Posts by Downbeatdan
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Peter Cox,
Right on Peter Cox. The Left have to look at how to plug into the base human instinct to choose what's best for oneself. Watching parents vote for a party which will make their children's tertiary education highly expensive, and a massive debt mountain is a prime indication of that.
Unfortunately, the million non-voters are most likely the ones who would in fact benefit from the policies of the left. Youth, uneducated in low quality jobs,, those on benefits for mental and physical health reasons.. How are they going to be galvanised into action, to even vote? Perhaps they just cant see where their interests lie, or perhaps the daily struggle for survival takes priority over political engagement. -
Good that you're looking at it Russell. I spent a while being a home energy assessor (about 500 homes) and looked at several homes with solar hot water.
The most crucial things in having reliable supply is how big your hot water cylinder is, and when you're going to use the hot water.
Yes these are very tricky systems, and I've seen several where the failure of one or other parts has caused the system to suck massive amounts of power. There have been no big advances in technology which have caused price drops for the heating units in this field. If anything, they are more expensive than ever. Average NZ family use is that 1/3rd of the electric usage will be hot water if using electricity. Savings from using solar hot water are only half of this third at best - more often only around 25%, from the units my company measured.If you look at PV system, you are collecting energy which can be used for any of the energy uses in the house. The cost of panels has dropped massively over the last several years, meaning that the long term cost of energy from these panels is getting very close to parity with grid produced power. Grid connected PV means that there are no finnicky batteries to maintain, halving the cost of the system, and minimising maintenance. The trickiest part of solar PV is not knowing what the future will be of grid exporting power. Seeing as you have a household with lots of use during the day, you'll be be using as much as possible as its made, so looks to suit you. Plus side is - you can stick with a standard, simple hot water cylinder, and you'll be able to spread your collection of solar energy across all of your energy uses, on existing cabling and wiring - no special plumbing set up required.
Some people are now implementing solar hot water, by simply wiring PV panels to a second element in the hot water cylinder with a power controller. Simple dumping of PV electric into the hot water tank.
Hope that helps.....