Comparing Solar Hot Water Diverters Available In Australia

Update: since publishing this article commenters have made us aware of 3 other hot water diverters on the Australian market, the ‘Dimplex Free-E’ and, The Fronius OhmPilot and a unit from SolarEdge. We’ll add these to the comparison table as soon as we have enough info. If you know of any others let us know.

I recently wrote about solar hot water diverters.  These devices use your surplus solar electricity to power your hot water cylinder.

They can cut your electricity bills provided your solar feed-in tariff is less than the cost of the grid electricity used to heat your water — which is not always the case.

I am going to assume you’ve read my earlier article, done your research, and decided a solar hot water diverter is for you.  You’ve either determined it will save you money or it was love at first comprehension of the concept and you’ve realized you can’t live without one.  So the question becomes, which diverter should you choose? [Read more…]

Will A Solar Hot Water Timer Save Or Lose You Money?

hot water timer

If you have solar, is adding a simple, cheap timer to your electric hot water system worthwhile?

Lately my life has been a lollapalloza of solar electric hot water heating.  I’ve looked at more ways of heating water using solar electricity than you can poke a stick at.  Or at least I have if your poking arm is weak and flabby and easily fatigued. [Read more…]

Sun Flux Review: Hot Water With Dedicated Solar PV Panels

Sun Flux Direct PV Hot Water System

The Sun Flux is a box of electronics with one function: heating water with solar electricity.

I recently wrote about solar hot water diverters1 which use surplus electricity from an existing rooftop solar system to heat water.

Another option for heating your water with solar electricity is to use dedicated solar panels. These panels put all their power directly into the hot water cylinder’s heating element. When the water hits its temperature set point the panels are deactivated. [Read more…]

Solar Hot Water Diverters Beat Batteries On Energy Storage

battery vs hot water cylinder

If you want to store your solar energy, should you put it in a battery or in your hot water cylinder?

 

Update: Compare all the hot water diverters available in Australia here.

How A Diverter Can Give You Solar Hot Water And Store Energy At A Lower Cost Than Batteries

A solar hot water diverter is an electronic device that sends surplus electricity from your rooftop solar to your electric hot water cylinder.  This reduces, or even eliminates, the need to use grid electricity to heat water.  Under the right circumstances diverters can save you money and allow you to store energy at a cost lower than batteries.

[Read more…]

How To Use a Fronius Smart Meter To Solar Power Your Hot Water

fronius hot water diversion

Note to installers: Don’t wire directly in to bathtub or the duck will die.

Over the past week or so I’ve been politely prodded  by a plethora of people pushing me to provide information pertaining to solar hot water diverters.

A ‘hot water diverter’ is a box of power electronics that that sucks up your homes’ surplus solar electricity and diverts it to an electric hot water system instead of exporting it to the grid where it would earn a feed-in-tariff.  If the whole system is well designed and installed it will  greatly reduce or even eliminate using grid electricity for water heating. [Read more…]

How To Divert Your Excess Solar PV to a Hot Water Cylinder.

a diversion sign

Is it worth investing in a system that will divert your excess solar electricity away from the grid and into your hot water system?

This guest blog post has been written by experienced solar installer, electrician, solar company owner and all round good guy, Mark Cavanagh from MC Electrical in Brisbane.

Mark answers a really common question we are getting here at SolarQuotes: “Can I divert my excess solar energy into my hot water cylinder instead of selling it to the grid for a pittance?”

Take it away Mark:

With the reduction of the solar feed in tariff across Australia, and battery storage not economically viable yet, there has been an ever-increasing interest in developing ways to use the electricity you produce rather than feeding it back to the grid for 8c per kWh. [Read more…]

How to find the most efficient solar water heater

an evacuated tube solar hot water system

Is the evac tube system really more efficient than the flat plate system you have been quoted? Here’s how to find out…

When you are looking to buy a solar hot water system for for home, one of the most important things to check (apart from the price) is the efficiency of your Solar Hot Water System. The more efficient your system is, the better it will be at converting the sun’s heat to piping hot water, which means you will use your gas or electric boost less.

But with thousands of models of solar water heaters on the Aussie market, from flat plate or evacuated tube, to heat pumps it can be difficult to know how to find the most efficient solar water heater. Especially when each sales person says their technology / model is the most efficient! They can’t all be right…

[Read more…]

Solar Hot Water vs Solar Panels. Which should you buy?

Poor old Solar Hot Water.

The concept of heating water directly from the Aussie sun with a solar hot water system like this…

a solahart hot water heater

The humble solar hot water heater

…really seems to have gone from hero to zero over the past 3 years. [Read more…]

What Should You Buy First? Solar Hot Water or Solar PV?

Solar Hot Water is fast becoming the poor cousin of Solar PV (AKA Solar Electricity). Consumers just seem to prefer solar PV to solar hot water these days. In fact solar hot water has gone from almost zero to 1,000,000 roofs in about 30 years, whereas PV has gone from almost zero to 1,000,000 roofs in less than 6 years. There is now more PV than Solar HW out there! Unbelievable.

It doesn’t help that retailers prefer to sell PV over hot water – for a whole bunch of reasons that I’ll go into in a future blog post.

Here’s a video where I answer the question posed in the title: Should you buy Solar Hot Water or PV first?, But first I answer a much more fundamental question that creates an enormous amount of confusion out there:

And here’t the transcript for the video-phobes amongst you: [Read more…]

Huge Subsidies (and waiting lists) for Solar Hot Water in QLD

The Queensland Solar Hot Water program is delivering and installing $500 systems for eligible Queenslanders and $100 for pensioners. But as you might expect, there is the mother of all waiting lists.

To date more than 850 customers have been allocated to suppliers to conduct inspections and install new systems.

By the end of this week over 110 systems will have been installed in Brisbane and a further 200 have been contacted to arrange site inspections.

More than 43,000 Queenslanders have registered their interest to participate in this program with more than 10,000 completed applications received so far.”

[Read more…]

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