Solar panel hot water in winter

[PookieDo]

Hi, don’t know where is best for this

Does anyone else have this system? My gas boiler is not connected to the hot water system at all. I have solar panels on the roof for hot water. A day like today which is bright but cold my water is only 16 degrees - and I have no way of preheating it unless I get up and turn on the immersion on for half an hour/hour which is expensive, and no use when you want to shower-and-go!

Is there any solution to this which isn’t so inconvenient and annoying?

The cost of hot water heated by gas is very low. Why isn't yours working?

How much insulation is on your cylinder and pipes?

Sounds like an unusual setup. We have solar water with a gas boiler - in the summer we use no gas for 3 months, and at this time of year we are just starting to use gas to get the water temp up for showers etc. You have two separate tanks?

I confess to not fully understanding the system I have - it was here when I moved in and the instruction manuals are the installation guides so very technical

If I turn the gas boiler on to ‘water’ and turn it on, it never lights on the pilot so I am assuming that it doesn’t ever heat the water at all. If I put the heating on, the pilot lights and the radiators heat up.

I have one huge tank in the airing cupboard that has lots of wires and pipes. It has one display that doesn’t do anything except show me the temperature of the solar panels and the water tank. Even when I turned the immersion on earlier the tank still said 16degrees inside even though I could hear the water heating and it got hot

There are 2 other smaller tanks one red one blue I do not know what they do or what they are for!

I don’t know if I am doing something wrong!

I have a gas check booked for October so I can find out more then about the water. Maybe it is possible the boiler should be heating water but for some reason it is not

post as many photos as you can of the cylinder, pipes, cables and controls please

Thank you for looking I will try!

This is my boiler
The hot water function is on
But nothing happens

This is the big tank

More

This panel says T1 and T2 on it
As the day has gone on it’s got a lot hotter but this morning it was freezing

The panel with the solar system diagram might just be monitoring that. Ours is similar so it shows the temp of the tubes (was showing 60c earlier) but there's no relationship between that system and the boiler except the boiler only comes on if:
the timer for the water comes on
and
the water temp is below the temperature on the tank thermostat.

I can't read the panel on your boiler. but one of the knobs might be for boiler temperature. The boiler has to be set higher than the ambient temp or the boiler. What is the knob set to? If it is off or min, the boiler will not start.

That is what I assumed mine would do, the boiler would heat it when asked to because the tank was only 16 degrees but it doesn’t
Perhaps this is a tank problem but I am not sure they are even connected

The boiler temp is 60 degrees which is exactly what it goes to with the heating

Sorry the knob doesn’t have numbers on it you just turn it and the display changes. It changes up and down however you twiddle it then reverts back to the current temperature

I know PJ knows far more about this stuff than me but I wonder if your tank thermostat has been turned right down.

As a further point on the solar system, ours doesn't start pumping the water round until the pipes are over 40c so if your system has similar you may not be getting the solar heating either.

You've got the same system as we have.

My panel is currently holding my tank at about 45 degrees
so its odd that yours is so low before the equinox.

I keep my boiler turned off till the heating comes on and use the immersion if a topup is needed

but it sounds like the panel is not working right if its not chucking out hotter on a sunny day - air temperature does not affect it, only sunlight. Mine can do 25 degrees when its below zero outside

It’s not holding all night is one problem, if someone has one shower at night then there is no hot for a shower until the solar has heated more water over the course of the day

Does anyone know where I could find the tank thermostat? Is this something I could change myself or not?

The panels are on the back of the house, 2 large ones. The way the sun comes up and the direction of my house I don’t think they get direct light until later in the afternoon

All summer I have had no need for any gas and copious amounts of hot water. The last week or so I have noticed it’s struggling to get hot/stay hot and assumed it was the change in weather!

Showers in the afternoon are a fact of life with solar hot water.
What is shading the panels early in the day?

I live on a housing estate the sun is behind other houses when it rises at the front, then slowly it Comes over the back of the house lighting up the garden in wedges like a sun dial 😂
I don’t know whether this just means it takes longer to get going

It’s 55 in tank 1 and 44 in tank 2 now

Tank 1 is the top of the tank
Tank 2 is the bottom of the tank
A shower thermostat defaults to 38
you have LOTS of hot water

if its not staying warm overnight you may need to add insulation
but it should be built in.
(mine drops about 8 degrees over night)

An update to this is today the heating engineer tells me that the previous tenants had ripped off the thermostat and fiddled with it so that the water heats at the same time as the heating is on and never independently, It all needs replacing now

I worked until recently in the renewables sector, with a company that installs solar thermal panels for hot water among other products. I've never heard of a system like yours and I can only presume that your gas boiler should be programmed to kick in and heat the hot water tank when it doesn't make it to 50 degrees and something's gone wrong with the diverter valve or programmer or whatever. Looks from your last post as if this is the case and can be sorted fairly easily.

We have solar thermal panels on our house. You obviously can't expect them to heat your tank to 50 degrees or more at this time of year. Our problem this summer has been what to do with 300 litres of very hot water when no one wants a hot bath! Love my thermal: love walking into the plant room on a cold but sunny day and hearing it at work, warming up the tank. Even 10-20 degrees heated by the sun means the heat pump has less work to do.