Anyone here have experience with solar hot water to supplement their

oil furnace heated hot water and baseboard heat? We live in a cold winter climate, so heating fuel is always a concern.

Thanks!

costs $15 to be hooked up to the line/month and we burn @ $3 worth of gas heating the water.
We heat with corn,using gas only in extreme cold, so the only gas we use is to heat water for the most part.
Don't know if there is a version for oil heat

But you can get propane models.

On edit - My error, they do indeed make them.

http://www.tanklesswaterheatersdirect.com/shop/tanklesswaterheaters/toyotomi/toyotomi-tankless-water-heaters-mainpage.asp

water.

There was a solar box on the roof with copper pipes that water ran through. The valve could sense the water temp from the roof and bypassed the water heater if the water was hot enough. This was in the early 90's when there was a tax credit for solar anything.

> Anyone here have experience with solar hot water to supplement their
> oil furnace heated hot water and baseboard heat? We live in a cold winter
> climate, so heating fuel is always a concern.

We have solar hot water to supplement our gas-fired boiler.

In good weather, the collector is keeping our hot water tank lovely and
warm - so much so that I later had to install a thermostatic mixing valve
to make sure that no-one was scalded - but even on overcast days, it will
take the edge off the cold water coming into the tank (thus saving some
of the energy that would have been required from gas).

I don't have any figures to hand (I'd have to dig out old bills and try
working things out) but the amount of gas used across the Summer & Autumn
went down by quite a bit (we still use gas to cook so it would never be
zero in any case). It would have been a nice £ saving if the gas prices
hadn't rocketed up last year but, as it was, it held off the pain that
my neighbours were hitting.

We still use gas to heat the radiators in the Winter as the benefit from
using the solar to pre-heat the radiator loop didn't outweigh the large
amount of re-piping that would have been required (and the climate here
in the UK wouldn't allow me to think of trying to replace the heating
with solar only - even with double the collector area!).

Hope this helps.

:hi: