She mentions Just have a think at the end. There's another channel called skill builder, who has a video on heat pumps in UK. I'm glad I watched it for a balanced view
Sounds good but I disagree about water being a problem. I am off grid for 13 years we have solar power but also solar heater that runs on water. I live in the mountains so we get very cold below freezing at times. The reason it doesn't freeze is we use antifreeze coolant that's designed for cars. Never had a problem. So that is one problem solved. The second problem mentioned is it holds the heat when it goes through the panel so it's hot at the top, that can be solved by using a faster pump. They are just some thoughts on this.
I agree, I don’t understand how his system is any different besides the distribution of cooling medium(air) which can also be used with distribution of water in similar manner.
Heat distribution in the panel could also be fixed by changing the shape of the piping to circulate between the panel areas before exiting to the central systems. A 3rd option, independent of pipe layout is to use the coolant of an attached heat pump directly, thus avoiding energy losses in transferring heat out of air or water into that heatpump.
I absolutely love how you accurately present all of the information needed to understand these topics, while also being enthusiastic about the opportunities to make more informed choices...something you facilitate greatly with each video you produce.
As a Canadian viewer, I'd say seasonal storage is key. Right now wood is my winter fuel but I am interested in making better use of my solar array to reduce wood needs. Insulation and dry wood make a massive difference but that in ground heat battery with a heat pump look pretty sweet too! Hydrogen, biogas and in ground heat batteries are all on my mind but so far efficient wood use is central for me where I live in the bush. I cut the dead wood to reduce potential forest fire fuel. In the city where there is little wood and lots more sun, I think I would have installed a heat battery or hydrogen system already I do keep thinking though, what would be possible if all patents were released? It seems like many great solutions are hidden from the public
The only really viable storage formats for energy between summer solar power and winter consumption are either pumped hydro, if you have a lake and a hydro plant. Or a bi-directional fuel cell and hydrogen. Assuming that you have plenty of panels, so conversion efficiency isn't a big issue but that long term storage is the absolute requirement I'd go for a hydrogen cell.
Thanks for a nice program. Now I feel the urge to climb up on the roof with my leaf blower (battery electric) and cool my PV panels to see if it differs. ;) One more note, here in Sweden we have snow covering the PV plant so we have absolutely 0 kWh in some winter months. Our plant is still going strong after 10 years. Fantastic invention.
here's an idea...could you not used to grid electrictity to blow some hot air through a sunovate like system which would in turn melt the snow/ice on your panels? thus reudcing the need to get up onto the roof to clear any snow.
Over 30 years ago I visited 2 homes, one near lake Tahoe, and the other in chilly Montana. Both homes at that time took less than $100 to heat, versus the $500-$700 average. Both were built with 3 times the insulation building codes required. Obviously,, insulation is as, if not more useful for reducing both heating and cooling costs. And it costs less than a heat pump using earthen piping.
Yes, it's called super-insulation. Add thermal mass and you have little need (comparatively) for heating/cooling. The interior is kept at a constant temp of your choice. Why it's not the world paradigm is a mystery to me.
When it comes to district heating you should have a look at places like Austria (the city of Graz for example). Basically the entire city is connected to the network and a big chunk of the heat is waste heat from industry which is usually just lost in most places around the world. Places like Vienna also started to implement district cooling. Those are much more efficient solutions than having every household install an individual heat-pump (which usually needs to be replaced every 10-15 years) and further straining the grid.
I also love district heating, that's how my city was heated when I lived in Denmark and it was so cosy and cheap. One of my first ever videos was on that topic acutally: ua-cam.com/video/F3mC_TaJk2U/v-deo.html
Many cities that relied on district heating generated from the waste heat of fossil fuel power stations and industry. With these power stations closing municipalities are scrambling to find alternative. This is what this sector is so exciting for us.
Finland also uses a lot of district heating. I believe we currently have ten functional waste incinerators that are connected to district heating and many more that burn (mostly wood based) biomass. Those waste incinerators have the added benefit of reducing the amount of waste we export. Actually once Vantaa's new waste line is functional the amount of exported waste should be reduced by more than 60%. I mean why pay for others to accept your waste when you can burn it for energy? Even more you can use the byproducts in construction. Similarly most of the byproducts (mostly ash) from biomass burning end up as fertilizer. Granted most locations still also use a bit of coal, biogas, peat and LNG - at least as a backup. For example in my hometown they produce 98% of heat from biomass. That being said only some districts are covered by it and for example I live outside district heating despite living rather close to one of the town centers. I have two heat pumps though as I replaced oil heating with an air to water heat pump two years ago and already had one regular heat pump. Those are pretty common here along with GHPs.
We did a project at uni recovering heat from PV back in 2005/6. I'm amazed that it's taken this long to recognise the benefits of doing so. Still more surprised that we are at the prototype stage still. I guess it comes down to cost over benefit as opposed to technical feasibility.
I don't think it took very long for engineers to realise the benefit (your uni was obviously aware some time ago), it has proven tough to commercialise so far though. Lots of reasons but I think the way that renewable energy incentives are set up is a big part. They usually only incentivise generating renewable electricity and not ways to use less electricity or to create renewable heat directly. Probably there are other reasons too!
Andy, we come up against the hard fact that gas has been heavily sold as an environmentally friendly fuel and its relatively cheap. Worse still it can be made cheap to keep a customer when competition appears. Globally renewable heat targets are just starting to be addressed so this should change the market dynamic as it did for renewable electricity. PVT also straddles the PV and solar thermal markets which have historically been battling for market share and roof space.
Here in the Netherlands I use the SolarFreezer system. It uses a collector, locked in behind the solarpanel. In my crawlspace I have a " balloon" filled with water. These waterstores are connected via a heatpump. It heated my home throughout the winter without a glitch. It's been running since December 1st so I Just got It installed . It cost just as much as a new EV. But with the savings for heating and cooling a EV is not far away.
Hi @@cclambie , The balloon is the thermal buffer and is charged by the PVT, and the control unit decides to use the PVT or the balloon as a source for the heatpump. Lowest COP till now was 5,3 (February) . December the pump was learning our usage with a COP of 5,6. I must note here that December 1st I filled the balloon with water of 12°C. It started January with 6°C. Maximum temperature of the balloon is set at 25°C. The kicker of this system is that is also has the ability to be used as an Ice storage system. It's to long to dive in to that here. Long storie short. U can keep pulling heat out until it freezes solid. And this way u have an ice block to cool our home later in the year. Because of the cost I opted for the balloon instead of concrete stores underneath my driveway.
@@cclambie No I haven't. Not really my thing. I just wanted to comment on the PVT topic raised by Rosie. There are a few videos on YT. Two of them are from a guy that didn't have the luck I had . His system doesn't run as it should. He made a video about it. Search for SolarFreezer and you'll find it
This is great! Thanks for posting. One thing that would be great to explore is the financial aspect. I find it a mystery that banks and contractors are so slow to adopt green energy. One would think they would be all over it. A house with solar panels and heat pumps is more expensive, but it has a lower lifetime cost of ownership. So the bank gets a bigger mortgage, the contractor get a s bigger contract, the only loser is the utility. You would thing greed alone would make bankers take notice. Thanks for being there. Keep up the good work.
I think the financing of home energy efficiency/electrification is going to be really important over the next decade. It's my understanding that most people who can't afford the upfront cost have to use high interest loans rather than being able to simply put it on their (lower interest) mortgage. I am starting to hear about some innovative financial products that will give good terms and allow homeowners to pay it off using their energy bill savings, so they're never out of pocket. We need much more of that! I'm reading The Big Switch by Saul Griffith at the moment, and chapter 10 is devoted entirely to this topic. I like how Saul puts it in his book: "It's not a fix if only the wealthy can afford it. This isn't some bleeding-heart socialist observation. All the emissions have to stop, not just the rich ones." I am trying to get Saul as a guest on a livestream soon, if I succeed I'll be sure to spend time talking with him about that issue.
@@EngineeringwithRosie what we need is is the same as been done in the past I don't know how your country or others have or even how the eastern provinces did but I know that get electricity outside of the big cities was very expensive so lighting was by oil or gas lights cooking was wood or coal same as heating those in smaller towns and rural areas started going to produce their own with home generation systems here in Canada one popular system was Delco they made a 32 volt system the generator was usually gasoline and for extra power supply you could put up a wind charger power was stored in 16 large 2 volt batteries tied together to make 32 volt as long as the wind blew enough theyd keep the batteries topped up and when there was no wind and the batteries were low you started the generator which meant you couldn't leave your home alone for any longer than a day or two so the province provided low interest or government backed loans for them to set up cooperatives who then run all the lines in their areas part of joining the cooperation was the ability to get a low interest loan to pay for the cost of home conversion and hooking up to the power lines and power was available to almost any homeowner rural or small town it was interesting that the big power companies like Edison and General Electric only were interested in the mega city's business sector for other smaller cities like Calgary Edmonton medicine hat and others they formed their own power companies Calgary formed Calgary power and water hydro electric dams were built I don't know which was first but there was one at spray lakes one at Sebe another created ghost lake then Bearspaw dam each had other customer bases Spray lakes provided power Banff and Canmore Ghost lake also powered the towns between it and Calgary now we see government subsidies for going to renewable or green initiatives but the problem is that unless you have the ability to cover the rest of the cost it's useless it would be like if the government had just given subsidies to put in power to the areas without power for a homeowner who was 10 miles from the power supply to come up with 10 grand or more to hook up it would have been to much to pay for the convenience of having power on demand rebates the only one's that can and will use them are those who are environmentalists and have money or credit to burn in Canada the liberal government has brought in a carbon tax to get people to freeze in the dark and walk or take public transit they need to give homeowners the ability to go green with low interest loans it's not like they are losing tax money but deferring it subsidizes would also be helpful for a lot more people if they did it like the old Concervative Government did when they wanted to look green the homeowner would get an energy audit on their home all areas were looked at separately walls below and above grade roof windows and doors furnace and hot water heater all were listed for were they at for efficiency and were they needed to be how much subsidies were available the owner then got 3 quotes to bring them to the new specifications and the subsidies were based on an average of the 3 a customer I worked for had the audit done and got 3 quotes on the attic to bring it to the new standards from R 10 to R60 all were around 3200 dollars and that wasn't worth it as he didn't know how long he would keep the place before selling it and it wouldn't add to his sales price and he didn't want to pay the 150 dollar price for the energy audit so he called me since I know insulation companies I ask him if the quote included insulation stops to allow air to flow into the attic from under the eaves he checked and they told him he'd have to ger someone else to do it so we took the measurements to the local lumber yard we figured best chance to meet the goal was cellulose insulation blown in so they figured out how much we would need and the cost to rent the machine to blow the insulation in he paid for the insulation and the delivery charges and the morning of the delivery we went back to the store and rented the blower brought it back to the house and set it up when the material arrived he fed the machine and I operated the hose in the attic I had already installed the air dams 4 on each side of the house. after we were done we will got a 2nd audit. audit and found we had not only met our R40 target but actually had R60 he was eligible for over 8 hundred dollars rebate and both audits rebated total costs for the insulation machine rental and my labor was under 700 dollars so you could say he either got paid for his labor or he made money to upgrade other areas did not justify the cost of upgrading unless he was planning to stay for 10 years or more and his reason for buying the house was to provide a home for each of his children while in university and one was already done another was halfway done and she last would start shortly and be done in four years and he hadn't decided if He and his wife were going to retire and live in the same place they were at or move to the house as after the last child was gone they wouldn't need a big four bedroom house
@@EngineeringwithRosie There are plenty techniques to produce clean and cheap energy not worth measuring. The problem is that the "powers that be" have kept those ideas away from the public .... If you are interested you may read about Thorium LFTR (see youtube presentations). An intrinsically safe, low pressure, high efficiency nuclear process that can produce enough energy for planet Earth for ten thousand years. The energy equivalent of 1 kg Thorium = 10 million kg oil ....... Think about that. Forget windmills and solar panels .... It is time that people wake up and inform themselves ....
Maybe it's because solar/off-grid solution companies include various smaller companies who could go bankrupt, etc, and thus represent an additional risk factor for financiers to worry about? I haven't heard of many homebuilders/developers who include the solar/etc as part of the upfront build cost of the home, although perhaps in those cases the banks may treated it differently, when it's part of an overall bundle.
Hi Rosie, I live off grid in Canada and I love your channel! One of my solutions for reducing my electricity need in winter is to have my freezer outside in the shade of my woodshed and I just unplug it in the winter. I have lots of power for it in summer and on warmer winter days. That seasonal storage looks really good to me. The coolant here would not be water, it would be glycol with a heat exchanger to make hot water and so it wouldn't freeze in winter. Wood heats my home and hot water and my floors now too! Winter is too long here to rely on a heat pump for Dec-March but charging an in ground heat tank during summer could certainly shorten the amount of heating needed.
I was planning to do something similar, but with closely packed copper pipe right against the underside of the panel close enough together to cool the panels and capture as much thermal energy as possible. Then transfer the heat to a concrete lined pit filled with sand using coiled PEX using thermosiphon. Sand is really great for storing heat long term. From what I have read they heat multiple homes and businesses that way in Scandinavian countries.
From a maintenance perspective hot air is a great idea. I have evacuated tube solar for hot water, and it's a massive pain in the butt. In -20C winters in Canada, even antifreeze will gel and prevent circulation which, somewhat counter-intuitively causes the panels to overheat, overpressure and vent steam. And when a pump fails on a bright sunny day that's just a barrel of fun.
this is a brilliant, simple idea. There is a significant nuber of people in the American Southwest (California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas) that could benefit from this idea (more than 100 million people).
Rosie, in horticulture they irrigate pot drippers in a parallel grid so that every pot plant gets the same amount of water. Surely PVT water cooling can do the same so every solar cell is equally cooled. Also. The time of year mismatch isn't a mismatch for horticulture or even households, you could use excess hot water to kill weeds or do other some other useful work. Tractor towed steam weeders have been experimented with as a alternate to chemicals. Seems like there might be some real possibilities for PVT in horticulture.
‘Just Have a Think’ had a video about regenerative agriculture that had arrays of panels that protected crops that would benefit from some shade. Going from memory here but it seemed like a win-win.
Hi Rosie, nice to hear about this progress and testing. I disagree with a comment that I heard in your discussion. If we look at a simplified electrical power system, broken down into generation and distribution. Distribution will continue to come up in discussions due to its limited capacity, high costs, and the higher losses associated. But as our costs of generation approach zero costs, the overall cost of distribution of that power will be overcome by the localization of the generation. We. need to move quickly to focus on solar with appropriate storage systems that have the capacity to almost completely overcome the bottleneck of distribution.
One of your best, though of course like Australia here in Florida (US) is mild and cooling is the primary concern so heat pumps do well though maybe with PV this could be used for heating water with heat pumps between the PV cooling exhaust and the water (obviously an optimization must be performed to see what balance would be needed in sizing such systems).
Yes, it has a very different potential in mild climates than in northern Europe and Canada. I think in really hot places the advantage would be in efficiency gain of the PV and improving longevity of the panels. But I expect we'll see this rolled out first in places like Scandinavia where district heating and seasonal thermal storage is already a mainstream thing.
Hi Zhu, as we have relatively mild winters we can use the heated air directly off the panel for space heating and at summer from night radiative cooling. We can reach domestic hot water temperatures in Summer if required. In wintertime we need some boosting time to time. In these cases we are using a simple top of tank electric resistance heater. In colder climates we leverage more on the air source heat pump option.
@@glenryan6692 A heat pump will heat the tank using less electricity than a resistive heater. They are usually sold with a sticker stating the improvement factor.
Absorption AC and refrigeration, that uses a heat source to provide the energy for cooling. And phase change heat batteries. Seems like the most universal way to use the excess heat. IMHO
... Or divert some of the solar power to run a 12V DC heat pump. Sounds like a waste of part of the PV output but it would more than pay for the energy it used. I do not have the intuitive expertise to his whether that would come or better or worse than using a great driven heat pump. A second thought leading on from that: They make fridges for motor caravans (residential vehicles) that run off either 12V or bottled gas or both. (That's butane or propane, not gasoline!) The ones that run only off 12V tend to have compressors, but if it takes gas as a the only fuel, or as an option, then it almost certainly uses heat to drive the heat pump. That's useful if DIY folk wasn't too repurpose one to run of the waste heat from the PV, to investigate whether the waste heat is hot enough to drive the pump. Problem might be that it is designed to be heated with a flame, not heat at maybe only 10C above ambient on a not-so-sunny day... Again I don't have sufficient expertise to know if this is viable. I would appreciate your thoughts on either of these ideas @Rosie or any experienced A/C designer
That is absolutely right! There are verrrry specific requirements for PPE and especially boots when you want to climb wind turbines. And fun fact, the certification differs from country to country so I have about 4 pairs of safety boots to suit all the places I've climbed.
8:27min This is the elefant, this question is relevant! Thank You! In my point of view, a combination of hydrogen storage for about four weeks (!) and wind power can help for the seasonal changes.
If you use water cooling, instead of a Serpentine coil use a single pipe per row of cells with a supply and return header to keep the temperatures consistent.
I was in the US Navy in 1976 and Mainly Buildings were still WW2 era structures My personal experience saw all of those buildings were connected through a very large complex steam heating system that were Asbestos wrapped piping that were above ground. So main boilers supplied the heat to the whole base through those large Steam Pipes I also remember homes using radiant heating and cast Iron radiators to heat each room in a home. So Old is now New again
Now we need a system which can be combined with the existing panels already on the roofs. So a "cabinet" in which the existing panels are placed and the panels are 'cooled' and that energy is being used. Ofcourse the retrofit should be commerically viable and be done by lower schooled technicians due to the lack of high schooled technicians. just a thought.
This would be possible, and it's something I talked about (off camera) with Glen. At this stage Sunovate's scale up and cost reductions are very important to the success of the company so standardisation is key, so I think that's why they're not going down that route right now.
I haven't tried it but it looks like just paneling over the back of the frame & adding forced-air junctions (possibly in the corners) would be a simple retro-fit. I don't know how you avoid the electrical junction box being a hot-spot & degrading the whole panel though.
@@EngineeringwithRosie I'm thinking a cheap modular system could be based around domestic guttering & downpipes as interconnects between plain sheet-metal backings on the solar panels (possibly with foamed polystyrene insulation) & then off to whatever plant extracts the heat. The backing panels would be hole punched across the ends & guttering glued over the holes with maybe silicon rubber or Sikaflex. Bends, 'Y' pieces & jointed pipes are available in a reasonable range of sizes.
Hi Rosie, In my view, Proper isolation of the housing is a key to the shift to renewables heating. it helps reduce the need for heating or cooling that would already reduce the size of teh elephant in the room.
I agree one million percent! I have never understood why most of the world has not managed to improve energy efficiency more as a key part of climate change action. It's by far the cheapest way to reduce emissions (and often has negative costs). I believe it's largely due to split incentives. I worked briefly in building energy efficiency (about 15 years ago) and the energy audits my company would do always identified a number of potential efficiency projects that would have an economic payback of 6 months or less. And they very rarely got done unless they wanted to rent to government tenants (who had a minimum energy efficiency rating they required). That's because otherwise there was no incentive for them to take on a new project. They bill the tenants directly for electricity consumption, so why add to their workload to save someone else money? Such a stupid situation.
@ Engineering with Rosie I have some experience dealing with property management firms and they get paid on the basis of a percentage of the expenses. Reducing expenses reduced their fee. Their incentive to keep costs low so that tenants could remain profitable and thus paying the rent (long term thinking) was outweighed by the reduced management fees today (short term thinking). Most commercial tenant’s associations are run by the tenants that actually take an interest and they may not be that sophisticated (not deriding them) in accounting. Hardly any tenant ever looks at the statements provided by the property management group. At the mall where I had a business I noticed in the summer that the lights in the parking lot were coming on at 3 PM when it didn’t get dark until 9 or 10. I asked where the timers were and the answer was nobody knows. After continually raising the issue the management company installed lights that only came on when it was dark. At a marina I was asked to figure out how a programmable timer worked for the lights. I was very impressed with the little gadget they had purchased. Rather than having to continually adjust the timer all I had to do was enter the latitude of where we were (Canada) and the program would adjust for seasonal changes on a daily basis. Someone put a lot of thought into that programmable timer!
@@mikedavison3400 I have seen this perverse outcome with some of my clients. Even worse the building/facility owner's procurement practices were so bad intentionally to drive a bigger cut of the energy bill. These practices need to be outlawed.
Thanks Rosie, excellent video. I too have been considering a similar idea of collecting renewable heat from a house or townhouse's attic using a heat pump coil and fan located in the attic, then running the refrigerant down to a Hot Water Heat Pump (HWHP). In essence I'd decouple the fan and coil from the compressor and tank of a HWHP. Locate the fan and coil in the attic (being careful to ensure friable insulation is not air-born by covering it with an additional layer of paper faced insulation to ensure it doesn't end up in the fins of the coils) run the refrigerant lines to the compressor and tank which would be located in the house. This idea could be coupled with Sunovate's solar panels. Alternatively skylights could be installed in the attic to improve the productivity of the HWHP. In my climate (Canada) we need lots of heat and the cooling of solar panels is less of a challenge, especially in the winter, snow cover is a much larger issue (would adding heaters to the Sunovate panels to melt snow be worthwhile?). Our heating requirements are typically 70 to 80% of the house's energy load with 3/4s of that in space heating and 25% in water heating. Other advantages of using the hot water tank in a HWHP is that the solar energy can be stored for over night (a cheaper thermal battery than an electric battery). Additional HWHPs with this arrangement can be installed for space heating. In Europe there is a thermal storage system by Latento that combines Phase Change Materials (PCMs) with a water storage tank for more compact thermal storage. Or perhaps it makes sense to couple this with a ground source well and store excess heat in the ground (like the Bore Hole Thermal Energy Storage systems mentioned in the video). Lots of opportunities to optimize a solution for these ideas.
Hi Rosie, I have considered this idea before. My initial thoughts are the most heat is on the top of the cell. So why not box in the heat on the top as well? You can add a glass or clear plastic cover and blow the air across the top of the panel. To even up cell heat distribution you could create channels across the panel, maybe blowing the air in alternate directions, one channel one way the next the opposite way. Or an alternating direction, continually revering every minute. André in Sydney
Living in ipswich Qld, my winters are reasonably mild compared to other places. So for me the benefit of this system would be the increase in electrical output of the system. The real holy grail would be the creation of panels that turn infrared light into electricity. Then these panels are then sandwiched with traditional pv panels
Watched this video after the Just Have a Think video. I'm amazed you both realized you were talking about the same thing before the videos were posted! Well done!
There are a few houses built with seasonal heat storage. Some underneath the house in sand. It is close to geo/ground-thermal heating. It is a system I'd like to incorporate into my own house, just to try it out.
While district heating overcomes storage issues it will often not be available. Another option is to store heat in the building structure if direct space heating leads to overheat the building. This process changes the time of delivery of the heat by radiation and convection from storage. The storage site could be actively warmed using air in hollow bricks or in slabs with air ducts or water pipes in place, and passively discharged. Alternatively, phase change salts in tubes can increase the energy density of storage. Using the heat for hot water in the summer would make use of at least some of the heating and venting the excess heat could pull cool air through the building for cooling.
Early refrigerators ran on kerosene, and people still use refrigerators that burn propane or butane. The flame size required to run a medium sized fridge is only about 25 mm in diameter. This being the case, it would seem to be doable to use extraneous heat from cooling solar panels to produce cold air for air conditioning.
So we are totally off grid in Andalucía, Spain. We have 22 x 300W solar panels, 34Kw lithium batteries and 2 Toshiba Estia Air to Water heat pumps. Together with our Victron system providing electricity, cooling and heating to a 420 sq metre house was expensive. I was aware that the efficiency of the panels dropped exponentially the hotter the day was. When it was under 25°C the batteries were filled by noon. During this blistering hot summer when air temps were mostly above 40°C, our batteries were struggling to fill by 4pm! Granted we were running the underfloor cooling for longer. So initially not to incur another expense immediately by changing our panels to those described in your video, do you think that because our panels are mounted on an aluminium frame at ground level (we can walk under them), we could fit ordinary air fans that blow over the underside surface of panel and this would help improve the efficiency of our panels? I’m going to pose the same question to “Just have a think”.
Thanks for the video Rosie: Can this heat be harvested economically to drive a Stirling Engine for generating electrcity? Or maybe we should look at using the walls and floors of concrete basements to store heat at least during winter months (I am in Canada)? There is also the application using this heat for drying clothes in winter?
I live just north of Okotoks Alberta in Calgary, I had no idea it was a high tech heat storage as well as PV in Drake Landing.. Thanks, going to subscribe, like, etc. I got your channel from "Just have a Think"
Mass thermal storage has fascinated me for a while. I had an idea of burying 1 or 2 IBC containers and to heat that water through a summer season and then with internal heat exchangers use that for base heating in a house.
If you use water, which is a good choice, you can calculate the capacity quite easily. The specific heat capacity of water is roughly 4.2 J/g/K, which means if each IBC container has a ton of water you can store 4.2 MJ/K per container. If you manage to heat you tanks to 100 °C, and consider anything above 20 °C useful energy their capacity is 336 MJ per container. That's ~93 kWh, per container. But, without fantastic insulation most of that heat will be dissipated long before heating becomes an issue. It can, best case scenario, probably delay the need to start your heating system a day or so. Also, heating that much water to 100 °C would require something like solar concentration, or active heating/heat pump or some other type of input other than passive collection of excess heat. The energy between 65 °C to 25 °C is much more realistic assumption for calculation of usable energy without heat pump the day after you stop collecting heat, which is half the energy, ~47 kWh/ton of water. Seasonal mass thermal storage needs a ridiculous amount of mass to be meaningful, and cost essentially nothing per kWh of storage capacity. ~0.02 IBC tanks and work and everything required to harvest, and insulate, and retrieve that heat per kWh per year is way too much investment to be worth it for the energy alone. Add personal interest, and it might be worth it, just don't expect such a system give savings to pay for any "large" investments when cycled once a year.
@@fishyerik I think something like that would go with cutting edge housing using best you can get insulation and only be expected to heat perhaps the first 5-10 degrees. I would not expect it to fulfill heating requirements in of its self. I would definitely be using insulation around the water tanks. Really the idea was thought of as being part of a range of possibilities for heating.
@@fishyerik I live in the SE corner of BC between several lakes we store about 30 million acre feet of water and provide power to half the province's 5 million people. Spring runoff will begin any day to refill these reservoirs for the next winter cycle. There is NO storage that can match this. Batteries are short term, tosic disposal and dirty power, our water is clean and green. All this water in turn flows into the US Columbia river and makes power through several dams for millions until it hits the Pacific ocean
@@normyanke2515 Not sure how that relates to my analysis of seasonal thermal storage in an IBC tank or two. Great if you have the conditions required to make large scale seasonal thermal storage practical. But no need for that BS about batteries, I assume you can't power much with the energy stored as heat? Also, spring runoff refilling the heat storage, as in heat stored in form of spring runoff? Just no.
Visited from - just have a think - Thank you for the video. It was good to see the chap's comparison setup. Might I respectfully suggest doing the elements to camera at home rather than 'selfie' style.
I remember I seen a passive system consisting in a black box with air circulating inside that will keep the inside of a shed above freezing temperatures at temperatures below -20°c.
I wonder if you could make solar panels that change color like a mood ring. On a hot summer day the panel might shift from black to green or grey. I’ve heard that one reason plants are green not black is because green allows easier thermal regulation.
I have a ASHP and very happy with it. moved from oil and did get some government money to do it. my oil boiler and tank was fairly old and was going to need replaced in near future. however as the electric market in UK is broken and based on gas prices electric price has gone up 250% in the time I've had ASHP. this summer I got solar and battery on house and haven't had to buy any power for 3 months however heading into winter demand will return on electric.
Great Video Rosie, Have you met up with Saul Griffith, author of the Big Switch and Electrifying Everything Advocate..be Great to have you and him hear in Alice Springs and NT if your ever passing through (not much wind here sorry haha) thanks outbackEV-Hunter
Yes I have met Saul, and I am keen to have him on a livestream to talk about his electrificying everything plans. He seems to be very busy promoting his new book right now, which I am reading and loving. Hopefully in a few months he'll have some time to be a guest on Engineering With Rosie. I'd love to do a trip to the NT some time soon, there are quite a few cool things happening there with microgrids, the Sun Cable project and critical minerals mining. I just need to wait for a "real" work trip there so I can combine (like I did for this video), or wait until the channel grows enough that I can afford a travel budget!
My area has clouds and rain all winter. Sometimes 30 days of overcast and rain straight. It's hard to do PV here in winter without lots of batteries. Luckily, we have hydroelectric dams everywhere and our grid has always been 100% renewable.
Hi John, this is part of the reason we suggested incorporating thermal storage solutions and systems like Hydro can then be run as the absolute large resort for servicing thermal demand.
I live in Iceland and here we are of course already with about 85% green energy. Electricity is 99% green, one island still use diesel generation. Electricity comes from hydro 75% and 25% geothermal. Space heating is over 90% done with direct geothermal, the rest is by electricity. All in all about 65% of primary energy comes from geothermal and about 20% comes from hydro. About 15% is still fossil fuels, mainly jet fuel, diesel and petrol for transport. That will change slowly. There is little one can do about aviation today. But ferries for example are going hybrid here. With cars and trucks, we are #2 after Norway with electrifying those. New cars in 2023 were over 50% EV. Town busses in Reykjavik and the area around are moving to BEV. I do not believe that solar has a near term future here in Iceland, but we see the first wind power generators. A few small ones, mainly for testing purpose. Landsvirkjun has two 900 KW Enercon E44 running in the area between Búrfell and Sultartangi hydro power stations for testing purpose. They operate at 42.5% average efficiency, a high value for onshore. A wind park of about 60 MW is in planing and going through the environmental survey. Wind could complement hydro, that gets less water in winter, when electricity usage is highest. Geothermal is base load, supplying power 24/7/365, without seasonal or daily variations. Further CO2 reduction in Iceland could come from the aluminum smelters replacing the carbon anodes and the building industry reducing the use of cement, or perhaps zero emission cement will come. Me and my sisters have a house in Portugal. There I have installed four panels for heating the hot water for the household. I am looking to replace the oil heating, only used on certain days and heating the pool, with a air to water heat pump. We have a fireplace, that also works as a boiler, that we use in the evening to heat the Living room directly and the sleeping rooms via convectors supplied with hot water from the fireplace. I am now looking for hybrid panels for electricity and heating the pool, so rather water than air. The pool water should be at a good temperature to cool the panels on a hot summer day. The difference in temperature over a panel should be small, if you get enough water flow.
I think a combination of full or partial-Earthships, Geothermal, wind and solar can offset quite a bit of the fossil fuel shortage problems. I also think combining this cooling idea with some solar panel reflectors & all the technologies the energy shortages & high costs can be 100% solved and a nation can be energy self sufficient. Thanks for sharing. Best Wishes & Blessings. Keith Noneya
So about a 15% efficiency increase on a 40 C day, plus hot air to harness also. Running heatpumps using that air would also be a huge additional bonus.
Most people do not realize that a solar system installed at 3,000 feet elevation will produce much more power than a system installed 10 miles away at near sea level. I have a watt per square meter that can tell me the sun output in a town such as Boulevard California, and compare it with San Diego, 40 miles to the west, at sea level. Boulevard is at about 3,600 feet of elevation. I measured 895 watts per square meter in Boulevard, and only 800 in San Diego a hour later, just past noon. It could be dust in the air, smog, whatever. Still it is a significant difference. You can get a parachute team to test this in real time, it only will take 1 day!
I was interested to hear about the thermal challenges with PV panels not about carbon issues. Glen offers some elegant solutions to the thermal problem.
Similar panels now available from a French company but with liquid cooling of the panel that you can then use for radiators or water tank heating while cooling the panels.
16% down to 12%, 0 to 80 C 4% (or 25% of output) over 80 C 30 C is 10%, less the electricity to drive fan. But extra energy to preheat water? One more panel maybe the answer to cover small lost energy. Roof space would not be that limiting. Mixed thoughts for me.
Rosie, thank you for the follow up post, on Sunovate. But Dave Borlace 'Just Have a Think' post. Left me with questions. For example, the jets of air created by the air box to cool the PV panel. Seem to be in the same airflow as the exhausting air. Which would cause airflow turbulence and resistance, And an increased energy demands on the fans to overcome it. And non-even cooling of the PV cells. So if possible a follow up post. Detailing exactly how it functions would be nice. Or just post comparison testing data. Or if i'm mistaken, please correct me about the actual path of the airflow. And how it's different then how it appeared to me. FWIW I am planning to install PV panels as part of reroofing my home and I was considering ways to cool the panels. So this could make a difference in how I proceed.
Great Question, Our challenge when we set out to just cool the panels was to ensure that energy we invested was much less than the energy regained through cooling. Early systems are generally are 1 to 2-3 times for PV boosting mode. When we are in heating mode the energy recovered is in excess of 1:100+ (i.e. a 20watt fan consumption produces +2kW of thermal heat). We intentionally kept some of the secret sauce from the images but what we can say is that there is next to no mixing of the inlet and exhausting air. This way we get maximum temp lift for a given mass flow rate.
@@glenryan6692 Thx for the feedback and the quantifiable figures for it's thermal vs electric use efficiency figures with one caveat... May I suggest considering developing a BIPV-T version. Since the airbox is to be made out of sheet metal. Which is what BIPV standing seam panels are made from too, such as from Roofit.Solar. So a BIPVT version, seems like the logical and synergic step to take. But not necessarily using the 'standing seam' format. Since 'stamping' gives you other value added options. IMHO And my caveat is your statement "that there is next to no mixing of the inlet and exhausting air', since you did not quantify it... Good luck developing your prototype, since it is an intriguing concept.
@@glenryan6692 BTW I have a BI-PV-T concept that uses the rafters as a cooling channel. I would be happy to give you more details about. If you would be interested in developing it.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Thx, and I hope you do a live stream on all the current BIPV and BIPVT options. I have to re-roof my home soon. And I'm trying to decide if a BIPV option is feasible for me in the USA.
We live in Perth WA and enjoy solar electric panel generation on our roof. The main problem we've had for years has been due to the house being so well insulated, the coldest months of June to Sept are also sunny but moving warmed air into the household space is difficult. Sometimes midday in winter it's far warmer sat in the garden than indoors. A warmed air mass would be a welcomed innovation that doesn't involve using a reverse cycle air conditioner.
This is one of the selfish reasons that we developed the tech. Our solar passice design house had all the sun taken away when the neighbor built to their maximum height limit. We froze that next winter. Now with the Sunovate solution we can now comfortably wear tee shirts in winter and not have to rely on the reverse cycle air conditioner.
Yes, I've been pushing this idea since 2007. It's a no-brainer. I think a simple air-tight sheet metal backing could be applied to solar panels with inlet and outlet connection points for air based temperature control.
I had PV and water solar in the UK. I was aware that the PV gets less efficient over time and temperature. now in France I need some heating (ANY heating!!) and the idea of these Sunovate panels is great. Systems that would be 'easily!) retrofittable OUGHT to sell well and i can only hope that a push by the EU to promote such systems would benefit all. the cooling by air is such a simple and inherently safe solution where a bit of 'leakage' due to damage/age etc is not a problem.
Rosie, you should do a program on the lack of affordability that all these programs are doing to young couples trying to buy their first home. The utilities did it first by charging more to provide electricity to new housing rather than spreading to cost to all the rate payers.
Great application of combined solar PV with solar thermal, with temperatures we would rarely ever see here in Wisconsin! Has anyone tried to combine one of these systems with a Stirling engine? 🌄
@@glenryan6692 Glen, that's fantastic! Stirling cycle engines are fascinating, and Peltier junction devices came to my mind as well as a more practical solid state device; I'm glad you are considering trying combinations to squeeze more electricity out of every drop of sunlight. From all indications you are blessed with abundant solar, I'm glad you are making full use of that resource! 🌄. Good real time operating systems we can all learn from, many thanks.
It is good to see you presenting a technology without a few gloomy caveat. But the really important point you make -- as a scientist and engineer -- is that combining different technologies is really the way we must go. Regions and even localities vary so very much by real nature, which we cannot change, that we shall see a whole generation of energy engineers trained to assess needs then select from a variety of solution on small and large scales. I have thought for some time that you are a perfect example and that having lived in Nordic regions and Australia you really know what you are talking about.
The fastest roll out of heat pumps currently is in the nordics: Norway, Finland etc. Also verrrry cold places. Heat pump technology has come a long way, and you can boost temps with other heating sources if you have occasional extremely low temperatures.
@ Heronimous Your football team is the Eskimos so you should be able to tolerate the cold. 🥶 A fellow Canadian here although on the Wet Coast. As ‘karllwt’ mentioned the temp of the air between your roof and the panels would be considerably higher than ambient and venting that warmer air to your heat pump would benefit you in less heating costs while also increasing the efficiency and durability of your panels. Given your northern latitude it would be ideal to angle your panels more steeply but getting up on an icy roof isn’t a fun proposition. A guy named Handy Bob had solar on his RV’s as well as his house south of you in Montana and he might have some good advice on his site. I’ve been to McMahon stadium in November and watched many a game at Commonwealth and frigid was the order of the day.
@ Engineering with Rosie I understand that geothermal is much more difficult to install but one thing has always bothered me about heat pumps is that they make the air around them even hotter during the warm months and even colder during winter. Much better to use the ground as the heat sink/source but I’m realistic as to why we can’t in many cases. Dave at ‘Just Have a Think’ had a video titled “Why don’t we just run on geothermal?”. Still I was surprised to find that Nordic countries are growing markets for heat pumps.
Stacking an air source hear pump on the output of the sunovate system allows the solar panel to increase the efficiency of the heat pump If the heat pump waste air is expelled at a cooler temperature than ambient, then looping that back into the air intake of the panels will ALSO increase the PV efficiency. So a closed loop for air would seem on paper to be more efficient than a simple linear system
I understand your idea but I suppose that the heat pump would generally only be on for a certain amount of time. Maybe also, with hot air going in to the HP the exhaust air temperature may not be below ambient. (But don’t quote me on any of that)
Hi True, This is exactly right. The system can run in open and closed loop mode. By having the system in closed loop it also significantly reduces the defrosting demand on air source heat pumps because the moisture is stripped out. The overall thermal efficiencies of the PVT part also increase.
I agree that air is a better choice then water because of the freezing and boiling issues. Air is cheap and forgiving. DIY for anyone is to go with air. In all system need some temperature controls. So how does a DIY make a system that cools each section of a solar panel evenly? Answer is to blow air at each panel through a tube. This happens to be the most efficient also. My guess is that the tubes need to be about 4 to 6 diameters apart. The tubes stick through the very large air return duct, want slow moving air, and the inlet of each tube is in the supply duct. Insulate the discharge duct with foam board. The same approach can be used for water. In this case the return duct always drains 100% and the centrifugal pump (use a sump pump) for the water doesn't have a check valve. Water drains also out of the panels on the roof to an insulated tank. Thermal storage can be as simple as rocks of earth that can be the ground under the house. If space is an issue the method of choice is always phase change that occurs at a very narrow temperature range, another control issue that best matches a heat pump. The heat packs that have salts that change states or melting of wax are the options.
(From the UK). And what about an in-between solution where we have solar and battery storage for all our electricity and buy a small amount in the winter and insulate our houses and reduce the the amount of gas we buy in the winter. I have a well insulated house and I use 1/10 of my friends old draughty house. If the UK only bought 10% of its current demand there would not be a problem and to make it better all the infrastructure is already installed.
It seems to me that Australia is prime territory for combined Hot Water Heat Pumps - products like - Rointe Dalis Pro Electric Air Source Heat, aroSTOR domestic hot water heat pump or OCHSNER EUROPA series. I am sure there are many others available worldwide. These combine an ASHP with a hot water cylinder. They not only provide your hot water for domestic use, they can (depending on size/product) also provide your heating. As a side benefit as they can be plumbed into rooms to draw air from within the building/rooms and will in effect provide a air conditioning effect, cooling those rooms.
Hi Rosie, thanks for a very interesting video 👍. It's 18 months or so since you released this, and looking into Sunovate, they've been working on this idea since at least 2019; have you any idea when they're likely to have a product ready for market, and specifically the residential market rather than large scale projects? The idea of PVT just makes so much sense; the idea that you get more PV from your panels by cooling them and get usable heat for heating or hot water as well just seems to make so much sense that it's surprising it's such a niche market with associated high costs.
Sunovate will never be affordable for domestic purposes. Hopefully a Chinese competitor will show up and offer this technology at reasonable prices. Standard solar PV only became cheap because China took interest in it. Unless China sees value in PVT, it will never be commercially viable for the middle class domestic market (absolutely no chance for anyone hovering near the poverty line which is most people on earth)
@@oplkfdhgk ah cool. didn't have the time yet to watch it. Its a technology i first heard about when linus (tech tips) installed it on his home and I'm quite hyped about it.
It wasn't planned that we both did videos on Sunovate at a similar time. When I knew I would be in Perth for work and contacted Glen to arrange a tour he told me that JHAT was also making a video on Sunovate soon. So then Dave and I were able to coordinate the release of our videos together.
Thanks for sharing about the pilot district heating community here in Canada. I thought that was only happening in Europe. Hopefully it willing take off everywhere soon.
@Rosie ( @UClu8Q445-ZAG1dzzP1mHiAw ), we know there's a "heat exchanger" but we don't know what sort! Given that an ordinary fridge motor is about 100W, I assume the first 100W is running a compressor to maximise heat extraction, and the air flowing across the panel has been cooled (i.e. chilled air) to get higher conversion efficiency? If he's not using a compressor in the heat exchanger, and just using atmospheric-pressure air behind the panels, I think he might be missing a trick there.
Cooling the PV cells definitely equates to longer life. Some panels only last 20 years, so having them last 30+ years is great. Roof and insulated roof spaces are now a matter for innovation, and engineered roofs are the next step. For a $250,000 house, the roof only costs about $16,000. Far better for it to save you money.
I am also frustrated with the lack of focus on heating. Up here in Canada, I don't think this system would make much difference. When it was coldest, my panels were covered with snow and did not produce much of anything. Now if I had a good micro wind turbine, it would have produced good power throughout the fall, winter and early spring. The idea of air cooling a panel in the summer would be useful, but not much need for the heat at that point. Here we need to go to ground source heat pumps. I talked to someone recently with a super efficient air source one, and it was unable to keep up when it was -25 C. Ground source heat pumps are expensive to install, and for this reason some incentive is needed. I like the idea of interest free loans attached to the property to encourage the adoption of this technology. In the city, district ground source heating systems should be required for any new development and older neighborhoods retrofitted as upgrades to other systems are done. It is so frustrating so see major upgrades without district heat being done at the same time.
There is a YT video of a guy who enclosed the back of his ground mount PV system and coupled it to his heat pump evaporator. He added venting for the summer. Spring, fall, and winter the air going into his heat pump was well above ambient. To really make this work I think you will have to allow your house to get much warmer than you may like during the day. Maybe 35 C. instead of 20 C. A heavy house would work better.
The houses thermal mass is key parameter. The Living Lab is double brick so has some thermal inertia. We can easily peak at +35 to 40 degrees in the middle of winter. As the ir is introduced through ceiling vents the low grade heat flows over the ceiling face and the upper brick walls. The warm ceiling then radiates this warmth to the floors and occupants. The walls then conduct the heat down. Its like being in Broome or the Bahama's in the middle of winter. We are looking at other thermal storage solutions to support longer term storage so we can make better use of the summer production.
Suspend and protect vertical panels in a tall transparent tower. The panel could rotate inside the tower to follow the sun. The tower could be located in urban areas.
I came up with a system that used the thermal to take heat away from the solar panel to provide hot water and better efficiency in solar panels all the way back before 2008. Sadly I was unable to get funding.
Here in Finland we don`t have visible sun usually from November to End of January. I `m getting soon 8,76kWp solar system, Mabne I will from that about 7000 kWh.
Sunovate should use the heated air for sand thermal battery like polar night energy or stiesdal sand battery and then control temperatures for a greenhouse growing spirulina to capture carbon dioxide emissions.
What about long term, send the heat the soil to cooldown the refrigerant? Of course, is long term, but entropy always grow so this is another thing to take care off. Same with the air, I cool down panels get more efficiency, but air will be more hot.
Sent here by Dave and subscribed. Based in Queensland. Love the content but still not sure how a rooftop system here could utilise much of that heat. We already have a heat pump for hot water which uses very little energy and is fully operational from our solar and battery. We don’t have a pool so the excess would be wasted?? In winter we have chilly nights/mornings regularly down to 5-8C so would like to heat the house up in the morning but this would be the only time that there would be no warm air from the panels. So the only advantage is the additional efficiency of our panels (and the longevity) but the fall is quite marginal for us. We have 11.2 kw of solar PV on our roof and a 10kw/h inverter. Peak out put is 10kw/h but on very hot days his can fall to about 8 or 9kw/h in the middle of a hot day. The additional generation would alone is not particularly significant. This is interesting but it still has the problem that is mostly providing heat when heat is not needed.
@ Robsenga I think you may be missing a key benefit of the cooling of the solar panels and that is that their performance will not degrade as fast and so will last longer (I believe the estimate was lasting 50 years instead of 20 and that would cut by half or more the number of panels that end up as garbage). It’s possible that this benefit alone warrants the additional cost let alone any benefit from use of the heat. And heat there is aplenty. I commented on ‘Just Have a Think’ that RV’ers found that having solar panels on the roof heated up their RV so much that they had to use shore power or a generator to run their air conditioners so it wasn’t a win for them.
@@mikedavison3400 Fair enough Mike though I suspect 20 years is a worst case scenario. My panels have a 25 year guarantee and I live in a very hot place. Another benefit might be that efficiency improvements mean that you can reduce the number of panels needed. I have 34 covering two sides of my roof and these panels might mean the same amount of power generation on hot days with just 30 panels. Extending their life and reducing the number by 10% are both worthwhile. My only point was that it does not solve the issue of heat generation when it isn’t needed.
@ Robsenga Hay Point well taken. They are working on the ‘waste heat’ issue. Glen talked about Stirling engine technology or solid state Peltier as ways to put it to use. Absorption chillers are another possibility. I remember when I first learned about RV fridges that burned propane to heat up the coils at the back of the fridge that I thought it was crazy to create heat in order to cool down something a couple of inches away but they do work well. They are not nearly as efficient as compressor fridges but when the heat source is waste heat then the main issue is collecting and getting the heat up to the level where the absorption cycle can begin. A great benefit of absorption or Peltier technology is that both are QUIET.
Engineering with Rosie it would be foolish to not generate hot water from these hot solar panels. But beside the warm water exit side the cool air could come in to make it both water and air cooled, each facing in the opposite direction. The air to run a clothes dryer and the hot water to go to a solar condenser such as a fresnel lens in a copper pipe to get the water up to close to 200 F. and store it for hot water usage, showers, dish washers or washing and laundry in addition to heating the house in radiant heaters.
As we transition ro renewable energy generation, distributed battery storage will reduce the strain on grids and enable the use of the superabundance of renewables coming our way.
Rosie, I hope you do a live stream on all the currently available BIPV and BIPVT options. I have to re-roof my home soon. And I'm trying to decide if a BIPV option is feasible.
Hi Rosie, Thanks for this video.. good to see someone finally trying to make this happen. The benefits have been so obvious for so long, I am amazed it hasn't made it as a commercial product yet. In this video you deal with the benefits to the efficiency and longevity of the solar PV panels, which is great, but a useful follow-up video would be to discuss what can be done with the warm air produced by the system. Obviously it could be used directly for space heating when the house is cooler than desired, but that isn't needed in summer in many parts of the world, during the day at least. Is there a way the heat energy could be stored during the day to be used overnight, during the seasons when daytime temperatures are comfortable but evenings are cool? Could the warm air be used to boost the efficiency of air source heat pumps for water heating? If so, adding a control system to run the heat pump mainly when warm air was available from the panels could add extra efficiency. You mention seasonal heat storage.. it would be great to learn more about how that works, and how the warm air could be used to assist with storing heat through summer. That is probably more practical at large scale, but if it could be done on a single-property or neighbourhood scale, it would be good to know about it.
PV + solar thermal has been invented several times in the last 30 years. It is not offered commercially because the heat collected is not worth the cost of the extra hardware. This is especially true because as you note, the heat isn't worth much in the summer and it is not available at a particularly useful temperature in the winter.
I keep wondering about heat pumps (in the UK) and whether there's a way to feed them waste heat of any kind so that they operate in their most efficient mode - so I'm really wondering if a system like this could be plugged into an air-source heat pump to any benefit in a colder climate.
Dig many trenches, lay down many loops of PEX pipes with water. Pump all the heat under ground during summer and absorb heat back during winter. So heat pump can work efficiently all the time.
@@hughmarcus1 I assumed so but at least it could be mixed with the rest of the air going in so that it could help the heat pump to be efficient. Another thing one would want is to mix stale, old air that has come out of the house be mixed with the air coming in to the heat pump too.
Best system for UK latitudes is the so called 'coffin ice bank heat pump'. Wet PVT panels are the heat source for the ice bank heat pump. The advantage for snow covered panels, is an automatic defrost capability. The snow just slides off via valve reversal.
It bothers me that the radiator on the back of my fridge and freezer dump their waste heat into the room, while on the opposite side of the wall my heat pump hot water system blows out the waste cold air from it's radiator. I look forward to whole of home heat exchangers that can more efficiently move heat around.
Speaking from the country of Scandinavia (no such thing but whatever...), luckily we have a lot more wind power than solar and wind power delivers more during the winter than during the summer so it is a much better fit for us but we are starting to get quite a bit of solar power to now. And of course we have nuclear and hydro...
I'd like to see more of the companies behind novel climate friendly tech to be seeking crowd funding in two stages 1: at an early stage the funders would be buying shares in the system (as for example the seeders funding platform does) 2: close to full scale launch a later stage use a funding platform where the funders reward is to get get some of the first models when the device finally goes into production at scale (kickstarter for example does this sort of funding). I can't afford to sponsor a whole factory, but would love the chance to put some of my savings into helping the planet. Until regular production starts that is always a risk: the shares might be worthless or the rewards might not be delivered at all: however if I could spread those over a number of projects done if those might do more good for my grandchildren in terms of leaving then a better planet than the value of the money if it is just handed over as a bank balance.
Biomass is not a solution as here in NY USA the local Biomass plant closed due to shortage of wood chips and pellets. My father works for a company that gets the wood and processes it for biomass and he said there is shortages of Biomass all the time. Going Green in my view would be good if it benefited the people but it is not geared that way. It is geared to make massive profits for companies. Tesla figured out how to take power right out of the sky and it makes sense, north and south pole, magnetosphere. The power is there the big biz just doesn't want us to figure it out as it eliminates them!
Central heat and air is the largest waste of energy in a household . Get a fire place. Cooling in the summer is a more difficult problem. At least in the south in the U.S. An underground water tank with 57 to 60 degree water temperature to tape for radiant cooling will help a great deal in the summer. A solar panel can run the pump and fans. Two large panels can run an efficient air conditioner unit in the summer and a good battery will run it for a few hours into the hot night. By one thirty in the morning a house should be cool and stay cool.
Came from "Just Have A Think"
Same!
She mentions Just have a think at the end. There's another channel called skill builder, who has a video on heat pumps in UK. I'm glad I watched it for a balanced view
My think is broken. Can I borrow some of yours?
Me too.
Dave from Just Have A Think sent me here.
Very interesting, I am from Perth so particularly relevant and useful.
Thx
Welcome! I was born in Perth so technically I am one of you (I moved when I was still a baby though, so I don't think it counts for much.
Well snap!
Same here.
Sounds good but I disagree about water being a problem. I am off grid for 13 years we have solar power but also solar heater that runs on water. I live in the mountains so we get very cold below freezing at times. The reason it doesn't freeze is we use antifreeze coolant that's designed for cars. Never had a problem. So that is one problem solved. The second problem mentioned is it holds the heat when it goes through the panel so it's hot at the top, that can be solved by using a faster pump. They are just some thoughts on this.
I agree, I don’t understand how his system is any different besides the distribution of cooling medium(air) which can also be used with distribution of water in similar manner.
If you can share manufacturers and suppliers of pv/t please.
Can you we explain your heating system?
Heat distribution in the panel could also be fixed by changing the shape of the piping to circulate between the panel areas before exiting to the central systems.
A 3rd option, independent of pipe layout is to use the coolant of an attached heat pump directly, thus avoiding energy losses in transferring heat out of air or water into that heatpump.
@@johndododoe1411 using the solar panels as the radiator for the heat pump sure would turbo charge the heat pump's efficiency! 😅
I absolutely love how you accurately present all of the information needed to understand these topics, while also being enthusiastic about the opportunities to make more informed choices...something you facilitate greatly with each video you produce.
As a Canadian viewer, I'd say seasonal storage is key. Right now wood is my winter fuel but I am interested in making better use of my solar array to reduce wood needs. Insulation and dry wood make a massive difference but that in ground heat battery with a heat pump look pretty sweet too! Hydrogen, biogas and in ground heat batteries are all on my mind but so far efficient wood use is central for me where I live in the bush. I cut the dead wood to reduce potential forest fire fuel. In the city where there is little wood and lots more sun, I think I would have installed a heat battery or hydrogen system already
I do keep thinking though, what would be possible if all patents were released? It seems like many great solutions are hidden from the public
Post pictures of your infraestructure
The only really viable storage formats for energy between summer solar power and winter consumption are either pumped hydro, if you have a lake and a hydro plant. Or a bi-directional fuel cell and hydrogen. Assuming that you have plenty of panels, so conversion efficiency isn't a big issue but that long term storage is the absolute requirement I'd go for a hydrogen cell.
Thanks for a nice program. Now I feel the urge to climb up on the roof with my leaf blower (battery electric) and cool my PV panels to see if it differs. ;)
One more note, here in Sweden we have snow covering the PV plant so we have absolutely 0 kWh in some winter months. Our plant is still going strong after 10 years. Fantastic invention.
here's an idea...could you not used to grid electrictity to blow some hot air through a sunovate like system which would in turn melt the snow/ice on your panels? thus reudcing the need to get up onto the roof to clear any snow.
Over 30 years ago I visited 2 homes, one near lake Tahoe, and the other in chilly Montana. Both homes at that time took less than $100 to heat, versus the $500-$700 average. Both were built with 3 times the insulation building codes required. Obviously,, insulation is as, if not more useful for reducing both heating and cooling costs. And it costs less than a heat pump using earthen piping.
Yes, it's called super-insulation. Add thermal mass and you have little need (comparatively) for heating/cooling. The interior is kept at a constant temp of your choice. Why it's not the world paradigm is a mystery to me.
But insulation has a massive diminish of returns past a certain point... 3x insulation isn't 3x as good
When it comes to district heating you should have a look at places like Austria (the city of Graz for example). Basically the entire city is connected to the network and a big chunk of the heat is waste heat from industry which is usually just lost in most places around the world. Places like Vienna also started to implement district cooling. Those are much more efficient solutions than having every household install an individual heat-pump (which usually needs to be replaced every 10-15 years) and further straining the grid.
I also love district heating, that's how my city was heated when I lived in Denmark and it was so cosy and cheap. One of my first ever videos was on that topic acutally: ua-cam.com/video/F3mC_TaJk2U/v-deo.html
Many cities that relied on district heating generated from the waste heat of fossil fuel power stations and industry. With these power stations closing municipalities are scrambling to find alternative. This is what this sector is so exciting for us.
Finland also uses a lot of district heating. I believe we currently have ten functional waste incinerators that are connected to district heating and many more that burn (mostly wood based) biomass. Those waste incinerators have the added benefit of reducing the amount of waste we export. Actually once Vantaa's new waste line is functional the amount of exported waste should be reduced by more than 60%. I mean why pay for others to accept your waste when you can burn it for energy? Even more you can use the byproducts in construction. Similarly most of the byproducts (mostly ash) from biomass burning end up as fertilizer.
Granted most locations still also use a bit of coal, biogas, peat and LNG - at least as a backup. For example in my hometown they produce 98% of heat from biomass. That being said only some districts are covered by it and for example I live outside district heating despite living rather close to one of the town centers. I have two heat pumps though as I replaced oil heating with an air to water heat pump two years ago and already had one regular heat pump. Those are pretty common here along with GHPs.
We did a project at uni recovering heat from PV back in 2005/6. I'm amazed that it's taken this long to recognise the benefits of doing so. Still more surprised that we are at the prototype stage still. I guess it comes down to cost over benefit as opposed to technical feasibility.
I don't think it took very long for engineers to realise the benefit (your uni was obviously aware some time ago), it has proven tough to commercialise so far though. Lots of reasons but I think the way that renewable energy incentives are set up is a big part. They usually only incentivise generating renewable electricity and not ways to use less electricity or to create renewable heat directly. Probably there are other reasons too!
Andy, we come up against the hard fact that gas has been heavily sold as an environmentally friendly fuel and its relatively cheap. Worse still it can be made cheap to keep a customer when competition appears. Globally renewable heat targets are just starting to be addressed so this should change the market dynamic as it did for renewable electricity. PVT also straddles the PV and solar thermal markets which have historically been battling for market share and roof space.
PVT panels are already being used, at least in the Netherlands. Not as common as PV, but that's to be expected.
It doesn't makes sense really still. Panels are so cheap, just add more panels
Here in the Netherlands I use the SolarFreezer system. It uses a collector, locked in behind the solarpanel. In my crawlspace I have a " balloon" filled with water. These waterstores are connected via a heatpump. It heated my home throughout the winter without a glitch. It's been running since December 1st so I Just got It installed . It cost just as much as a new EV. But with the savings for heating and cooling a EV is not far away.
What is your COP of this system? Are you using a heat pump on the balloon to heat the home?
Hi @@cclambie ,
The balloon is the thermal buffer and is charged by the PVT, and the control unit decides to use the PVT or the balloon as a source for the heatpump. Lowest COP till now was 5,3 (February) . December the pump was learning our usage with a COP of 5,6. I must note here that December 1st I filled the balloon with water of 12°C. It started January with 6°C. Maximum temperature of the balloon is set at 25°C. The kicker of this system is that is also has the ability to be used as an Ice storage system. It's to long to dive in to that here. Long storie short. U can keep pulling heat out until it freezes solid. And this way u have an ice block to cool our home later in the year. Because of the cost I opted for the balloon instead of concrete stores underneath my driveway.
@@homegrown241 that is super interesting. Have you done any blog/video/explainer on it?
@@cclambie
No I haven't. Not really my thing. I just wanted to comment on the PVT topic raised by Rosie. There are a few videos on YT. Two of them are from a guy that didn't have the luck I had . His system doesn't run as it should. He made a video about it. Search for SolarFreezer and you'll find it
@@homegrown241 thanks.
This is great! Thanks for posting. One thing that would be great to explore is the financial aspect. I find it a mystery that banks and contractors are so slow to adopt green energy. One would think they would be all over it. A house with solar panels and heat pumps is more expensive, but it has a lower lifetime cost of ownership. So the bank gets a bigger mortgage, the contractor get a s bigger contract, the only loser is the utility. You would thing greed alone would make bankers take notice. Thanks for being there. Keep up the good work.
I think the financing of home energy efficiency/electrification is going to be really important over the next decade. It's my understanding that most people who can't afford the upfront cost have to use high interest loans rather than being able to simply put it on their (lower interest) mortgage. I am starting to hear about some innovative financial products that will give good terms and allow homeowners to pay it off using their energy bill savings, so they're never out of pocket. We need much more of that!
I'm reading The Big Switch by Saul Griffith at the moment, and chapter 10 is devoted entirely to this topic. I like how Saul puts it in his book:
"It's not a fix if only the wealthy can afford it. This isn't some bleeding-heart socialist observation. All the emissions have to stop, not just the rich ones."
I am trying to get Saul as a guest on a livestream soon, if I succeed I'll be sure to spend time talking with him about that issue.
@@EngineeringwithRosie what we need is is the same as been done in the past I don't know how your country or others have or even how the eastern provinces did but I know that get electricity outside of the big cities was very expensive so lighting was by oil or gas lights cooking was wood or coal same as heating those in smaller towns and rural areas started going to produce their own with home generation systems here in Canada one popular system was Delco they made a 32 volt system the generator was usually gasoline and for extra power supply you could put up a wind charger power was stored in 16 large 2 volt batteries tied together to make 32 volt as long as the wind blew enough theyd keep the batteries topped up and when there was no wind and the batteries were low you started the generator which meant you couldn't leave your home alone for any longer than a day or two so the province provided low interest or government backed loans for them to set up cooperatives who then run all the lines in their areas part of joining the cooperation was the ability to get a low interest loan to pay for the cost of home conversion and hooking up to the power lines and power was available to almost any homeowner rural or small town it was interesting that the big power companies like Edison and General Electric only were interested in the mega city's business sector for other smaller cities like Calgary Edmonton medicine hat and others they formed their own power companies Calgary formed Calgary power and water hydro electric dams were built I don't know which was first but there was one at spray lakes one at Sebe another created ghost lake then Bearspaw dam each had other customer bases Spray lakes provided power Banff and Canmore Ghost lake also powered the towns between it and Calgary now we see government subsidies for going to renewable or green initiatives but the problem is that unless you have the ability to cover the rest of the cost it's useless it would be like if the government had just given subsidies to put in power to the areas without power for a homeowner who was 10 miles from the power supply to come up with 10 grand or more to hook up it would have been to much to pay for the convenience of having power on demand rebates the only one's that can and will use them are those who are environmentalists and have money or credit to burn in Canada the liberal government has brought in a carbon tax to get people to freeze in the dark and walk or take public transit they need to give homeowners the ability to go green with low interest loans it's not like they are losing tax money but deferring it subsidizes would also be helpful for a lot more people if they did it like the old Concervative Government did when they wanted to look green the homeowner would get an energy audit on their home all areas were looked at separately walls below and above grade roof windows and doors furnace and hot water heater all were listed for were they at for efficiency and were they needed to be how much subsidies were available the owner then got 3 quotes to bring them to the new specifications and the subsidies were based on an average of the 3 a customer I worked for had the audit done and got 3 quotes on the attic to bring it to the new standards from R 10 to R60 all were around 3200 dollars and that wasn't worth it as he didn't know how long he would keep the place before selling it and it wouldn't add to his sales price and he didn't want to pay the 150 dollar price for the energy audit so he called me since I know insulation companies I ask him if the quote included insulation stops to allow air to flow into the attic from under the eaves he checked and they told him he'd have to ger someone else to do it so we took the measurements to the local lumber yard we figured best chance to meet the goal was cellulose insulation blown in so they figured out how much we would need and the cost to rent the machine to blow the insulation in he paid for the insulation and the delivery charges and the morning of the delivery we went back to the store and rented the blower brought it back to the house and set it up when the material arrived he fed the machine and I operated the hose in the attic I had already installed the air dams 4 on each side of the house. after we were done we will got a 2nd audit. audit and found we had not only met our R40 target but actually had R60 he was eligible for over 8 hundred dollars rebate and both audits rebated total costs for the insulation machine rental and my labor was under 700 dollars so you could say he either got paid for his labor or he made money to upgrade other areas did not justify the cost of upgrading unless he was planning to stay for 10 years or more and his reason for buying the house was to provide a home for each of his children while in university and one was already done another was halfway done and she last would start shortly and be done in four years and he hadn't decided if He and his wife were going to retire and live in the same place they were at or move to the house as after the last child was gone they wouldn't need a big four bedroom house
@@EngineeringwithRosie There are plenty techniques to produce clean and cheap energy not worth measuring. The problem is that the "powers that be" have kept those ideas away from the public ....
If you are interested you may read about Thorium LFTR (see youtube presentations). An intrinsically safe, low pressure, high efficiency nuclear process that can produce enough energy for planet Earth for ten thousand years. The energy equivalent of 1 kg Thorium = 10 million kg oil ....... Think about that.
Forget windmills and solar panels .... It is time that people wake up and inform themselves ....
Maybe it's because solar/off-grid solution companies include various smaller companies who could go bankrupt, etc, and thus represent an additional risk factor for financiers to worry about? I haven't heard of many homebuilders/developers who include the solar/etc as part of the upfront build cost of the home, although perhaps in those cases the banks may treated it differently, when it's part of an overall bundle.
Hi Rosie, I live off grid in Canada and I love your channel!
One of my solutions for reducing my electricity need in winter is to have my freezer outside in the shade of my woodshed and I just unplug it in the winter. I have lots of power for it in summer and on warmer winter days. That seasonal storage looks really good to me. The coolant here would not be water, it would be glycol with a heat exchanger to make hot water and so it wouldn't freeze in winter. Wood heats my home and hot water and my floors now too! Winter is too long here to rely on a heat pump for Dec-March but charging an in ground heat tank during summer could certainly shorten the amount of heating needed.
I am sorry to hear you live in canda, but great that you are off grid....
I was planning to do something similar, but with closely packed copper pipe right against the underside of the panel close enough together to cool the panels and capture as much thermal energy as possible. Then transfer the heat to a concrete lined pit filled with sand using coiled PEX using thermosiphon. Sand is really great for storing heat long term. From what I have read they heat multiple homes and businesses that way in Scandinavian countries.
How much heat are you planning on capturing?
From a maintenance perspective hot air is a great idea. I have evacuated tube solar for hot water, and it's a massive pain in the butt. In -20C winters in Canada, even antifreeze will gel and prevent circulation which, somewhat counter-intuitively causes the panels to overheat, overpressure and vent steam. And when a pump fails on a bright sunny day that's just a barrel of fun.
Get better antifreeze
If you said it gels at -70 I’d believe you. But @ -20C or -30C? Get some proper stuff
this is a brilliant, simple idea. There is a significant nuber of people in the American Southwest (California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas) that could benefit from this idea (more than 100 million people).
Rosie, in horticulture they irrigate pot drippers in a parallel grid so that every pot plant gets the same amount of water. Surely PVT water cooling can do the same so every solar cell is equally cooled.
Also. The time of year mismatch isn't a mismatch for horticulture or even households, you could use excess hot water to kill weeds or do other some other useful work. Tractor towed steam weeders have been experimented with as a alternate to chemicals. Seems like there might be some real possibilities for PVT in horticulture.
Agri PVT is an application that we are hot on at the moment. Sunovate is the only PVT solution to cool every cell evenly.
‘Just Have a Think’ had a video about regenerative agriculture that had arrays of panels that protected crops that would benefit from some shade. Going from memory here but it seemed like a win-win.
Hi Rosie, nice to hear about this progress and testing. I disagree with a comment that I heard in your discussion. If we look at a simplified electrical power system, broken down into generation and distribution. Distribution will continue to come up in discussions due to its limited capacity, high costs, and the higher losses associated. But as our costs of generation approach zero costs, the overall cost of distribution of that power will be overcome by the localization of the generation. We. need to move quickly to focus on solar with appropriate storage systems that have the capacity to almost completely overcome the bottleneck of distribution.
Distribution is still essential to transport electricity between sunny and cloudy locations as weather moves across each continent.
One of your best, though of course like Australia here in Florida (US) is mild and cooling is the primary concern so heat pumps do well though maybe with PV this could be used for heating water with heat pumps between the PV cooling exhaust and the water (obviously an optimization must be performed to see what balance would be needed in sizing such systems).
Yes, it has a very different potential in mild climates than in northern Europe and Canada. I think in really hot places the advantage would be in efficiency gain of the PV and improving longevity of the panels. But I expect we'll see this rolled out first in places like Scandinavia where district heating and seasonal thermal storage is already a mainstream thing.
Hi Zhu, as we have relatively mild winters we can use the heated air directly off the panel for space heating and at summer from night radiative cooling. We can reach domestic hot water temperatures in Summer if required. In wintertime we need some boosting time to time. In these cases we are using a simple top of tank electric resistance heater. In colder climates we leverage more on the air source heat pump option.
@@glenryan6692 are you Sunovate?
@@glenryan6692 A heat pump will heat the tank using less electricity than a resistive heater. They are usually sold with a sticker stating the improvement factor.
Absorption AC and refrigeration, that uses a heat source to provide the energy for cooling. And phase change heat batteries. Seems like the most universal way to use the excess heat. IMHO
... Or divert some of the solar power to run a 12V DC heat pump. Sounds like a waste of part of the PV output but it would more than pay for the energy it used.
I do not have the intuitive expertise to his whether that would come or better or worse than using a great driven heat pump.
A second thought leading on from that:
They make fridges for motor caravans (residential vehicles) that run off either 12V or bottled gas or both. (That's butane or propane, not gasoline!)
The ones that run only off 12V tend to have compressors, but if it takes gas as a the only fuel, or as an option, then it almost certainly uses heat to drive the heat pump. That's useful if DIY folk wasn't too repurpose one to run of the waste heat from the PV, to investigate whether the waste heat is hot enough to drive the pump. Problem might be that it is designed to be heated with a flame, not heat at maybe only 10C above ambient on a not-so-sunny day... Again I don't have sufficient expertise to know if this is viable.
I would appreciate your thoughts on either of these ideas @Rosie or any experienced A/C designer
All applications we are considering for the H2X program.
Thanks Rosie, interesting and informative as usual.👍
Oh, BTW. Serious pair of boots there.😁👍
She's a windmill engineer!
Proper kit is essential if you don't wish to incur the wrath of H&S
That is absolutely right! There are verrrry specific requirements for PPE and especially boots when you want to climb wind turbines. And fun fact, the certification differs from country to country so I have about 4 pairs of safety boots to suit all the places I've climbed.
@@EngineeringwithRosie cool.👍
8:27min This is the elefant, this question is relevant! Thank You! In my point of view, a combination of hydrogen storage for about four weeks (!) and wind power can help for the seasonal changes.
If you use water cooling, instead of a Serpentine coil use a single pipe per row of cells with a supply and return header to keep the temperatures consistent.
I was in the US Navy in 1976 and Mainly Buildings were still WW2 era structures
My personal experience saw all of those buildings were connected through a very large complex steam heating system that were Asbestos wrapped piping that were above ground.
So main boilers supplied the heat to the whole base through those large Steam Pipes
I also remember homes using radiant heating and cast Iron radiators to heat each room in a home.
So Old is now New again
Thanks Rosie, that was enlightening. Goodluck to Glen Ryan!
Now we need a system which can be combined with the existing panels already on the roofs. So a "cabinet" in which the existing panels are placed and the panels are 'cooled' and that energy is being used. Ofcourse the retrofit should be commerically viable and be done by lower schooled technicians due to the lack of high schooled technicians. just a thought.
This would be possible, and it's something I talked about (off camera) with Glen. At this stage Sunovate's scale up and cost reductions are very important to the success of the company so standardisation is key, so I think that's why they're not going down that route right now.
I haven't tried it but it looks like just paneling over the back of the frame & adding forced-air junctions (possibly in the corners) would be a simple retro-fit.
I don't know how you avoid the electrical junction box being a hot-spot & degrading the whole panel though.
@@EngineeringwithRosie I'm thinking a cheap modular system could be based around domestic guttering & downpipes as interconnects between plain sheet-metal backings on the solar panels (possibly with foamed polystyrene insulation) & then off to whatever plant extracts the heat.
The backing panels would be hole punched across the ends & guttering glued over the holes with maybe silicon rubber or Sikaflex. Bends, 'Y' pieces & jointed pipes are available in a reasonable range of sizes.
I thought you were talking about HATE, but I finally realized that you were saying HEAT
Hi Rosie, In my view, Proper isolation of the housing is a key to the shift to renewables heating. it helps reduce the need for heating or cooling that would already reduce the size of teh elephant in the room.
[nsulation
I agree one million percent! I have never understood why most of the world has not managed to improve energy efficiency more as a key part of climate change action. It's by far the cheapest way to reduce emissions (and often has negative costs).
I believe it's largely due to split incentives. I worked briefly in building energy efficiency (about 15 years ago) and the energy audits my company would do always identified a number of potential efficiency projects that would have an economic payback of 6 months or less. And they very rarely got done unless they wanted to rent to government tenants (who had a minimum energy efficiency rating they required). That's because otherwise there was no incentive for them to take on a new project. They bill the tenants directly for electricity consumption, so why add to their workload to save someone else money? Such a stupid situation.
@ Engineering with Rosie
I have some experience dealing with property management firms and they get paid on the basis of a percentage of the expenses. Reducing expenses reduced their fee. Their incentive to keep costs low so that tenants could remain profitable and thus paying the rent (long term thinking) was outweighed by the reduced management fees today (short term thinking). Most commercial tenant’s associations are run by the tenants that actually take an interest and they may not be that sophisticated (not deriding them) in accounting. Hardly any tenant ever looks at the statements provided by the property management group. At the mall where I had a business I noticed in the summer that the lights in the parking lot were coming on at 3 PM when it didn’t get dark until 9 or 10. I asked where the timers were and the answer was nobody knows. After continually raising the issue the management company installed lights that only came on when it was dark. At a marina I was asked to figure out how a programmable timer worked for the lights. I was very impressed with the little gadget they had purchased. Rather than having to continually adjust the timer all I had to do was enter the latitude of where we were (Canada) and the program would adjust for seasonal changes on a daily basis. Someone put a lot of thought into that programmable timer!
Passivehaus
@@mikedavison3400 I have seen this perverse outcome with some of my clients. Even worse the building/facility owner's procurement practices were so bad intentionally to drive a bigger cut of the energy bill. These practices need to be outlawed.
Thanks to David I've found you Rosie and that was a well put together video and will now add you to my list of channels on renewables!!
what other channels you watch?
same
Thanks Rosie, excellent video. I too have been considering a similar idea of collecting renewable heat from a house or townhouse's attic using a heat pump coil and fan located in the attic, then running the refrigerant down to a Hot Water Heat Pump (HWHP). In essence I'd decouple the fan and coil from the compressor and tank of a HWHP. Locate the fan and coil in the attic (being careful to ensure friable insulation is not air-born by covering it with an additional layer of paper faced insulation to ensure it doesn't end up in the fins of the coils) run the refrigerant lines to the compressor and tank which would be located in the house. This idea could be coupled with Sunovate's solar panels. Alternatively skylights could be installed in the attic to improve the productivity of the HWHP. In my climate (Canada) we need lots of heat and the cooling of solar panels is less of a challenge, especially in the winter, snow cover is a much larger issue (would adding heaters to the Sunovate panels to melt snow be worthwhile?). Our heating requirements are typically 70 to 80% of the house's energy load with 3/4s of that in space heating and 25% in water heating. Other advantages of using the hot water tank in a HWHP is that the solar energy can be stored for over night (a cheaper thermal battery than an electric battery). Additional HWHPs with this arrangement can be installed for space heating. In Europe there is a thermal storage system by Latento that combines Phase Change Materials (PCMs) with a water storage tank for more compact thermal storage. Or perhaps it makes sense to couple this with a ground source well and store excess heat in the ground (like the Bore Hole Thermal Energy Storage systems mentioned in the video). Lots of opportunities to optimize a solution for these ideas.
Thanks! yeah we’re in South Africa and the most power we’ve gotten from our solar panels was a sunny day in winter with an icy breeze
Hi Rosie, I have considered this idea before. My initial thoughts are the most heat is on the top of the cell. So why not box in the heat on the top as well? You can add a glass or clear plastic cover and blow the air across the top of the panel. To even up cell heat distribution you could create channels across the panel, maybe blowing the air in alternate directions, one channel one way the next the opposite way. Or an alternating direction, continually revering every minute. André in Sydney
Now you are thinking
Living in ipswich Qld, my winters are reasonably mild compared to other places. So for me the benefit of this system would be the increase in electrical output of the system.
The real holy grail would be the creation of panels that turn infrared light into electricity. Then these panels are then sandwiched with traditional pv panels
Watched this video after the Just Have a Think video. I'm amazed you both realized you were talking about the same thing before the videos were posted! Well done!
We both spoke to Glen, and Glen told us what was going on!
I was imagining large thermal storage units, but never thought they would be practical.
There are a few houses built with seasonal heat storage. Some underneath the house in sand. It is close to geo/ground-thermal heating.
It is a system I'd like to incorporate into my own house, just to try it out.
While district heating overcomes storage issues it will often not be available. Another option is to store heat in the building structure if direct space heating leads to overheat the building. This process changes the time of delivery of the heat by radiation and convection from storage. The storage site could be actively warmed using air in hollow bricks or in slabs with air ducts or water pipes in place, and passively discharged. Alternatively, phase change salts in tubes can increase the energy density of storage. Using the heat for hot water in the summer would make use of at least some of the heating and venting the excess heat could pull cool air through the building for cooling.
Early refrigerators ran on kerosene, and people still use refrigerators that burn propane or butane. The flame size required to run a medium sized fridge is only about 25 mm in diameter. This being the case, it would seem to be doable to use extraneous heat from cooling solar panels to produce cold air for air conditioning.
So we are totally off grid in Andalucía, Spain. We have 22 x 300W solar panels, 34Kw lithium batteries and 2 Toshiba Estia Air to Water heat pumps. Together with our Victron system providing electricity, cooling and heating to a 420 sq metre house was expensive. I was aware that the efficiency of the panels dropped exponentially the hotter the day was. When it was under 25°C the batteries were filled by noon. During this blistering hot summer when air temps were mostly above 40°C, our batteries were struggling to fill by 4pm! Granted we were running the underfloor cooling for longer.
So initially not to incur another expense immediately by changing our panels to those described in your video, do you think that because our panels are mounted on an aluminium frame at ground level (we can walk under them), we could fit ordinary air fans that blow over the underside surface of panel and this would help improve the efficiency of our panels? I’m going to pose the same question to “Just have a think”.
Thanks for the video Rosie:
Can this heat be harvested economically to drive a Stirling Engine for generating electrcity?
Or maybe we should look at using the walls and floors of concrete basements to store heat at least during winter months (I am in Canada)?
There is also the application using this heat for drying clothes in winter?
I live just north of Okotoks Alberta in Calgary, I had no idea it was a high tech heat storage as well as PV in Drake Landing.. Thanks, going to subscribe, like, etc. I got your channel from "Just have a Think"
Mass thermal storage has fascinated me for a while. I had an idea of burying 1 or 2 IBC containers and to heat that water through a summer season and then with internal heat exchangers use that for base heating in a house.
If you use water, which is a good choice, you can calculate the capacity quite easily. The specific heat capacity of water is roughly 4.2 J/g/K, which means if each IBC container has a ton of water you can store 4.2 MJ/K per container. If you manage to heat you tanks to 100 °C, and consider anything above 20 °C useful energy their capacity is 336 MJ per container. That's ~93 kWh, per container. But, without fantastic insulation most of that heat will be dissipated long before heating becomes an issue. It can, best case scenario, probably delay the need to start your heating system a day or so. Also, heating that much water to 100 °C would require something like solar concentration, or active heating/heat pump or some other type of input other than passive collection of excess heat. The energy between 65 °C to 25 °C is much more realistic assumption for calculation of usable energy without heat pump the day after you stop collecting heat, which is half the energy, ~47 kWh/ton of water.
Seasonal mass thermal storage needs a ridiculous amount of mass to be meaningful, and cost essentially nothing per kWh of storage capacity. ~0.02 IBC tanks and work and everything required to harvest, and insulate, and retrieve that heat per kWh per year is way too much investment to be worth it for the energy alone. Add personal interest, and it might be worth it, just don't expect such a system give savings to pay for any "large" investments when cycled once a year.
@@fishyerik I think something like that would go with cutting edge housing using best you can get insulation and only be expected to heat perhaps the first 5-10 degrees. I would not expect it to fulfill heating requirements in of its self. I would definitely be using insulation around the water tanks.
Really the idea was thought of as being part of a range of possibilities for heating.
@@fishyerik I live in the SE corner of BC between several lakes we store about 30 million acre feet of water and provide power to half the province's 5 million people. Spring runoff will begin any day to refill these reservoirs for the next winter cycle. There is NO storage that can match this. Batteries are short term, tosic disposal and dirty power, our water is clean and green. All this water in turn flows into the US Columbia river and makes power through several dams for millions until it hits the Pacific ocean
@@normyanke2515 Not sure how that relates to my analysis of seasonal thermal storage in an IBC tank or two.
Great if you have the conditions required to make large scale seasonal thermal storage practical. But no need for that BS about batteries, I assume you can't power much with the energy stored as heat?
Also, spring runoff refilling the heat storage, as in heat stored in form of spring runoff? Just no.
@@fishyerik they are talking about hydro, not thermal.
Visited from - just have a think - Thank you for the video. It was good to see the chap's comparison setup. Might I respectfully suggest doing the elements to camera at home rather than 'selfie' style.
I remember I seen a passive system consisting in a black box with air circulating inside that will keep the inside of a shed above freezing temperatures at temperatures below -20°c.
I wonder if you could make solar panels that change color like a mood ring.
On a hot summer day the panel might shift from black to green or grey.
I’ve heard that one reason plants are green not black is because green allows easier thermal regulation.
I have a ASHP and very happy with it. moved from oil and did get some government money to do it. my oil boiler and tank was fairly old and was going to need replaced in near future. however as the electric market in UK is broken and based on gas prices electric price has gone up 250% in the time I've had ASHP. this summer I got solar and battery on house and haven't had to buy any power for 3 months however heading into winter demand will return on electric.
Great Video Rosie, Have you met up with Saul Griffith, author of the Big Switch and Electrifying Everything Advocate..be Great to have you and him hear in Alice Springs and NT if your ever passing through (not much wind here sorry haha) thanks outbackEV-Hunter
Yes I have met Saul, and I am keen to have him on a livestream to talk about his electrificying everything plans. He seems to be very busy promoting his new book right now, which I am reading and loving. Hopefully in a few months he'll have some time to be a guest on Engineering With Rosie.
I'd love to do a trip to the NT some time soon, there are quite a few cool things happening there with microgrids, the Sun Cable project and critical minerals mining. I just need to wait for a "real" work trip there so I can combine (like I did for this video), or wait until the channel grows enough that I can afford a travel budget!
Just Have a Think sent me too. Well done. Subscribed. Thank you!
My area has clouds and rain all winter. Sometimes 30 days of overcast and rain straight. It's hard to do PV here in winter without lots of batteries. Luckily, we have hydroelectric dams everywhere and our grid has always been 100% renewable.
Hi John, this is part of the reason we suggested incorporating thermal storage solutions and systems like Hydro can then be run as the absolute large resort for servicing thermal demand.
I live in Iceland and here we are of course already with about 85% green energy. Electricity is 99% green, one island still use diesel generation. Electricity comes from hydro 75% and 25% geothermal. Space heating is over 90% done with direct geothermal, the rest is by electricity. All in all about 65% of primary energy comes from geothermal and about 20% comes from hydro. About 15% is still fossil fuels, mainly jet fuel, diesel and petrol for transport. That will change slowly. There is little one can do about aviation today. But ferries for example are going hybrid here. With cars and trucks, we are #2 after Norway with electrifying those. New cars in 2023 were over 50% EV. Town busses in Reykjavik and the area around are moving to BEV.
I do not believe that solar has a near term future here in Iceland, but we see the first wind power generators. A few small ones, mainly for testing purpose. Landsvirkjun has two 900 KW Enercon E44 running in the area between Búrfell and Sultartangi hydro power stations for testing purpose. They operate at 42.5% average efficiency, a high value for onshore. A wind park of about 60 MW is in planing and going through the environmental survey. Wind could complement hydro, that gets less water in winter, when electricity usage is highest.
Geothermal is base load, supplying power 24/7/365, without seasonal or daily variations.
Further CO2 reduction in Iceland could come from the aluminum smelters replacing the carbon anodes and the building industry reducing the use of cement, or perhaps zero emission cement will come.
Me and my sisters have a house in Portugal. There I have installed four panels for heating the hot water for the household. I am looking to replace the oil heating, only used on certain days and heating the pool, with a air to water heat pump. We have a fireplace, that also works as a boiler, that we use in the evening to heat the Living room directly and the sleeping rooms via convectors supplied with hot water from the fireplace.
I am now looking for hybrid panels for electricity and heating the pool, so rather water than air. The pool water should be at a good temperature to cool the panels on a hot summer day. The difference in temperature over a panel should be small, if you get enough water flow.
I think a combination of full or partial-Earthships, Geothermal, wind and solar can offset quite a bit of the fossil fuel shortage problems. I also think combining this cooling idea with some solar panel reflectors & all the technologies the energy shortages & high costs can be 100% solved and a nation can be energy self sufficient. Thanks for sharing. Best Wishes & Blessings. Keith Noneya
So about a 15% efficiency increase on a 40 C day, plus hot air to harness also. Running heatpumps using that air would also be a huge additional bonus.
Most people do not realize that a solar system installed at 3,000 feet elevation will produce much more power than a system installed 10 miles away at near sea level. I have a watt per square meter that can tell me the sun output in a town such as Boulevard California, and compare it with San Diego, 40 miles to the west, at sea level. Boulevard is at about 3,600 feet of elevation. I measured 895 watts per square meter in Boulevard, and only 800 in San Diego a hour later, just past noon. It could be dust in the air, smog, whatever. Still it is a significant difference. You can get a parachute team to test this in real time, it only will take 1 day!
I was interested to hear about the thermal challenges with PV panels not about carbon issues.
Glen offers some elegant solutions to the thermal problem.
Similar panels now available from a French company but with liquid cooling of the panel that you can then use for radiators or water tank heating while cooling the panels.
16% down to 12%, 0 to 80 C
4% (or 25% of output) over 80 C
30 C is 10%, less the electricity to drive fan.
But extra energy to preheat water?
One more panel maybe the answer to cover small lost energy.
Roof space would not be that limiting.
Mixed thoughts for me.
Rosie, thank you for the follow up post, on Sunovate. But Dave Borlace 'Just Have a Think' post. Left me with questions. For example, the jets of air created by the air box to cool the PV panel. Seem to be in the same airflow as the exhausting air. Which would cause airflow turbulence and resistance, And an increased energy demands on the fans to overcome it. And non-even cooling of the PV cells.
So if possible a follow up post. Detailing exactly how it functions would be nice. Or just post comparison testing data. Or if i'm mistaken, please correct me about the actual path of the airflow. And how it's different then how it appeared to me.
FWIW I am planning to install PV panels as part of reroofing my home and I was considering ways to cool the panels. So this could make a difference in how I proceed.
I have data for the energy consumption so I will check up and get back to you here.
Great Question, Our challenge when we set out to just cool the panels was to ensure that energy we invested was much less than the energy regained through cooling. Early systems are generally are 1 to 2-3 times for PV boosting mode. When we are in heating mode the energy recovered is in excess of 1:100+ (i.e. a 20watt fan consumption produces +2kW of thermal heat). We intentionally kept some of the secret sauce from the images but what we can say is that there is next to no mixing of the inlet and exhausting air. This way we get maximum temp lift for a given mass flow rate.
@@glenryan6692 Thx for the feedback and the quantifiable figures for it's thermal vs electric use efficiency figures with one caveat...
May I suggest considering developing a BIPV-T version. Since the airbox is to be made out of sheet metal. Which is what BIPV standing seam panels are made from too, such as from Roofit.Solar. So a BIPVT version, seems like the logical and synergic step to take. But not necessarily using the 'standing seam' format. Since 'stamping' gives you other value added options. IMHO
And my caveat is your statement "that there is next to no mixing of the inlet and exhausting air', since you did not quantify it...
Good luck developing your prototype, since it is an intriguing concept.
@@glenryan6692 BTW I have a BI-PV-T concept that uses the rafters as a cooling channel. I would be happy to give you more details about. If you would be interested in developing it.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Thx, and I hope you do a live stream on all the current BIPV and BIPVT options. I have to re-roof my home soon. And I'm trying to decide if a BIPV option is feasible for me in the USA.
We live in Perth WA and enjoy solar electric panel generation on our roof. The main problem we've had for years has been due to the house being so well insulated, the coldest months of June to Sept are also sunny but moving warmed air into the household space is difficult. Sometimes midday in winter it's far warmer sat in the garden than indoors. A warmed air mass would be a welcomed innovation that doesn't involve using a reverse cycle air conditioner.
This is one of the selfish reasons that we developed the tech. Our solar passice design house had all the sun taken away when the neighbor built to their maximum height limit. We froze that next winter. Now with the Sunovate solution we can now comfortably wear tee shirts in winter and not have to rely on the reverse cycle air conditioner.
Yes, I've been pushing this idea since 2007. It's a no-brainer. I think a simple air-tight sheet metal backing could be applied to solar panels with inlet and outlet connection points for air based temperature control.
I had PV and water solar in the UK. I was aware that the PV gets less efficient over time and temperature. now in France I need some heating (ANY heating!!) and the idea of these Sunovate panels is great. Systems that would be 'easily!) retrofittable OUGHT to sell well and i can only hope that a push by the EU to promote such systems would benefit all. the cooling by air is such a simple and inherently safe solution where a bit of 'leakage' due to damage/age etc is not a problem.
Rosie, you should do a program on the lack of affordability that all these programs are doing to young couples trying to buy their first home. The utilities did it first by charging more to provide electricity to new housing rather than spreading to cost to all the rate payers.
Great application of combined solar PV with solar thermal, with temperatures we would rarely ever see here in Wisconsin! Has anyone tried to combine one of these systems with a Stirling engine? 🌄
Hi Chuck, We are considering the inclusion of other H2X (heat to....) Stirling engines, solid state peltier just to name a few.
@@glenryan6692 Glen, that's fantastic! Stirling cycle engines are fascinating, and Peltier junction devices came to my mind as well as a more practical solid state device; I'm glad you are considering trying combinations to squeeze more electricity out of every drop of sunlight. From all indications you are blessed with abundant solar, I'm glad you are making full use of that resource! 🌄. Good real time operating systems we can all learn from, many thanks.
It is good to see you presenting a technology without a few gloomy caveat.
But the really important point you make -- as a scientist and engineer -- is that combining different technologies is really the way we must go. Regions and even localities vary so very much by real nature, which we cannot change, that we shall see a whole generation of energy engineers trained to assess needs then select from a variety of solution on small and large scales.
I have thought for some time that you are a perfect example and that having lived in Nordic regions and Australia you really know what you are talking about.
Heating with a heat pump would be challenging here in Canada where the temperature in Edmonton last December dropped to -42 deg. C.
The fastest roll out of heat pumps currently is in the nordics: Norway, Finland etc. Also verrrry cold places. Heat pump technology has come a long way, and you can boost temps with other heating sources if you have occasional extremely low temperatures.
You also had sunny days of minus 14C. and the air in an enclosed space behind a pv panel would be 0C. or more.
@ Heronimous
Your football team is the Eskimos so you should be able to tolerate the cold. 🥶 A fellow Canadian here although on the Wet Coast. As ‘karllwt’ mentioned the temp of the air between your roof and the panels would be considerably higher than ambient and venting that warmer air to your heat pump would benefit you in less heating costs while also increasing the efficiency and durability of your panels. Given your northern latitude it would be ideal to angle your panels more steeply but getting up on an icy roof isn’t a fun proposition. A guy named Handy Bob had solar on his RV’s as well as his house south of you in Montana and he might have some good advice on his site. I’ve been to McMahon stadium in November and watched many a game at Commonwealth and frigid was the order of the day.
@ Engineering with Rosie
I understand that geothermal is much more difficult to install but one thing has always bothered me about heat pumps is that they make the air around them even hotter during the warm months and even colder during winter. Much better to use the ground as the heat sink/source but I’m realistic as to why we can’t in many cases. Dave at ‘Just Have a Think’ had a video titled “Why don’t we just run on geothermal?”. Still I was surprised to find that Nordic countries are growing markets for heat pumps.
Popping over from just have a think channel..
Welcome!
Stacking an air source hear pump on the output of the sunovate system allows the solar panel to increase the efficiency of the heat pump
If the heat pump waste air is expelled at a cooler temperature than ambient, then looping that back into the air intake of the panels will ALSO increase the PV efficiency. So a closed loop for air would seem on paper to be more efficient than a simple linear system
I understand your idea but I suppose that the heat pump would generally only be on for a certain amount of time. Maybe also, with hot air going in to the HP the exhaust air temperature may not be below ambient. (But don’t quote me on any of that)
Hi True, This is exactly right. The system can run in open and closed loop mode. By having the system in closed loop it also significantly reduces the defrosting demand on air source heat pumps because the moisture is stripped out. The overall thermal efficiencies of the PVT part also increase.
Is there a way we could concentrate and store this excess heat to later use for cooking?
I agree that air is a better choice then water because of the freezing and boiling issues. Air is cheap and forgiving. DIY for anyone is to go with air. In all system need some temperature controls.
So how does a DIY make a system that cools each section of a solar panel evenly? Answer is to blow air at each panel through a tube. This happens to be the most efficient also. My guess is that the tubes need to be about 4 to 6 diameters apart. The tubes stick through the very large air return duct, want slow moving air, and the inlet of each tube is in the supply duct. Insulate the discharge duct with foam board.
The same approach can be used for water. In this case the return duct always drains 100% and the centrifugal pump (use a sump pump) for the water doesn't have a check valve. Water drains also out of the panels on the roof to an insulated tank.
Thermal storage can be as simple as rocks of earth that can be the ground under the house. If space is an issue the method of choice is always phase change that occurs at a very narrow temperature range, another control issue that best matches a heat pump. The heat packs that have salts that change states or melting of wax are the options.
Thanks for the video, Rosie. You have a new subscriber. Have a nice day.
It's About time they started using my idea. ;-)
(From the UK). And what about an in-between solution where we have solar and battery storage for all our electricity and buy a small amount in the winter and insulate our houses and reduce the the amount of gas we buy in the winter. I have a well insulated house and I use 1/10 of my friends old draughty house. If the UK only bought 10% of its current demand there would not be a problem and to make it better all the infrastructure is already installed.
7:20 The Jaws curve!
It seems to me that Australia is prime territory for combined Hot Water Heat Pumps - products like - Rointe Dalis Pro Electric Air Source Heat, aroSTOR domestic hot water heat pump or OCHSNER EUROPA series. I am sure there are many others available worldwide. These combine an ASHP with a hot water cylinder. They not only provide your hot water for domestic use, they can (depending on size/product) also provide your heating. As a side benefit as they can be plumbed into rooms to draw air from within the building/rooms and will in effect provide a air conditioning effect, cooling those rooms.
Exceptionally well balanced wrap up. Always great content.
Hi Rosie, thanks for a very interesting video 👍. It's 18 months or so since you released this, and looking into Sunovate, they've been working on this idea since at least 2019; have you any idea when they're likely to have a product ready for market, and specifically the residential market rather than large scale projects?
The idea of PVT just makes so much sense; the idea that you get more PV from your panels by cooling them and get usable heat for heating or hot water as well just seems to make so much sense that it's surprising it's such a niche market with associated high costs.
Sunovate will never be affordable for domestic purposes. Hopefully a Chinese competitor will show up and offer this technology at reasonable prices. Standard solar PV only became cheap because China took interest in it. Unless China sees value in PVT, it will never be commercially viable for the middle class domestic market (absolutely no chance for anyone hovering near the poverty line which is most people on earth)
was it planed that you and "Just have a think" just released a video on the same topic just a few seconds apart?
If you look at the video description it seems like it's planned
@@oplkfdhgk ah cool. didn't have the time yet to watch it. Its a technology i first heard about when linus (tech tips) installed it on his home and I'm quite hyped about it.
It wasn't planned that we both did videos on Sunovate at a similar time. When I knew I would be in Perth for work and contacted Glen to arrange a tour he told me that JHAT was also making a video on Sunovate soon. So then Dave and I were able to coordinate the release of our videos together.
Thanks for sharing about the pilot district heating community here in Canada. I thought that was only happening in Europe. Hopefully it willing take off everywhere soon.
@Rosie ( @UClu8Q445-ZAG1dzzP1mHiAw ), we know there's a "heat exchanger" but we don't know what sort! Given that an ordinary fridge motor is about 100W, I assume the first 100W is running a compressor to maximise heat extraction, and the air flowing across the panel has been cooled (i.e. chilled air) to get higher conversion efficiency? If he's not using a compressor in the heat exchanger, and just using atmospheric-pressure air behind the panels, I think he might be missing a trick there.
Cooling the PV cells definitely equates to longer life. Some panels only last 20 years, so having them last 30+ years is great. Roof and insulated roof spaces are now a matter for innovation, and engineered roofs are the next step. For a $250,000 house, the roof only costs about $16,000. Far better for it to save you money.
Thanks Rosie
I am also frustrated with the lack of focus on heating. Up here in Canada, I don't think this system would make much difference. When it was coldest, my panels were covered with snow and did not produce much of anything. Now if I had a good micro wind turbine, it would have produced good power throughout the fall, winter and early spring.
The idea of air cooling a panel in the summer would be useful, but not much need for the heat at that point.
Here we need to go to ground source heat pumps. I talked to someone recently with a super efficient air source one, and it was unable to keep up when it was -25 C. Ground source heat pumps are expensive to install, and for this reason some incentive is needed. I like the idea of interest free loans attached to the property to encourage the adoption of this technology. In the city, district ground source heating systems should be required for any new development and older neighborhoods retrofitted as upgrades to other systems are done. It is so frustrating so see major upgrades without district heat being done at the same time.
There is a YT video of a guy who enclosed the back of his ground mount PV system and coupled it to his heat pump evaporator. He added venting for the summer. Spring, fall, and winter the air going into his heat pump was well above ambient. To really make this work I think you will have to allow your house to get much warmer than you may like during the day. Maybe 35 C. instead of 20 C. A heavy house would work better.
The houses thermal mass is key parameter. The Living Lab is double brick so has some thermal inertia. We can easily peak at +35 to 40 degrees in the middle of winter. As the ir is introduced through ceiling vents the low grade heat flows over the ceiling face and the upper brick walls. The warm ceiling then radiates this warmth to the floors and occupants. The walls then conduct the heat down. Its like being in Broome or the Bahama's in the middle of winter. We are looking at other thermal storage solutions to support longer term storage so we can make better use of the summer production.
Suspend and protect vertical panels in a tall transparent tower. The panel could rotate inside the tower to follow the sun. The tower could be located in urban areas.
I came up with a system that used the thermal to take heat away from the solar panel to provide hot water and better efficiency in solar panels all the way back before 2008. Sadly I was unable to get funding.
Glad to see they've gotten round to it!
😊
Here in Finland we don`t have visible sun usually from November to End of January. I `m getting soon 8,76kWp solar system, Mabne I will from that about 7000 kWh.
Sunovate should use the heated air for sand thermal battery like polar night energy or stiesdal sand battery and then control temperatures for a greenhouse growing spirulina to capture carbon dioxide emissions.
What about long term, send the heat the soil to cooldown the refrigerant? Of course, is long term, but entropy always grow so this is another thing to take care off. Same with the air, I cool down panels get more efficiency, but air will be more hot.
The heat is gonna be there on the roof if you don't have solar panels. You are just shifting the heat energy from one place to another
The entropic value of the world will negate any warmth from this system
Mini-split is a option too
Thanks for sharing 🙂
Why don't you use refrigerant to cool the panels and drive a small heatpump for domestic hot water?
I'm in Perth, Watching this video. :-)
Sent here by Dave and subscribed. Based in Queensland.
Love the content but still not sure how a rooftop system here could utilise much of that heat. We already have a heat pump for hot water which uses very little energy and is fully operational from our solar and battery. We don’t have a pool so the excess would be wasted?? In winter we have chilly nights/mornings regularly down to 5-8C so would like to heat the house up in the morning but this would be the only time that there would be no warm air from the panels.
So the only advantage is the additional efficiency of our panels (and the longevity) but the fall is quite marginal for us. We have 11.2 kw of solar PV on our roof and a 10kw/h inverter. Peak out put is 10kw/h but on very hot days his can fall to about 8 or 9kw/h in the middle of a hot day. The additional generation would alone is not particularly significant.
This is interesting but it still has the problem that is mostly providing heat when heat is not needed.
@ Robsenga
I think you may be missing a key benefit of the cooling of the solar panels and that is that their performance will not degrade as fast and so will last longer (I believe the estimate was lasting 50 years instead of 20 and that would cut by half or more the number of panels that end up as garbage). It’s possible that this benefit alone warrants the additional cost let alone any benefit from use of the heat. And heat there is aplenty. I commented on ‘Just Have a Think’ that RV’ers found that having solar panels on the roof heated up their RV so much that they had to use shore power or a generator to run their air conditioners so it wasn’t a win for them.
@@mikedavison3400 Fair enough Mike though I suspect 20 years is a worst case scenario. My panels have a 25 year guarantee and I live in a very hot place.
Another benefit might be that efficiency improvements mean that you can reduce the number of panels needed. I have 34 covering two sides of my roof and these panels might mean the same amount of power generation on hot days with just 30 panels. Extending their life and reducing the number by 10% are both worthwhile.
My only point was that it does not solve the issue of heat generation when it isn’t needed.
@ Robsenga Hay
Point well taken. They are working on the ‘waste heat’ issue. Glen talked about Stirling engine technology or solid state Peltier as ways to put it to use. Absorption chillers are another possibility. I remember when I first learned about RV fridges that burned propane to heat up the coils at the back of the fridge that I thought it was crazy to create heat in order to cool down something a couple of inches away but they do work well. They are not nearly as efficient as compressor fridges but when the heat source is waste heat then the main issue is collecting and getting the heat up to the level where the absorption cycle can begin. A great benefit of absorption or Peltier technology is that both are QUIET.
Engineering with Rosie it would be foolish to not generate hot water from these hot solar panels. But beside the warm water exit side the cool air could come in to make it both water and air cooled, each facing in the opposite direction. The air to run a clothes dryer and the hot water to go to a solar condenser such as a fresnel lens in a copper pipe to get the water up to close to 200 F. and store it for hot water usage, showers, dish washers or washing and laundry in addition to heating the house in radiant heaters.
As we transition ro renewable energy generation, distributed battery storage will reduce the strain on grids and enable the use of the superabundance of renewables coming our way.
Rosie, I hope you do a live stream on all the currently available BIPV and BIPVT options. I have to re-roof my home soon. And I'm trying to decide if a BIPV option is feasible.
Hi Rosie how about the process of evaporation small jets that mist the panels with water, it worked for me 😊
Hi Rosie,
Thanks for this video.. good to see someone finally trying to make this happen. The benefits have been so obvious for so long, I am amazed it hasn't made it as a commercial product yet.
In this video you deal with the benefits to the efficiency and longevity of the solar PV panels, which is great, but a useful follow-up video would be to discuss what can be done with the warm air produced by the system.
Obviously it could be used directly for space heating when the house is cooler than desired, but that isn't needed in summer in many parts of the world, during the day at least.
Is there a way the heat energy could be stored during the day to be used overnight, during the seasons when daytime temperatures are comfortable but evenings are cool?
Could the warm air be used to boost the efficiency of air source heat pumps for water heating? If so, adding a control system to run the heat pump mainly when warm air was available from the panels could add extra efficiency.
You mention seasonal heat storage.. it would be great to learn more about how that works, and how the warm air could be used to assist with storing heat through summer.
That is probably more practical at large scale, but if it could be done on a single-property or neighbourhood scale, it would be good to know about it.
PV + solar thermal has been invented several times in the last 30 years. It is not offered commercially because the heat collected is not worth the cost of the extra hardware. This is especially true because as you note, the heat isn't worth much in the summer and it is not available at a particularly useful temperature in the winter.
I keep wondering about heat pumps (in the UK) and whether there's a way to feed them waste heat of any kind so that they operate in their most efficient mode - so I'm really wondering if a system like this could be plugged into an air-source heat pump to any benefit in a colder climate.
Dig many trenches, lay down many loops of PEX pipes with water. Pump all the heat under ground during summer and absorb heat back during winter. So heat pump can work efficiently all the time.
The amount of air required to run a heat pump is many times what this would produce.
@@hughmarcus1 I assumed so but at least it could be mixed with the rest of the air going in so that it could help the heat pump to be efficient. Another thing one would want is to mix stale, old air that has come out of the house be mixed with the air coming in to the heat pump too.
Best system for UK latitudes is the so called 'coffin ice bank heat pump'.
Wet PVT panels are the heat source for the ice bank heat pump.
The advantage for snow covered panels, is an automatic defrost capability. The snow just slides off via valve reversal.
It bothers me that the radiator on the back of my fridge and freezer dump their waste heat into the room, while on the opposite side of the wall my heat pump hot water system blows out the waste cold air from it's radiator.
I look forward to whole of home heat exchangers that can more efficiently move heat around.
Speaking from the country of Scandinavia (no such thing but whatever...), luckily we have a lot more wind power than solar and wind power delivers more during the winter than during the summer so it is a much better fit for us but we are starting to get quite a bit of solar power to now. And of course we have nuclear and hydro...
I'd like to see more of the companies behind novel climate friendly tech to be seeking crowd funding in two stages
1: at an early stage the funders would be buying shares in the system (as for example the seeders funding platform does)
2: close to full scale launch a later stage use a funding platform where the funders reward is to get get some of the first models when the device finally goes into production at scale (kickstarter for example does this sort of funding).
I can't afford to sponsor a whole factory, but would love the chance to put some of my savings into helping the planet. Until regular production starts that is always a risk: the shares might be worthless or the rewards might not be delivered at all: however if I could spread those over a number of projects done if those might do more good for my grandchildren in terms of leaving then a better planet than the value of the money if it is just handed over as a bank balance.
Sunamp has thermal batteries that could store the heat for water heating and general heating.
Biomass is not a solution as here in NY USA the local Biomass plant closed due to shortage of wood chips and pellets. My father works for a company that gets the wood and processes it for biomass and he said there is shortages of Biomass all the time. Going Green in my view would be good if it benefited the people but it is not geared that way. It is geared to make massive profits for companies. Tesla figured out how to take power right out of the sky and it makes sense, north and south pole, magnetosphere. The power is there the big biz just doesn't want us to figure it out as it eliminates them!
Central heat and air is the largest waste of energy in a household . Get a fire place. Cooling in the summer is a more difficult problem. At least in the south in the U.S. An underground water tank with 57 to 60 degree water temperature to tape for radiant cooling will help a great deal in the summer. A solar panel can run the pump and fans. Two large panels can run an efficient air conditioner unit in the summer and a good battery will run it for a few hours into the hot night. By one thirty in the morning a house should be cool and stay cool.
Hi Rosie could the warm air coming from the panels be directed to air to water heat pumps and then be used to heat water?What do you think?
Let’s build a prototype