Tankless solar water heater
Posted by Solar energy guru | Filed under Solar thermal solutions
If you have ever messed around with installing and fixing a traditional water heater, then you know the difficulty that you can have with the tank. One of the largest complaints that people receive is the problems with tanks rupturing or leaking onto their floors. One way to fix this problem and to save a lot of energy is to turn to a tankless solar water heater. This system is designed to heat the water as you are bringing it into the house through the use of solar power. However, this system does have its own set of pros and cons that you will need to look at before you decide whether or not a tankless solar water heater is the right way for your house to go.
For example, one thing many people don’t realize about a tankless solar water heater is that it only starts to heat the water when you turn on the faucet. This means that the water will have to run longer in order to get to the appropriate temperature, and this expenditure of water unnecessarily has made some people who have turned to the tankless solar water heater as a reliable green method of getting hot water a little bit hesitant. There are other specialized products which can help to eliminate the amount of water waste that you will experience, but they are an additional cost and many people do not always want to spend the extra money to help make a product work more efficiently.
Another problem that people have reported with the tankless solar water heater units is that the source of power to heat up their water is unreliable, and this causes some concerns. There is no guarantee that you will not need to get hot water at a time when the solar power cannot be used to heat it up (example, maybe there has been no significant sunlight for a few days), and if this is the case how will you have access to hot water to make sure that you can take a bath or wash dishes? The answer is that you will need to make sure that your system has a back-up power supply to the heating element so that you can have hot water no matter the temperature and conditions. It is for this reason that many people who do not live in the “sunbelt” probably would not find that the tankless solar water heater helped them out too much because they would be relying on the alternative energy source more often than not.
However, there are benefits to using a tankless solar water heater to help make sure that your energy costs are more efficient. This is because in a traditional tank system the cost to keep it heated takes up about twenty percent of a household’s utility budget. The tank will run day and night to make sure that all of the water in it stays at the appropriate temperature. This constant running of the water heater is sure to take a chunk out of any household’s budget.
By relying on a tankless solar water heater you are only heating up the water that you need at that precise moment, which means that the system does not have to run continuously to make sure that it keeps a certain amount of hot water heated. This saves on your energy bills, and with the combination of solar power and the tankless water heater you are cutting your energy costs back even further. This can be a significant amount of savings when you think about the twenty percent that it could cost you to run a traditional system. Also, it can be a large first step in helping to make sure that your home is running entirely on renewable natural energy sources.
