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Choice Magazine have a free online article with a little bit of useful information on solar hot water heaters.  While it will give a good backgrounder on the subject, it is not a comparison of available components.   One feels that the authors of the article were not quite clear about how this might be achieved.  It’s true that it would be quite difficult in such a large country with its different climates, energy options and water qualities.

Perhaps what they should have done was to confine the scope of the inquiry not to systems but to components.   That way perhaps at least the industry practitioners who are constantly putting together new systems, would have a little more qualitative information with which to make the choice.   I feel that with a system where the components are customised almost with every installation, the idea is not to educate the consumer, but the industry.

The methodology of evaluating solar hot water systems should be to compare like with like.  Comparing a flat panel collector with a heat pump system is just not good enough and ends up confusing readers.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 9:41 am and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.