Can I heat my house with the solar hot water system?
Yes, solar heating can be done but a seasonal storage system is required. In B.C., we heat in the winter when our solar resource is at its minimum. To overcome this you can either oversize the amount of collectors on your roof or increase your storage.
In the first scenario of over sizing your collector array, you develop a problem in the summer as to what to do with the excess heat generated by the large system. It can become an issue of inefficiency to continually dump heat from the oversized system in the summer.
The second scenario involves creating a thermal storage system (thermal mass) to store heat in the summer and shoulder seasons, and pull it out in the winter when you are heating. This can be combined with a heat pump, or gas boiler. The thermal storage must be sized to adequately store enough heat to make the system feasible.
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