Saving costs on Domestic Solar Water Heating Systems

Evacuated Tube Solar Collector, installed on Terrace Top at Neco SkyPark situated at Pimple Nilakh, Pune

Introduction
Treading the environment-friendly path, almost everyone is resorting to install solar-powered water heaters in their homes today. It is a positive step towards using renewable energy and the good news is that the payback period for it also around 4-5 years, whereas system life is about 10+ years. Please note that the cost of solar panels is subsidized by the Indian government to make it more affordable and bring the payback period down. The government site contains sufficient information on the topic www.mnre.gov.in/schemes/decentralized-systems/solar-systems/solar-water-heatres-air-heatingsystems/. I recommend visiting it once to get a better understanding of the solar systems and subsidies offered. There is a lot of debate regarding which type of system is better, i.e. Flat Plate or Evacuated Tubes. I will not get into that debate, but I will elucidate why I chose Evacuated Tube Collector (ETC) over Flat Plate Collector (FPC) System Also, we shall see how tweaking a few parameters of the system, can help us save on overall system costs.

Evacuated Tube Collector (ETC) v/s Flat Plate Collector (FPC)

1. Evacuated Tube Collectors occupy less space than Flat Plate Collectors. (Better efficiency per unit area) This can help save on expensive fabrication costs as well, which people normally ignore while calculating costs for solar systems. 2. Evacuated Tube Collectors provide hotter water than Flat Plate Collectors, in the same climatic conditions. The ETC system at Neco SkyPark provides water at 60C, despite the cloudy monsoon season, with little or no direct sunlight. 3. If hard water is used, scaling occurs. Cleaning/Replacing the FPC is much more cumbersome than replacing single tubes in the ETC.

What capacity system should one choose?

The government website recommends a family of 4 to use a system of 100 litres, which will cost about Rs. 15000 all inclusive. At home I have a geyser of 25 litres capacity. Our family of 4 uses about 50-75 litres of hot water on a daily basis. A geyser heats the water to a temperature of about 50-60C. To actually find out the volume of hot water used in an apartment, we connected a water meter in two apartment buildings at Neco SkyPark, over a period of 4 months. We found out that the average consumption of hot water during summers is about 35 litres per bathroom and during monsoons/winter is 50 litres per bathroom. A point to be noted is that the hot water temperature during summers was about 80C, while it fell to 55-60C in other seasons. This can also be interpreted as The volume of hot water consumed is directly proportional to the hot water temperature. For most systems, the hot water cut-off temperature is set at 60C. In my opinion, we should raise this maximum limit to around 80C. (Only if soft water is used for heating. For hard water, keep the cut-off temperature around the default 60C) This way, less hot water is consumed during mixing to achieve ideal bath temperature, thus saving hot water. This way, one can use a system of a lesser capacity, saving on wasteful costs incurred for an over-sized system. If one wishes to use hot water for solely bathing purposing, I recommend a system of 50-75 litres capacity for a family of 4. If you intend to use it for other household purposes, then choose a higher capacity accordingly. The payback period will only elongate if you purchase an over-sized system. By obtaining actual water consumption figures, we were able to redesign the Solar Heating System for our newly constructed buildings and made a saving of Rs. 10,000 per apartment, which translates to huge savings when aggregated over the entire project. - Rahul Ajmera, Project Manager, Neco SkyPark

Follow the Blog at: http://www.rahulajmera.wordpress.com/ http://www.rahul-ajmera.blogspot.in/ This blog is about practical methods of saving construction costs & time, based on my personal experiences at Neco SkyPark (www.facebook.com/NecoSkyPark) Hoping that individual buyers as well as builders will benefit from them. The author is a professional civil engineer, having graduated from IIT-Bombay in 2012. More about the author at http://www.linkedin.com/in/ajmerarahul