this guy is somewhere in the Rockies, up to the north, and says his system works year round. You'd need a backup source, of course, but should be able to heat primarily with solar year round. I hope the guy is being up front about it, because I'm banking on him being accurate and plan to duplicate his setup, with the improvements he recommended after running his for a year. He specifically addresses summertime overheating too, with suggestions to eliminate it as a problem.

 

[steam man]

Good sites mentioned. I think I could get close to year round heating with solar. Even where I live in northern ME we get plenty of bright sun. There are times when it will be somewhat "sunless" which will require a backup. I have 9 flat plate collectors but may go with evacuated tube since they can overcome the sun limitations somewhat better. I have a relatively large system planned with plenty of heat dump zone. One is a 26000 gal pool the other will be a 1200 gal heat storage tank that can dump into an uninsulated slab. Once the system gets big the dump zones better work.

 

[jim_n_nh]

You might want to check out this gentleman's system. I want to do a slightly larger version of this for my home.

(broken link removed)

Jim