The Solar PV panel that provides electricity AND heat for your home!
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- Опубликовано: 12 май 2024
- Solar photovoltaic panels provide electricity for homes, businesses and utility scale grid providers. Ironically though, the hotter they get in direct sunshine, the less effective they are at producing power. So, what if we could harvest the heat, remove it from the panel, and do something useful with it? 'Killing two birds with one stone', if you like. Well...it looks like we've just worked out how to do exactly that.
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This panel can put out close to 100 watts ruclips.net/user/postUgkxOqI2yqX0XVrhR2BMJciTWrHJpG8FhJyg when positioned in the appropriate southernly direction, tilted to the optimal angle for your latitude/date, and connected to a higher capacity device than a 500. The built in kickstand angle is a fixed at 50 degrees. Up to 20% more power can be output by selecting the actual date and latitude optimal angle.The 500 will only input 3.5A maximum at 18 volts for 63 watts. Some of the excess power from the panel can be fed into a USB battery bank, charged directly from the panel while also charging a 500. This will allow you to harvest as much as 63 + 15 = 78 watts.If this panel is used to charge a larger device, such as the power station, then its full output potential can be realized.
a dual axis you can make at home dirt cheap, + cardbord backing with a small PC fan will keep it cool and you will get about 40% per day
Here in Holland (or the Netherlands🙄) this technic is already booming. I myself got the SolarFreezer system. PVT on the roof and a reservoir in my crawlspace. Floorheating is a must have. And a NIBE heatpump. I have it running since December 1st. Used 215 kWh in December COP of 5,6. I'm monitoring my usage over the year but I'm using far less energy than from my residual heat from nearby industries contract, offered via a local network throughout the neighborhood. I'm glad I did the research and found the PVT system and even more about its performance.
Jurgen welk merk PVT heb je gekozen ? heb je een link?
@@boattrip Als je genoeg oppervlakte hebt Volthera PVT panelen, als je (dak)oppervlak tekort komt dan Triple PVT panelen. Meest kosten-effectieve / meest efficiënte per m2.
Vaillant, Nibe en EcoForest hebben als warmtepomp fabrikant zelf PVT ondersteuning.
Via de PVT leveranciers kan je in contact komen met (totaal)installateurs die het complete systeem kunnen samenstellen en installeren.
Bijkomend voordeel tegenwoordig is dat PVT wel leverbaar is en lucht/water nauwelijks leverbaar is vanwege ventilator leverproblemen.
Om de systemen te vergelijken kan je rendement en opbrengst inzien op bcrg.nl/nl/verklaringenregister/
@@TeXiCiTy Dank!
Booming hey?? 😂
Is it a ground source heat
pump?
i've been thinking about this tech a lot recently. the combination of PVT and agrivoltaics could make for some amazing passively heated and cooled horticultural structures for specialty crops.
totally agree!!! integration of that tech into greenhouses - brilliant idea for cold climates no longer relying on shipping food from 1000s of kms away.
Agreed. Combining this technology with vertical farming might alleviate some of the downsides of the latter
Tony, this is a big market that we are looking to tap into. COVID has driven many to consider domestic production of food again. Sunovate is looking to play its part with its Covered AGRI-PVT solution.
@@glenryan6692 Is there a space application?
@@FreeCanadian76 or relying on subsidised natural gas
Came here from Rosie's channel. PVT with air as the thermal medium seems like a promising technology.
Sunday is back to normal. Thank you for another 'Think'.
Cheers David :-) Just to let you know, the post time is changing from 2pm UK time to 6pm UK time from next Sunday.
@@JustHaveaThink Thanks for the heads up. Perfect time for my Sunday lunch break!
You know, back when I was a kid, a friend's dad built a solar water heater made of simple copper tubing, a plexi box, and an unplugged, junky water heater tank just for storage. The hot water that came out of that thing was ferocious. Now when I look at rooftop solar panels (1:58 for example) with those awkward, unsightly gaps around corners & chimneys, I think those would be perfect for H2O water heating panels. They could be cheap, custom-built to be any shape, and could fill in those gaps perfectly: perfect follow-on cottage industry.
The PVT using air-cooling is truly a brilliant innovation; it's not just highly effective but is a relatively simple retrofit to solar cells, providing tons of uses for waste heat. Even in domestic use, these look to have great potential for just energy savings alone, but on an industrial scale, it could provide a huge source of waste heat that could be used for industrial processes and large-scale heating.
I thought about this several years ago. It's good to know that adding a liquid cooling system isn't very effective, I hadn't thought of that disadvantage, but it's great to know that there are companies working on this solution. One thing I've been thinking about recently is how to get hot air for drying clothes. I think this would actually be an awesome use for this technology. A few years ago, I saw a RUclips channel (Missouri Solar and Wind) where he sealed off a dryer and ducted it to pull air from the attic so that it used a lot hotter air than the ambient temperature in the house with the added benefit of not using the cooler air in the house when A/C was running. I highly recommend that channel for DIYers.
Excellent video as usual. You have also since several years the french "Dualsun" compagny hybriding on the same panel PV & (water) thermal circuit...
I wasn't aware of Dualsun, thanks for sharing.
I added copper plate with with pipes to the back of my solar pv panels 10 years ago, pumping heated water underground into thermal sink for winter house heating and water heating. works wonders(Western Australia)
You could make a video on this
Always come away from these videos learning something new and being inspired Dave. Excellent stuff.
A massive thanks once again for helping me teach my students about tech futures. Their lives will need it. And giving them positive thing to look for as well as providing clues to my own future home.
Very cool concept. I've long thought that "waste heat" was a wasted opportunity. Been seeing some good progress on heat recovery and heat-to-electricity conversion. Really excited to see where it goes. Love synergistic systems.
P.s. This could potentially dovetail well with emerging solar-powered air-to-water systems which also rely on temperature to to remove/condensate water vapor.
What a great way to improve the efficiency of PV solar AND it doesn't even require improving the sunlight/electrical conversion efficiency of the cells themselves. Using air to transfer the heat away from the panels also makes for a simpler system than trying to use a liquid. I like the idea of ducting the heat down to a shed type greenhouse attached to my house.
And/or a hot tub.
As usual a very comprehensive overview of the subject.
Ive been wondering for years why pv panels could be used for heat as well as electricity, delighted to see its now coming to a stage where it can be used in a domestic situation
Dave, thank you for another well researched and thought provoking video - enhanced by your wonderful dry humour 👍🤣 keep them coming and here's wishing you and all your viewers good health👌
As soon as you started I thought about the way Tesla scrounges heat for battery management and passenger warmth. Makes a lot of sense.
Thanks for this, I am optimistic for the future because of you!
Good to hear :-)
Good job! Thanks for doing due diligence on your research and for presenting such even-handed appraisals on an often over-complicated subject.
I dreamed about trapping the heat 40 years ago, but was too busy working for paupers wages to try to innovate the system! I'm so glad someone has finally had the same idea and put it into operation! :)
Great video, if I save enough, I'll be looking to fit a PVT and possibly an internal heat pump setup as you described. Seems like something that should be brought into standard building regs so all new homes built have some kid of EV setup like this! Excellent video
it will cost more to install than simply installing more panels for more electricity and less heat. that's why this concept isn't mainstream. also, there is a huge disadvantage with tying together many systems so that if one fails, it can mess up the others. the kind of setup described in this video makes more sense if you DIY it because you won't lose so much to the install labor, but it's still unclear that even subtracting the labor cost would lend a big enough cost reduction to offset the long term operating and maintenance costs.
Cheers John :-)
Great content as usual - love the variety of the topics. Also, Great T-shirt!!
Much appreciated!
Happy to see they've gotten round to that.
😊
I love checking in on your videos because it gives me hope for the future. I love the content thanks
Cheers Steve :-)
I was wondering when this type of tech will come out? Thanks for making this video!!! I would like to see Sunovate convert that heat into energy!!! That would be awesome! :)
Thanks for rockin' that Ukrainian flag shirt! (and, the info was great, too!)
Cheers Bonnie :-)
PVT's been on my radar for many years, I find myself quite staggered that it's as niche as your video has made it seem. As proud as I am of how in touch I am with renewables tech I'm saddened by how much this no brainer needs to be 'promoted' and talked about. Fingers crossed the tremendous drop in PV costs over the past decade has made PVT hybrid panels much more competitive with regular PV panels for the wider populace.
Liked and commented for the algorithm in the hopes it spreads this far and wide. Also shared on twitter for the tiny bonus potential bump in exposure.
I like how your shirt represents the sky above and the sunlight we're trying to harvest below
As an Engineer (living in temperate Australia where typical daytime maximums go from 10C in winter to 40C in summer) I've actually worked on this exact problem. And at least on the domestic level, its a very hard problem. You end up needing to convince people to spend a fair bit of money on some form of heat store. Or having some other tradeoff.
Also, the air box setup you see on this video is great in a colder climate. But in a climate like here its just a heat removal system for the solar panels. And its cheaper to simply buy more panels to compensate for inefficiencies than it is to retrofit this type of system (designed in from manufacture is a different thing).
Without giving too much away I can say two things. Firstly, pure water is sufficiently non conductive. Secondly, you don't have to resort to complex plumbing and joints in order to create a solar panel sized heat exchanger - you can make it out of two pieces of aluminium. You can even make it in a form that creates the entire frame for an OEM panel. The key to not having too much of a thermal gradient across the panel is simply flow.
Btw in a real system you will need a heat pump and a heat exchanger to reject heat to the air. (Nice if you could store heat for winter but again its a small swimming pool sized structure). One nice thing is that you can actually keep the panels quite cool by using the heat pump - not just passive cooling. That again adds to efficiency and life.
As a complete layman i have often thought of CSP with fresnel lens technology or trough capture with parabolics as a great way of heat source from the sun . Could you not combine this on a roof with the heat recovery from solar panels to provide very high temperatiures for heat exchangers to work more efficiently efficiently
@@gategi10 These things are more complex to manufacture and thus end up being more expensive. That's why they haven't taken off. One possible tech that might get somewhere (and is being trialled commercially) is water cooling PV arrays. The warm water gets used as a heat source (for PV driven heat pump) and in return the PV array operates more efficiently, since its cooler. Its still niche though.
as a home owner living in Australia its pretty easy to have a cool and warm house, double brick big eves and wool insulation we have solar hot water and solar electricity - we used bamboo as a wind /storm break never need to use air cond or heater but if we get a super cold winter I use the wood fireplace - from the wood i collect on the property. my energy bill is generally 1000 a year in credit even with the tiny FiT (which shows you how much they value solar energy). The house was built east to west too which is not ideal but it works - during rain I can leave every window open and not get rain in. The only problem I have is one wall which gets hot afternoon sun (great in winter its like a heat store for the house) but bad in summer after about three days the wall is so hot it needs to be cooled down by water - i generally do that at night, a quick hose down to release the heat.
It would've been interesting to hear how the thermal systems affect the total output energy of the panels (do all the fans in the gas approach just negate the efficiency gain? (Or worsen it))
I'm also surrised the liquid solution problems couldn't be worked out, the temperature gradient issue can be resolved the same way as the gaseous implementation, cooling each panel individually, and with regards to liquid and electricity, we've been using liquid cooled computer systems for years, surely there's some useful research to be applied from it here too?
Always look forward to these videos though! :)
the main problem with either of these systems is getting them cheap enough. you need the hardware to be cheap, AND you need it easy to install. the cooling of the panels is a benefit, but the cost to install, maintain, and operate the blowers/pumps has always been greater than the benefit. if you actually put the hot air or hot water to good use rather than as just a way to increase the efficiency of the panels, they it MIGHT be enough of a gain to offset the cost and energy consumption of the panels. if it costs you $1k-$2k in labor to hook up all the plumbing or ducting, then it probably makes more sense to just add more panels instead and skip the heat harvesting.
however, if the cassettes are designed simply and double as a mounting platform, then the labor cost might be reduced enough to make it worth it.
if you're willing to DIY much of the work, then it may be a pretty good benefit.
personally, I think it might make more sense for them to create a system that tries to create an up-draft through some kind of cassette, that way you don't even need to capture the heat and the lower panels (with micro inverters) will be cooled by such a system, then a homeowner could choose to take the output of the natural up-draft and pull it inside for some use.
@@somedude-lc5dy These make sense if you don't have room to simply add more panels. Also, in stand-alone systems every bit of heat helps. It only makes sense comparing that heat bonus with natural gas if you already have natural gas. If you don't need to plumb for NG, then your labor and cost savings go up significantly.
@@somedude-lc5dy I like some of your thinking but the updraft rather than downdraft makes no sense.
Back to Edward deBono. I'm sure that these problem could be solved synergistically, the same way Telsa saved energy in heating and cooling their car's interior by utilizing the waste heat from cooling the car batteries with a multi-channel heat pump. What is described here is just the first step. In time we will be able to build solar panels that are self-cooling via multi-frequency solar energy conversion to electricity.
Remember that cooling the panels not only increases performance and provides useful heat for other energy uses, it also doubles the life of the solar panels which effectively halves their LCOE, while adding more solar panels, costs more. Sometimes, it just takes a 'crazy' entrepreneur, who doesn't know what 'can't be done', to make it work.
the more one is space constrained (limited numbers of panels) ,the more pvT will make sense.
Just about to get solar panel’s so thanks for the update. 👍
Hey JHT, I love your videos and this one was no exception. I live in a seaside condo in an area of the world that is generally warm and sunny. We just started the process of choosing PV panels on the roof to supply electricity for the common areas. Both to lower the electricity bill and reduce carbon footprint. I imagine that our PVs will get VERY hot on a bright summer day. The other problem we have is a salty well where we get our water. We currently run that salty water through a reverse osmosis system that is both very expensive and doesn't work very well. I know that the other technology for getting salt out of water is desalinization. From what I've read about desalinization, the problem is that it requires a lot of energy. It's usually only used where there is some kind of waste heat available. I googled this and there seems to be a lot of research going on about how to use waste heat from PVs for desalinization but I didn't find any market ready products. Maybe that's on of the "industrial uses" you talk about in the video.
It would be great if you keep incorporating these startup insights :) maybe even make a series about this.. I believe startups are the driver of the energy transition not those slow corporates.....
Most solar installations seem to want to leave zero space between the panels, sometimes obviously for using all available roofspace, but surely if it's possible, it would make sense to leave gaps between the panels to allow air to flow as much as possible, to keep the panels cooler?
Thank you for this new video! It's great to see you again.
That was a really interesting introduction to the concept of combining solar thermal technology with solar photovoltaic panels. Sunovate's "cassette" looks intriguing but it seems like an idea that would work better with new home builds than retrofitting older ones. All that moving hot air around inside the house works a lot better in homes that are built with central HVAC to begin with. But when you're starting from a blank page there's all kinds of wonderful things you can do with diverted heat energy, as you showed later in the video. I wonder if it could be integrated with vertical farms and apartment buildings?
Man, that idea of collecting heat in the summer and storing it underground could be a video of its own! Just the concept of heat energy (or hot air) being a resource that can be applied where it's most needed or even stored for months is so European, I love it. Here in North America we're used to thinking of heat as something you keep in, but not as something that can be pumped from one place to another or stored like a jar of pickles.
Getting back to solar thermal systems for a minute, depending on the cost Sunovate's system might be worth using for renovations of older homes just for the increase in the PV panel's lifetime, even if you don't have any way to easily utilize the resulting thermal energy. If it can increase the panel's lifetime from twenty to fifty years, that's got to be less than the cost of installing the thermal system.
Always learning cool new things each week. Thanks for all you do :)
Thanks for watching!
This system has existed for many years in the UK near Poole in Dorset. Literally allowing water to flow over the panels and re-circulate using a car like radiator. The problems come when moved to more northern parts in winter.
Global warming makes all of England viable for such systems already... Problem is we don't have a truly representative English Government with our long term interests as a priority We don't even officially exist as a Country London refuses to recognise we English even exist....why be british for such thieves...
I was planning on trying to make my own PVT panels for my next home. Maybe instead those Sunovate panels will be ready by then! I do think utilizing the summer heat will be a challenge though, especially if we're talking about a structure targeting passive house like insulation and sealing. Adding a pool would certainly help in the late spring and early fall as well as lengthening the swimming season and providing potential storage for the house in the bordering months but I think there will still be some time mid to late summer where even people with pools would be looking for a place to dump heat.
Bloody expensive, but I've seen pvt used in conjunction with ground source heat pumps. In the summer heat is used to produce hot water an any excess gets dumped into the earth in more recent cases surrounded by insulated foundations under the the building.
Due to the large amount of mass a fair amount of heat can be stored until the winter months when the PVT cant produce enough heat for water or heating at which point the stored heat is used by the heat pump to work at a higher COP than without.
Only really usable by new builds and even then unlikely to recover costs, but in far as making the most use of energy that can be extracted from sunlight it is pretty effective.
I paused Time Team for this - you just can't buy that kind of dedication
I admire your commitment Johnny :-)
Thank you, it is so good to learn about new ideas and to better understand how things work.When panels cool down at night, the energy flux into the sky may be a bit small perhaps. But anyway, the flux of heat during a sunny day is enormous, no black cat remains on a hot tin roof for too long !
40 to 50W/m2 with ambient air as the inlet condition. Higher if hotter than ambient air is introduced.
It's nice to see heat harvesting and storage being given some prominence. This is really brought home especially for northern countries in the book "The Post Pandemic World, Sustainable Living on a Wounded Planet". Man cannot live by solar PV alone!
I reckon I could with a big enough battery.
Depends on how well you're insulated.
Then your windows are your heaters.
Still, PV heat recovery is a plus.
Harvesting thermal energy is dead simple. You just need to understand how to move energy around and how to store it effectively.
@@onebylandtwoifbysearunifby5475 A huge plus if you can store it (geothermal storage) which is critical for northern countries.
@@johnm2879 If you build an underground insulated sandbox, you can store a lot of heat. Mass storage is great, water storage is even better. Add a few water pipes or air tubes and you're all set.
Recently Linus tech tips bought solar panels with built in inlet/outlet for water cooling.
They havent hooked it up just yet, but it would be interest how much heat it could harvest in tandem with electricity
Even my first experiments could extract substantially more heat than electric power and I expect it to stay that way :-)
@@RupertReynolds1962 was that experiment conducted in (North American) winter?
@@jonnyde No. Northern UK, (54.3° north), in spring. If you live in very cold places, you might want to consider 1 or even 2 panes of glass in front of any heat collection panels, or if you have the roof space, separate PV from heat altogether.
But for a lot of people the hybrid collection can work well most of the year.
@@RupertReynolds1962 I wouldn't put any glass in front of the PV panels myself. Remember each layer of glazing reduces light by 10%, so even a 10% gain from a panel who's energy was FIRST reduced by 10% would still put you negative.
I think we have to look at these systems like heat pumps: there's still heat to be had (extracted) even in winter temperatures.
@@onebylandtwoifbysearunifby5475 It all depends on temperature, roof space and economics.
As an example, I'm building an electric camper. Roof space is limited, but on the other hand it isn't very often cold enough to worry. I haven't decided yet what approach I'll take.
Yes, I've been pushing for PV with a thermal system included since about 2007. A no-brainer.
WOW! Amazing technology and I love your T-shirt. Thank you
Yay! FINALLY! I've been talking about this idea for AGES! So glad to see that it's finally getting the attention it deserves. I'd never thought of using air as the heat transfer medium. That's interesting...
unfortunately, no. This "new" idea has been pushed almost every year and then forgotten because it does not work well.
Stumbled onto this thought a couple of years back when researching into a long term replacement heating system for my home. I'd already decided that I wanted solar panels/storage for electricity, but it was that efficiency drop through overheated panels which bothered me a bit. Then I saw EV batteries having their cell heat "wicked" away and it struck me why solar panels couldn't do similar. It was a classic case where two unrelated technologies could come together and make a third. 1 + 1 = 3.
Anyway, as I was getting distracted, I went back to researching heat pumps and forgot all about it. Full of ideas, logical or otherwise, but short attention span.🧐
Nice to see a product tackling this issue though. And great video as always, Dave.
Cheers Andy. Hopefully it'll catch on at scale. Seems like a very logical idea to me.
A really hopeful post. I have had both solar thermal and PV on my roof in the U.K. for about 10 years. If these had been around then I would have used them. Unlikely that sustained high temps is a big issue around Leeds but every little helps.
We have to solve the ‘feast or famine’ issue for renewables. I’ve talked to various engineers over the years about creating a thermal store under the back lawn to use heat stored in the summer for my heating requirements in the winter. All have looked at me in horror! 😀
Thanks for producing great and informative videos!
One of the best ways to cool the photo voltaic panels is to install the panels directly onto heat exchangers filled with a food grade glycol/distilled water, then pump the heated fluid into a radiant tubing imbedded in the Gunite shell of a swimming pool. In the summer months the pool might not need added heat, the solar heated fluid can be cooled with irrigation water. This application would be perfect for a farm, to produce electricity for pumps and lighting.
I’ve been in the solar business since1978 and have many different solar projects being used.
Cheers!
Giovanni
unfortunately concrete is a highly polluting material, so somewhat defeats the object
I like the new t-shirt 👍
Thank you :-)
Great video highlighting some exciting possibilities. A San Diego company Icarus RT, was recently awarded funding by the California Energy Commission for a demonstration project of their hybrid PV/T system which uses heat exchangers attached to the back of panels to cool panels and produce hot water that can be stored or used on demand.
Thanks for another excellent video. Here in the southern US where air conditioning is critical I believe that a 3" gap under and between solar panels not only helps to dissipate heat but it also creates air movement that not only cools the solar panels but also cools the structure under the solar panel. As the heat rises cooler air circulates and rises also. I use excess solar power to heat water and don't see a need to fix something that works good on a small scale for me.
This sounds so good...
*Super compact and easy to carry and travel with accessories for the electric **Generater.Systems** .I was worried this was going to be bulky or hard to use.Hooks up easy and charges quickly*
Great episode! Excellent explanation about how we got here with our energy needs!
Thank you :-)
Fantastic delivery of interesting topics, keep up the great work!
Love your shirt. 👍
Cheers. Slava Ukraini :-)
This could be used for commercial greenhouses! Large water tanks can be stored inside greenhouses. Connect them to a heat exchanger and fan to remove heat from air during the day. Run them at night to keep the greenhouses warm without using natural gas.
Troy one of the many applications we have inquires on our technology for.
If you have a good spot to put those panels. On the roof of the greenhouse wouldn't be a good spot since it would shade the inside of the greenhouse.
Have a Think about stating temperatures in C and F just in case the four of us here in north America who watch your videos have our computers turned on.
I live in Canada, off grid with solar and batteries. I have dreamt of this type of thing for a long time. Air cooling would simplify a lot of the system and make it much cheaper, as you say. It seems less effective then cooling with glycol but the simplicity makes up for the difference. It looks like a good fit for domestic hot water or seasonal heat storage in the ground when combined with geothermal heat for winter. So so much potential here for sure. Even more energy is available then there is for just electricity from each panel.
There's also such a thing as adsorption chillers that use heat energy to remove heat. Not hugely efficient enrgy-wise but when your heat is free...
I made a similar comment on another thread in this video. RV absorption type fridges use ~5 times as much power as an equivalent compressor type one which is a drawback. But given that the energy source for the absorption chillers would be ‘waste’ heat then it would be close to ‘free’.
Excellent video as always mate, very interesting and informative, food for thought. Love the shirt as well!
In cooler climates, you could shunt the heat to a greenhouse or a pool of water therein as a heat sink for the greenhouse.
Wouldn't this also lower the heat that was absorbed through the roof, making it easier to cool a building on hot days? Should better than the shade from the solar panels alone.
Yes, also in my experience the shade effect is greatly overrun by the heat produced by the panels.
right, the shade keeps the roof cool. If properly designed, the hot air trapper in between the roof and panel and produce a strong air current (chimney effect) that will add to the cooling of the panels.
Since heat rises couldn't it also be used as a attic cooling device...
@ OroWizard
I recall some RV’ers found that after installing solar panels on their roof that the temperature inside the RV went up and in some cases a lot. So much so that if not hooked up to shore power they would have to crank up their generator to power their air conditioner so solar wasn’t a win for them. Another issue with RV solar is that in hot climates you would love to find a shady place to park but as Dave said in this video panels only produce at the rate of their weakest cell. Even a bit of shade dramatically reduces output. Dave has talked about flexible solar panels before and an awning made of them would be ideal. Air flow under the awning should allow the heat generated to vent while the shade and power generated made the idea a plus overall.
@ Pomo Dorino
I replied to OroWizard and meant to include you but I fully agree with your assertion that the heat generated outweighs the cooling from the shade provided. There was a solar powered kick type scooter made that was larger than the usual ones and you stood on the solar panel setup. I imagine some people had the soles of their shoes melt.
Brilliant, one of those simple ideas that make you think why anyone didnt think of it before, why didnt I think of it !!!!!!
Excellent video Dave. Thank you. I've been considering a similar idea of collecting heat from the attic using a heat pump coil and fan, then running the refrigerant down to a Hot Water Heat Pump (HWHP). In essence I'd decouple the fan and coil from the compressor and tank of a HWHP. Locate the fan and coil in the attic (being careful to ensure friable insulation is not air-born by covering it with an additional layer of paper faced insulation to ensure it doesn't end up in the fins of the coils) run the refrigerant lines to the compressor and tank which would be located in the house. Either Sunovate panels or skylights could be installed to improve the productivity of the HWHP. In my climate (Canada) we need lots of heat and the cooling of solar panels is less of a challenge (especially in the winter) our heating requirements are typically 70 to 80% of the house's energy load with 3/4s of that in space heating and 25% in water heating. The UK's climate is similar but I believe solar production is typically less so you might get less value than us. Other advantages of using the hot water tank is that the solar energy can be stored for over night (a cheaper thermal battery than an electric battery). Additional HWHPs with this arrangement can be installed for space heating. In Europe there is a thermal storage system by Latento that combines Phase Change Materials (PCMs) with a water storage tank for more compact thermal storage.
Thank you, well dome, soon I will come with one interesting idea for your channel
You could attach a sterling heat engine to the outflow to generate more electricity as well
I'm fairly certain Dr Phil mason would have an opinion on this.
@@b0b5m1th Can't wait until he "debunks" the moon landings.
Sterling engine, peltier effect, any other thermoelectric/thermomechanical generation.
Funny how I`ve thought about that for 20years now, and now I know I was not alone :-D thx as always :-)
We had a similar system installed in our school back in the day. The PV was used to power the school and the "passive" cooling system was used as AC in the class rooms. The first year it was installed the AC wasnt tweaked correctly and ppl would wear jackets in summer because the room would be 18-19°C but they got it running correctly by winter and it was perfect.
I dont really know how it worked but it didnt have the typical "AC air" that you get with classic AC units which is a plus.
Imagine living in the outback aus you become independent, Just the watermanagement is a hurdle, but with recycled water you can go far. A crucial step forwards for the Aussie world. As a dutchy i'm optimistic for our future. Massive storagebuffers are the solution for bringing down the price p/kwh down to 1 cent. That makes gas and oil to expensive. It's good for your wallet and society
You could combine the "air sponges" tech (see Bill Gates, et al. testing in Oeru now, I believe) that can harvest moisture from thin air to supplement the loss of any water in a drier climate such as the Australian Outback. Cheers!
Engg with Rosie posted at the same time. Coincidence? 😜
Nope. We planned it together so that we could reference each other's videos. Quite a normal thing for RUclips buddies to do.
@@JustHaveaThink Definitely! I figured. Keep up the great work! I had bell notification on for both of you so I knew :)
Thank you Dave. Another great contribution.
Thanks for the interesting video?
When I built my house in 1987, I installed 320 sqft. Of thermal hydronic at a 70 degree angle to optimize for winter . The steep angle also has the added benefit of not overheating the 800 gallon ss. tank in the basement in the summer here in VT, USA. Thermal integration sounds like a great idea, but I don’t like moving heat with air, it is so inefficient compared to liquid though as mentioned has its own drawbacks.
Cheers
heat batteries and thermal electrics should also be considered. imagine active cooling from thermoelectrics that are powered by the excess heat on the solar panels themselves it's built-in automation
Definitely, we are considering all these options in our H2X applications
Yes brilliant and logical, stove fans convert heat to kinetic energy do the tech is there it just needs some tweaking
Cool.
Through the "use the cool panels at night to cool down the house" makes almost no sense to me. The outside air should be at a similar temperature (excluding the space cooling effect), so wouldn't it make sense to just dump more outside air into the building via vents?
Anyway, all of this won't matter for me, as I won't be a homeowner any time soon in the next 20-30 years. So I will continue to spew my mandated amount of carbon into the air thanks to my landlord.
Finally someone made this product! I want to dump all the heat into my pool from May - Oct, and into my house the rest of the time, I hope that's an option.
This makes so much sense! I would not have thought of the cooling effect at night, that's a bonus! I have a friend who has had an all solar home in Michgian USA for decades and he has talked about being able to get MORE than the rated output from his panels in the dead of winter since the panels are so cold then. In the summer he get less of course but the longer days make up for that so the pulling away heat from them in a usable form is a brilliant!
Hi Larry, the cooling effect at night is used for space cooling. So its 100% thermal related. We can also take fresh ambient air in and sub cool it like an evaporative (swampie) system but without the water use. Fresh filtered coolled ambient air chills the house best the next summer day.
@@glenryan6692 Yes thank you! I can see the benefit and how it works, it's just not something I would have thought of. But that's why I'm not a solar engineer!
@@glenryan6692 And if you're looking for a test site in the U.S. We are an all electric home with Geothermal H&C! I hope to Add Solar this year.
Interesting, if multi-junction solar cells ever become economic, we could have ~70% efficient PVT solar cells, if more heat could be extracted maybe up to 90% in the (probably distant) future.
We can only hope. There is further work in our R&D pipeline - stayed tuned.
@@glenryan6692 Great, I am stoked to see what you come up with!
I am a computer science student with an interest in renewable energy. Out of curiosity, I have a few questions for you, I would be grateful if you could answer them! (Ignoring cost, I am mainly interested in efficiency)
1) I assume PV-panels are optimized to reflect parts of the spectrum they can't utilize. Could you add some darkening/absorbing substance during panel production to capture more heat energy, or maybe add a film that absorbs any part of the spectrum the solar panel does not absorb?
2) Would adding an air-gapped (dual?) glass pane help with heat loss from convection?
3) Would a heat-pump increase efficiency?
4) Do multi-junction cells capture more heat energy because they are darker or do they capture less because they transform more light into electricity or is it about the same as regular panels?
5) Is heat transfer an between the PV and the T parts issue at all? Would adding something like liquid metal thermal interface material (like for CPU cooling) give a significant increase in efficiency?
6) Is there an efficiency difference between air cooling and water cooling? I assume you picked air cooling because of cost, simplicity, less maintenance like mentioned in the video or are there other reasons to pick air cooling?
I’m skeptical that air cooling will be efficient enough. I’d lean more toward liquid cooling or even just adding heat sinks.
Electric cars have this same problem and have found ways to liquid cool the battery packs without worrying about leaks.
air all the way, this is going to run on your roof for 20+ years. Would you rather replace a dead fan or have water inside your computer.
@@Pale_ghost common tap water may be highly corrosive; you need to use demineralised water for cooling.
Great explanations, calmly presented - thanks. Subbed.
Hi Dave. I've just found a new technology we could use that heat for. Salt heat batteries, invented in Eindhoven, and now getting commercialized by a new company called Cellcius.
The technology is so simple. Just add water to salt, and the salt heats up.
To store energy, just add heat, and evaporate the water out of the salt again. It's supposed to be 10 times cheaper than current technologies. And these TPV panels would be great in combination with that.
Hope you make a video about Cellcius and their thermal salt batteries!
Using a closed system like heat pipes (the ones similar to PC coolers) could harvest the steam to move fans and generate even more electricity, before using the harvested sun heat to heat your home/water/pool.
More detailed explanation: heat pipes uses a low pressured special liquid that boils at desired temp like 30-60⁰C (you can pick it by tweaking the liquid or pressure). So the sun heat would boil this liquid, and the generated steam spins a fan which makes electricity. But we didn't lost any heat yet, only kinetic energy, se we still can use the steam to heat what we wanted in the first place
while we're dreaming of world where cost and added complexity does not matter.... just use the Seebeck effect
@@nc3826 good point/observation.
It would add cost, and I really don't know if the gains would compensate the additional costs.
But seebeck effect would also add cost and is not very efficient (like, it's REALLY hard to keep the temperature difference between hot and cold sides, and that's why many attempts to do that failed)
@@joaogabriels.f.5143 My 'seebeck effect' retort was sardonically made just to illustrate my main point.
What are your thoughts on absorption chiller/refrigeration HVAC and phase change storage. Instead of the use of a HP and/or a communal ground heat sink?
I've been working on solar heat and PV for about a decade. Especially low temperature heat is a difficult one to utilise. 40C air has next to no use other than pool or space heating and is treated as water energy by most industrial scale operations. To be useful heat needs to be at least able to generate steam and that would not be good for the PV technology. PVT is often called the best of both worlds but in my experience it brings out the worst in both. For heat to be useful it needs to be really hot, if you want to cool PV in a useful way you need to go way cooler.
A real shame as the idea seems so simple... I have spent a lot of time trying to make ends meet economically and technically, I have to remain sceptical.
a product called "Air-to-Water Heat Pump Water Heater" or "Residential High Temperature Air/Water to Water Heat Pump" will heat water to 80-90 degree Celsius (close to boiling) provided that you feed it ambient air (at least -25 degree Celsius). Using a heat-pump you can convert low-temperature (40 degree Celsius) to high-temperature (80-90 degree Celsius) and the process is more efficient the higher the input temperature is.
I considered the old style PVT when I put my solar in and as you say it was a hard sell, seemed to give you the worst of both worlds. This tech looks much more promising, I particularly like that it can be retrofitted.
0:40 When are we going to start addressing the elephant in the room, which is overpopulation, on a daily basis rather than on the odd occasion, once a year?
The whole climate crisis debacle is played out on international media as a slightly frustrating economy/resources problem i.e. something that will slightly inconvenience us, and possibly might destroy some far away countries we don't actually care much about instead of being hammered into our brains that the entire planet eco-system will suffer the greatest extinction of species in history.
Overpopulation will lead to mass-scale destruction, wars, genocides and at best, billions of miserable people living on top of one another slaving away their entire lives in order to eke a living or in order to satisfy their artificially created needs and their insatiable, hedonistic, inane desires.
Brave new world here we come!
Thank you.
Most countries have a negative birth rate
@@markthomasson5077 That is another problem. World overpopulation combined with the increasing population of mankind is the most acute problem of our age. There may never be another one.
You know you need to talk about de populating to two billion people or less. It’s a population that the world can support. It’s going to take decades to develop a storage system that will meet the needs of our energy storage issues. Nuclear is clearly the way to go, it’s developed, it’s now save and it’s clean and a clear choice to solve the needs to beat climate change. It can also be implemented world wide in the next ten years. It’s the gas and oil people that are blocking nuclear.
Build thorium reactors to eat all the waste from current reactors AND deactivate nuclear arsenals and use those materials in the reactors also.
You go first then
I was only thinking this week about the potential to pump through a liquid to cool the panel and provide heat. Seems like such an obvious thing to do. A hybrid thermal / electrical system - sounds positive! A good video!
Dave, it's so easy. We glue solar rubber pool strip behind the panel. It takes the heat away and sends the heat to the water system. It could be the pool or the SH water supply to the house. The 10 pipe strip has been used for years and is freely available everywhere.
It makes really really great sense! And if there was enough heat, one could run sterling cycle engines and generate even more electricity, the waste heat going into the pool/ground storage mass/etc.
I was wondering about doing direct thermal to electric conversion rather than a sterling as a no moving parts system would be cheaper, easier to maintain, less noise etc but i'm not sure what the minimum temperature gradient is
A good start to the morning. Positive ideas and action in a sea of despicable moral leadership
I think this system is a damn good idea and if we could combine that with the flexible new type of solar panels still in development that promise big gains from current day solar tech we'll really have solid tools to help renewable be an a viable option for just about everyone instead of people with tons of cash like they are today unless your lucky enough to buy a home with panels already which I'm sure is quite rare and expensive at least for now ; )
Thanks I can't tell you how much I look forward to learning about things like this. I just wish I had more people to share stuff like this with
I watch your videos from a long time (sorry, I'm not a native english speaker) and this time I put a comment to tell you a like them, and to improve your youtube referencement.
Thank you Yannick. I appreciate that :-)
Seems like a good idea. I saw solar water heaters in China and didn't know what they were at the time and wondered why we didn't have them in the states as much.Combining these ideas seems like a no brainer and I like the ideas discussed here.
I'm amazed that they took so many years to turn this into a commercial product. I suggested the idea to a manufacturer, decades ago. I've also asked panel suppliers about this for many years. A friend listened and built a system for himself, and it has been working for at least 13 years. What has kept suppliers from taking the idea and running with it for so long? I never expected to see my pension before these became available to purchase!
marvelous idea! Cheers, Dave
Cheers Martin :-)
For a future video it would be great if you could provide more on the heat pump integration with these panels. Thanks again for the great content.
So glad to see more and more innovations that think of heat as a _resource_, and are throwing out this antiquated concept of _waste_ heat.
I've been saying for years that as a species we have to recognize that there is no such thing as _waste_ .... only a resource wasted.
Thanks for the video! The question why PV and solar thermal aren't combined has been on my mind for years. Your explanations make lots of sense. Air cooling is maybe a reasonable solution, even though air has less than a quarter of the specific heat capacity of water.
👍🏼 I love that the tech is growing fast. But my worry is that it's not fast enough, and more importantly, it's not widespread enough!
And affordable.
I made my solar thermal panel years ago, its paid for itself hundreds of times over, it provides pretty much all my hot water from Feb to late Oct. I now have Solar PV now as well.