Dynamic Energy - thermo dynamics?

[nameofanother]

Had a guy come to talk to us about the newest thing in solar panels (type thing!) Think he called them Thermo dynamic panels. They are the ones that don't rely on day light but on the ambiente temperature and apparently can provide hot water all year long.

We have solid fuel heating. Electric immersion heater for water. No gas in area.

We would like a way to heat more water without it costing the earth. We have quite a small water tank and although we can manage a few short showers per tank, in winter it can take such a long time to reheat when tank empties and I'm sure there must be a more efficient way to have a plentiful supply of hot water.

It is managable at the moment while dc are little but when they hit the teenage years there is no way our present set up would cope with the morning showers.

Any suggestions? Are these panels worth the 6k we were quoted?

if they are hot-water solar panels, they will heat your hot water cylinder, especially on warm sunny days but also (slower) on overcast days.

They are said to save about 50% on your hot water bill.

However, almost all your gas or electricity goes on heating. The cost of running hot water is very slight. For example my modern boiler and modern cylinder uses about 40p worth of gas per day to heat the HW. You can see that saving 20p a day would not be a good payback on £6,000

Take some accurate meter readings over a summer week and you will probably find your summer fuel bill is very small. It might not be as small as mine.

If you heat your hot water with a multifuel boiler, then the panels could save you the trouble of lighting it in summer. Except of course if you want to have two baths in the evening or morning when the sun does not have time to reheat the cylinder. If you top it up with an immersion heater it will be more expensive than using gas.

p.s.

If you have a small hot water cylinder... consider buying a bigger one. It will cost you far less than £6.000

You could have a (quick) immersion heater at the top for small amounts of water, and a (slow) element at the bottom to heat the whole cylinder.

If you have a solid fuel boiler to heat the house it presumably heats the cylinder too. Modern cylinders heat faster than old ones, and the supply could probably be pumped. Climaflex or similar on the hot pipes will cut wastage.

Thermodynamic panels are not technically solar panels but basic heat pumps. Works like a fridge or air-conditioning unit but the heat exchange is the other way round - they draw residual heat from the atmosphere, supposedly. The 'solar' claim got them registered with MCS for a while, but MCS withdrew the certification in September 2012, largely because there's scant data to justify the rather bold claims for thermodynamics. Try asking the company who came to talk to you to justify their price or provide a cost breakdown of components and installation, or give you a written payback period and generation calculation and I'm sure you'll find them very reluctant to put anything in writing.

We had a sales bloke try to flog us a thermodynamic system after we showed initial interest in solar pv panels - he tried to claim they were the same but better, although DP, an engineer with a renewable energy specialism, realised he was talking rubbish after a few minutes especially when we began avoiding questions about whether they had any data for efficiency. After about an hour of sales talk where we politely tried to get rid of him by saying we'd think about it, he pulled out a contract and a finance agreement and tried to get us to sign an application for £30,000 of finance and an installation agreement, offering us increasingly large discounts the more we refused!

We now have a biomass boiler (woodchip, automated) which feeds our central heating and hot water using accumulator tanks, one fitted with an internal heat exchanger which gives us instant hot water. Like you we're off the gas grid and were reliant on coal and oil before. Have you looked into biomass at all? www.microgenerationcertification.org/