Solar water heaters are a great, useful and money-saving device. But if you’re a household looking for Solar Water Heater you might get a bit lost with all the promises of “save up to 30% on your electricity bill”, “save over 50% on your heating”.
I was recently walking around Builders Warehouse and spotted a flyer for Solar Water Geysers. It all sounded very good until I read one of the figures at the back – 11.4MJ of energy per day. As an engineer and someone interested in saving money on my electricity bill, I converted that number –> 11.4MJ is 3.2 KiloWatt Hours – that’s 3.2 from my electricity meter; so if you pay R1.3 per unit of electricity that’s just over R4/day. So this geyser, working perfectly and if I use all hot water it makes can only save around R4/day…
Lots of people say your geyser accounts for around 50% of your energy use, so if you spend R1,500/month on electricity, then you spend R750 on your geyser – which is about R25 per day. So you’d need more than 6 of these solar panels to cover my usual geyser usage, if they worked perfectly!
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