Let's get down to the heart and solar of things

By Tim Lessard Special to PRIME August already. Yet the sun's still high in the sky and its rays mighty hot against the nape of your neck. No wonder they use this stuff to heat houses. It is hot. But it's free. And there's lots of it. In fact, there's enough energy from the rays of the sun against the earth each hour to meet the world's energy demands for one year. Peak oil? Maybe. Peak sun? Never. A brief history of solar energy We human beings have been using this solar energy since the early Greeks. They used mirrors and magnifying glasses to start fires, to light torches for religious ceremonies, and, according to their records, to burn ants. These were, of course, pre-ASPCA days. This year is the 100th anniversary of modern solar. The Frenchman August Mouchet developed a solar powered steam engine in the 1860s, but it wasn't until 1908 that William J. Bailley of the Carnegie Steel Company put together a solar collector using copper coils in an insulated box. That's basically the same design concept we use today for solar. With the price of oil aiming at $150 a barrel, more and more people are looking at solar and many are converting to it, not just to reduce their carbon footprint on the planet, but to save money on their energy bills for the long run. A solar energy primer What do you need to know about solar to see if it would save you money? First, there are three general categories of solar energy: hydronic, passive and photovoltaic. Hydronic solar heats hot water for your home by circulating a fluid heated by the sun through plates, tubes and piping. Passive solar warms your home by using the heat of the sun through windows, skylights and doorways or against sun sensitive materials used in the design and construction of your home. Photovoltaic cells literally, "electricity through light" provide electricity to run your home or to sell back to the local electrical energy grid by using the sun's radiation to create a current from semiconductor-like solar cells. We'll focus on hydronic solar here because it is the most practical and the most cost effective investment for those of us living in the Pioneer Valley. You can use it to heat the water you use daily in your home or you can use it to help heat your home itself. Or both. Advantages, disadvantages Here's how solar works. The sun's radiation is captured through a solar collector, either flat panels or tubes. A fluid inside is used to absorb the heat collected and transfer it by pump to a heat exchanger. Here the heat is transferred to the water or the heating circuit of your house. The transfer fluid cools, and it is pumped back to the solar collector to be reheated. This cycle repeats itself over and over. Your first consideration for solar is the location of your home and the amount of space you have to install the solar collectors. You'll need an adequate, unobstructed southern exposure to accommodate a display of panels or tubes sufficient to provide you with the hot water or heat you'll need for your individual home. Each house is unique and you may want an expert to do a solar analysis for your own home. Be wary, by the way, of exaggerated claims about the speed of payback from your investment in solar. Because the high cost of energy has shortened the time it takes for you to recoup your investment in solar and to start taking advantage of free energy from the sun the market has become ripe for a few quick-buck artists to engage in a kind of gold rush mentality and sales hype full of exaggerated claims that you need to watch out for. Just be careful out there. Calculating the cost to convert When calculating the cost of your investment in solar versus the return, you'll need to consider the tax incentives and rebates currently available. For example, the federal government is offering a 30 percent tax credit for purchase and installation of a solar system, healthy state incentives and bonuses exist, and there are interest-free loans for solar installation available at a local level as well. The best place to start researching the options available to you is on the web at dsireusa.org. One other overall consideration: the choice between solar panels and vacuum tubes as your solar collector. Solar plates arranged into panels are what we're most familiar with, but vacuum-filled solar tubes magnify the solar energy collected. They are, therefore, more powerful than solar panels, and their heat is also more adjustable so you won't end up with too much heat in the summer, a potential danger to your system. The cost of tubes, though, is about double that of solar panels. In your calculation of investment versus time of return on investment, another key factor is how long you plan to keep your home. If you know, for instance, that you'll be there for twenty years, even a large investment now will pay you back handsomely by reducing your long-term energy costs. Resale value of a home with a solar system in twenty years is also a factor, particularly given the probable cost of conventional energy by 2025. Even a twenty-thousand-dollar investment now could be worth forty thousand in return savings over the course of the next twenty years. Currently the most practical and most affordable use of solar at our latitude is to heat the water you use daily for showers, dishwashers, clothes washers, and so forth. Seventy percent of the annual household demand for hot water can be met through solar for a family of four in the Pioneer Valley. The equipment is so efficient today that in Israel, for example, ninety percent of all homes now use solar hot water heat. Of course, they're only about a foot and a half from the equator. Lots of that hot, hot sun there. Even so, here in Massachusetts solar will provide us with 45-50 percent of our hot water needs from October to May, and from May to October, a full 100 percent. If you have an electric hot water heater, that's an annual reduction of 70 percent off that aspect of your electrical bill. If you have oil, the savings will be less; but with oil you're also running your boiler or water heater all summer to produce hot water. It takes you about two gallons of oil a day to do that. Pro-rated, that's about six bucks a day, forty-two dollars a week, you'd be saving with solar during the summer. The best you can do with solar at this latitude for your overall household heat is about a 15 percent augmentation of a conventional system. However, with heating oil near $4.80 a gallon, that solar "help" would mean you'd only be spending about $4.08 a gallon, net. That savings, too, is worth considering when you look at the long-term life cycle of your home. The cost of any solar system is going to be unique to the requirements of your own home and its current heating system, but in this area you can figure around $12,000 for a hot water system only, $18,000 for a hot water and heating system. Looking at a ten-to-twenty year life cycle for your home and how much you'll save in energy costs over that period not to mention the appreciated value of your house that investment, particularly if it's through one of the longer term, no interest loans now available, is no longer formidable. You may, by the way, get lower quotes than these, but do beware of substandard equipment and inexpert installation. Remember, this is a long term investment and your "savings" won't be savings at all with the cost of replacing faulty equipment or the frequent maintenance and "tweaking" expenses that you can avoid by doing it right the first time. The payback window The typical pay back time is now about ten years at present solar costs and present energy costs. However, given peak oil, the increased energy demands from India and China, and the unpredictable volatility of some Middle East madman, the cost of energy is likely to keep going up. How far up? How fast? That will determine the speed of payback on your investment. By the way, "peak oil" refers to the peak of the bell curve graph of the world's oil production roughly speaking, that point when half the oil has been removed from the planet's resources and half remains. While it's true that leaves more than a trillion gallons of the stuff, the extraction of that second half is far more expensive and far more time consuming. Imagine a glass of water half full of pebbles, shale and sand. You can easily suck out through a straw the top half of water, but getting the second half out is far more difficult. So too with the oil still in the earth. Most experts agree we're passing through the period of peak oil right now. To extract the remaining half will cost far more than getting out the first half did. Energy prices will go up. So, the conclusion about solar? There are two reasons to do it. To reduce your own carbon footprint on this planet of ours. To save money in the long run on your energy costs. As for the investment end, if you're keeping your house between ten and twenty years, it almost certainly is worth the investment. And that's at today's energy rates. What about when oil hits $200 or $250 a barrel? Oops. Sorry. Just kidding. I hope. Tim Lessard is a Master Plumber and the president of Lessard Home Solutions of Springfield. Visit his web site at www.lessardhomesolutions.com or call him at 413.736.0066. Tim can also be heard on John Walter's Home Improvement Show on WMAS AM the second Saturday of every month at 11:00am.