The ABC's of the PHPP - Part 12 Solar DHW - Liquid Sunshine
Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 12:43AM 
Used under CCA license - author Ra Boe under the "CC-BY-SA-3.0" in Wikipedia. One thing that I have seen a lot of Passive House projects incorporate into their design is a solar hot water system. When I toured the Passive Houses being built a few years ago it was fun to see the excitement that the homeowners had in knowing they could get some of their hot water for free.
The Solar Domestic Hot Water worksheet in the PHPP is where you will record any free heat supplied to water heated by a solar collector. As you can expect you will need to give the PHPP the same type of coordinates as you did for your windows. This way the PHPP knows where the solar collector is relative to the sun for the climate you set. If you have anything that will shade that collector at anytime, you need to record that on this sheet as well. If you notice in the picture above, the dormer roof could be a source of shading for the solar collector next to it depending on how the sun travelled at that particular spot. You would need to determine how much of the collector was covered and for how long.
Further down the worksheet is a place to enter new solar collector and solar storage information if you are not using something that is already listed. The solar collector is the part that gets mounted outside to collect the heat from the sun and transfer it to your hot water tank. The storage is the type of tank that you will be storing that hot water in. There are several different kinds of solar hot water collectors and storage tanks out there with more coming all the time. If you want an opinion I am sure there is a happy homeowner or a CPHC out there who would love to tell you all about their project.
Next Up – The Electricity Worksheet.
Reader Comments (1)
It was so amazing stuff "see the excitement that the homeowners had in knowing they could get some of their hot water for free" its for free I wonder when it could happen in our homeowners.