Solar Home & Space Heating

Solar space heating is possible because of the high efficiency that solar vacuum tubes display in colder months. As such they are ideal for space heating for homes, garages, and workshops. The solar vacuum tubes are not affected by the outside temperature and as such capture solar heat even in the coldest of winters.

Solar pace heating systems can be designed to heat the home directly or they can be designed to work in conjunction with domestic hot water systems. The latter will provide higher paybacks as you can use the system to provide hot water in the summer when space heating is not required.

When designing a space heating system it is best if you can store of buffer the energy when not needed, this can be done with a large water tank but a concrete slab such as a basement floor also acts as a great storage buffer. Using solar energy directly without a storage tank of buffer means that heat energy will only be available during the day and a backup heating source will be needed for the evening.

Combo Solar Water + Space Heating

The best way to design a solar home heating system is to combine it with a solar water heating system. All our solar water heater's use a RESOL BS + controller that is able to monitor and operate two heating zones. The First zone is the domestic hot water and the second zone is the space heating zone. With a small investment in a 3-way diversion value you can easily control two zones.

The RESOL Controller uses a priority logic defined by the homeowner (hot water or space heat/pool). Whichever system is determined to have the priority will be loaded with heat energy until it reaches its set limit. At that time the RESOL controller will then activate the 3-way valve transferring the solar energy to the 2nd zone. If the 1st zone drops in temperature, the controller will switch the 3-way valve back to that priority zone.

A combination hot water space heating maximizes the home owners investment in solar. You can easily expand the systems performance by purchasing more solar collectors. NOTE: Covers or a summer heating zone such as a pool may be needed if you over size the system too much as no winter heating zone will be present in the summer.

Types of Heating Integration

Solar heat energy can be transferred to virtually any type of heating source via a heat exchanger. Some popular heating zones may be:

2^nd Solar Heating Zone

Any solar heating zone can be done directly or with storage. When using storage you have the advantage of releasing the energy as needed such as the evening. Without storage all the solar energy is released during the day when the sun out. In most cases customer will want to store the energy for later use. This is done by utilizing the water tank as both the potable domestic water source and the solar energy storage. Special Solar Water tanks are used that have two heat exchangers a top and a bottom. The solar is transferred though the bottom heat exchanger heating up the water for use by the household. The top heat exchanger can be used to pull the heat out of the tank and transfer it to any location in the house, shop, pool, or snow melt zone.