Quote:
Originally Posted by PoolBrews
As an engineer, if you do the research and see how effective these systems are, you quickly realize they are a waste of money. They work great when you don't need them (summer), a little in early fall/late spring, and can't heat adequately when you really need them (about 4 months at end of year/beginning of year).
If you install a solar heater, you still need a supplemental heat source (electric is most cost effective here in FL due to the price of gas vs electric). Calculating the costs, you'll never recover the $5k for the solar over the life of the system. You're better off just going with an electric or gas heater. I keep my pool at 88 all winter. No issues.
In addition, when you need any work done on your roof, you'll need to pay someone to remove the solar system, do the repair, then pay again to have it installed again. And each time you open more holes in the roof, and hope your system doesn't leak or cause a leak.
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And yet - there are homes in the north that use solar for their entire electrical system in their homes all year 'round. Granted, some of them also have fireplaces or wood stoves to supplement on the worst of days (or just for ambiance) but not all of them do. There are homes in Oregon that are 100% powered by solar, completely and totally off the grid.
There's an entire municipality in Connecticut (North Haven) that powers most of its municipal buildings with a single solar farm placed atop an old landfill. They have generators for emergencies such as nor'easters but otherwise the solar works just fine. It's kept the costs of running the town down and saved taxpayers millions of dollars over the time the system has been running.
I'd suggest that the reason it's so inefficient here, is because the people who install them are doing a bad job and/or the roof construction is not sufficient for installation of solar panels - and not because solar is a bad option. This state gets plenty of sun all year. The only time it'd be inefficient is on days when it's cloudy during the entirety of the daylight hours with few or no breaks in the clouds.