Go Solar! Get Free Hot Water From an Easy-to-Build System

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The collectors are mounted on a timber frame shed that’s located away from the house for optimal solar exposure. PHOTO: BRYAN WELCH

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For some homeowners, the adventure of installing cutting-edge energy technology is a treat. Handy folks with a knack for plumbing and carpentry love putting their skills to work and learning new tricks, creating a custom system that fits their precise vision. The rest of us would rather skip the adventure and opt for a proven system, such as the Sunward solar hot water kit that Country Home Products offers. With factory mounts and prefabricated components, this kit will allow you to enjoy long, hot and solar-powered showers in just a few weeks — without the challenges of designing and building a system from scratch. If you’d like some expert help with installation, you can even hire a certified installer.

 The solar collectors of the new Sunward system capture heat and transfer it to glycol-filled tubes. The glycol then circulates through a heat exchanger in the hot water storage tank. Some systems use water to carry heat from the collectors, but water would freeze in winter in some climates unless there were a mechanism to drain it each time the temperature fell below freezing. A glycol-based system can be used in a wider range of climates.

Country Home Products designed its Sunward system for versatile installation, too. Customers can choose to mount the collectors on the roof or on a ground-based frame. The roof-mounted frame lies flush with your roof, so you’ll need a south-facing slope, and your collectors will likely be a little less efficient than they would be on a ground-mounted frame (unless you have a steep roof ). The closer the angle of the roof matches the angle of the sun, the more effective the system will be.

If you want to mount your collectors in a frame, you have a choice between a weatherproof steel rack and a timber frame rack. We chose the timber frame option and enclosed it as a shed.

The first thing you’ll notice when the truck delivers your Sunward system is that it’s big. Packed on a wooden pallet about 9 feet long with a 4-foot-tall backstop, it can’t be safely unloaded in one piece. Pretty much everything you’ll need comes in the package, including the collectors, heat exchanger, mounting hardware, framing, connectors and glycol. To protect the components, make sure to tell the delivery driver to disassemble the package and unload the components one at a time. Even with a pallet loader, the huge package is unwieldy. After it’s on the ground, you’re ready to start the installation.

How the Solar Hot Water System Works

The most complicated aspect of the system is probably circulating the hot glycol between your house and the collector. Like many solar hot water systems, Sunward’s system is designed to supplement your existing water heater, so the heat exchanger and the 80-gallon hot water tank that comes with the kit need to be located near your existing water heater and tied into the existing tank (see photo in the Image Gallery). If you’ve chosen a roof-mounted collector, this means you’ll need to run glycol lines to the tank through the roof and the house. If you go with the ground-mounted option, you’ll need to bury tubing from the collector to the storage tank inside your house. Because the lines contain only glycol, you can lay them in a relatively shallow trench without worrying that they’ll freeze. Just be careful next time you plant a tree!

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