We’ve decided to install a solar hot water system to provide domestic hot water and heat to the house in winter. We already use a combination hot water heater and boiler that gives us domestic hot water and in-floor radiant heat, but it’s propane-fired.
We are in an excellent area for solar, and we hope to reduce our propane consumption by at least half. Our house is set up facing south with a huge roof area – it’s perfect for solar. There are no tall trees to shade it, and we have the in-floor system already, so it should be very efficient. We can put the extra storage tank in the garage, and the pipes can come directly into the equipment room from the solar connectors. It should be nice once it’s all finished.
Our other option was a geothermal system, which uses a heat pump run off electricity. It has many hundreds of feet of pipe in the ground. However, this is Garvin Mesa; we have rocks. Lots of rocks. Digging a six-foot-deep trench over 600 feet long was going to cost an unknown amount of time and money. So, we decided to go with solar, which only needs a single four-by-four hole to bury the heat sink pipe.
Guess what we found while digging? Of course, a huge rock that’s too large for our backhoe. It was right in the location where the hole was supposed to be. Ken ended up moving the hole a bit, and he found even more rocks there! We did get it all dug out in the end.
The solar connectors arrived today, and Ken got the landscape cloth and the first layer of pea gravel into the hole. Tomorrow we’ll start installation of the heat sink pipe. We’ll backfill with more gravel, then fill in the hole. We should be done in a few weeks if the rest of the parts come on time.