Solar Hot Water: A Conversation with Drew Gillett and Henry Vandermark

To take the pulse of the solar domestic hot water industry, NESEA Membership Coordinator Alexandra Floratos spoke with two prominent NESEA members with long involvement with solar hot water: Drew Gillett, Professional Engineer and Henry  Vandermark, the president of Solar Wave Energy, Inc.

What is the current state of solar hot water technology?
Drew. There are three pieces to it. First, there is the state of the art in maintenance techniques. Maintenance currently represents about half the industry. Second, the old durable types of systems, such as basic flat plate collectors, have proven themselves over the years and are still being made and installed in niche markets. Then, there are new ideas that come along and get tried.

What improvements have been made in recent years?
Henry. One of the big improvements has been reliability. There’s now a track record with known components that have been installed over the past 20 years. The ones that have survived have been the ones that work best. We’ve gotten rid of some of the bad ones and we can fix the others.

Drew. There’s also been a positive move lately to eliminate the control systems from domestic hot water systems and replace them with photovoltaic panels that can be directly connected through very simple controls to the water pump. This seems to eliminate a lot of the electrical, lightning-strike, wire-disconnection and sensor problems that have occurred with small systems.

Henry. It also eliminates the perception that external electrical power is required.

Drew. Now people can say it’s all powered by the sun. The system will continue to work when there’s a power outage.

How long can people expect a good system to last?
Drew. The system on my house is now 23 years old and it’s still functioning well. As we speak here on this cloudy day, it’s merrily turning my 45 degree well water into 120 degree solar-heated water. The systems do work. It’s not rocket science. Every morning the system comes up, turns on, and makes hot water, and you just sort of forget about it.

I tend to keep an eye on mine so that I know it is working. That seems to be the key—to recognize that the investment in the system requires some maintenance to actually realize the savings. If the homeowner takes a weekly look and keeps abreast of things, then every 2-3 years a suitable service call to take care of little details like recovering exterior insulation on the pipes, recharging low fluid, or repairing a sensor.

How would you describe the current market for solar hot water?
Drew. The market is really divided into three parts. One part consists of the rather large installed base of old systems out there, which either need maintenance or need their new owners educated to understand their systems a little better. This creates a constant base of work involved in taking care of these systems. Then there’s what I’ll call the "eco" niche where new systems are being installed by people who have a long-time desire to do something right for the environment and just automatically assume that their new house or dream vacation/retirement home will have solar domestic hot water, and they suddenly discover that there aren’t a whole heck of a lot of people out there who can install those systems for them, but that there are still some who can.

More recently, there has also been a response to the spike in oil prices. Energy went from the back burner in people’s minds to being much more on the front burner. We’re now getting a few new people out of that, and also new programs from institutions like the Massachusetts Energy Consumers Alliance.

Henry. For the service or maintenance market, there were about a dozen different types of systems installed back in the 1970s and 80s. Installers like myself service all these different models. Now environmentally conscious people are starting to ask for new solar hot water systems, and they expect there to be just one type of system. We don’t have a standard—either one kind of system or even three types of systems. This is a marketing weakness for the industry.

Drew. The volume at this point really doesn’t justify that kind of standardization. Customers basically get a custom system for their home. But, as the market grows, the lack of standardization will lead to difficulties in the long run.

Are there enough people out there to install  and service solar domestic hot water systems?
Drew. There are about 20 in the Northeast. Within a 50-100 mile radius of a customer, there are competent people who can install or repair a system. Nevertheless, it’s certainly not like being able to look up plumbers in the yellow pages.  But people shouldn’t feel that that if they install a system, there won’t be someone with the capability to maintain it and ensure that they get their savings.

Henry. A number of years ago we tried to get the plumbers involved and some other trades. It never seemed to be a match that worked. In Massachusetts, for example, you need a licensed plumber to do the domestic hot water tie in, but the plumbing trade won’t really handle anything else in a solar hot water system. There may be exceptions, but most plumbers won’t service a solar hot water system.

Drew. The installation of a solar domestic hot water system requires skills from a variety of different trades which you don’t often find in a single person or even a single company. It requires roofing skills, rigging skills, plumbing skills, and even weightlifting skills in some cases. The electrician portion of things has been pretty much eliminated by the current generation of controllers, as well as by the photovoltaic systems which use low voltage wiring which generally don’t require electricians to install. Nevertheless, the complexity of the installation means that you’ve got to get people who have the training and the willingness to do all these varieties of tasks. This has led to the cost-inefficient approach in the Northeast where it takes two people two days to install a system. In California and Florida where there is a larger market and none of the freezing problems we have, it’s a one person ½-day job.

Will it be possible to interest more people in solar domestic hot water?
Drew. The energy price spike has brought people’s attention to it. It has always been a cost-effective alternative to using electricity to heat hot water. Anybody who has several people in their household and is heating water with electricity should be a good candidate for a cost-effective solar system. But they have to have an underlying willingness to try this kind of technology and an interest in maintaining the system over time.

Henry. One of the problems with getting people to buy a solar hot water system is that they have to take the long view. It’s hard to generate interest in something that costs several thousand dollars and saves two or three hundred dollars a year.

Drew. When people look in the paper and see an electric water heater for $110, they buy it. They don’t understand the system is going to cost them another $300-600 per year for electricity.

Henry. People don’t do lifecycle analysis on their purchases. In addition, people move every 5 years. And they don’t have much perception of what their energy costs are. They don’t sit back and figure out what their hot water costs are going to be over the next 10 years with different types of systems. You can barely get them to look at what it would cost them for a year. An engineer might think that way, but normal people don’t.  They don’t have any economics in school that they can remember or the sort of home economics at a high level that you need to make rational purchase decisions. So there’s a great educational need.

Drew. Perhaps we should just try to convince people that solar is something they want on their buildings for its own sake and not try to use cost-effectiveness arguments. NESEA’s National Tour of Solar Homes is the type of program that can play an important role. The general public can see solar buildings with happy homeowners who are satisfied with their systems and would do it this way again next time. But we need to reach many more people.

Would government support be helpful to the industry?
Drew. What would really help is removal of subsidies from conventional forms of energy. If that would happen, solar hot water would become much more financially attractive to consumers. But this is probably politically futile. And I don’t see the industry getting together to push for any other major government efforts to support solar hot water.

Henry. There’s more interest these days in photovoltaics. The same types of government policies that they need, the solar hot water industry could use. But because the solar hot water manufacturing industry is minuscule these days it’s hard for them to make large coordinated efforts or to lobby for major support.

Drew. Interest doesn’t seem to be proportional to cost effectiveness. Solar hot water can very definitely make an economic case against conventional electricity, and even against oil and natural gas. Yet the solar industry seems to be more interested in PV technology, which is still much more expensive than conventional electricity. Perhaps a solution is to package together systems which include appropriate amounts of both technologies. A photovoltaic-powered solar hot water system represents a cost-effective use of PV, since it eliminates a trouble-prone, costly controller.

What final thoughts would you like to leave with people?
Drew. It’s an industry with a good track record. There are good systems out there that are doing their job. Good maintenance and service are required for them to be successful, but these things are available. And with recent energy price increases, it’s an industry that deserve new attention. Installing a solar hot water system is akin to drilling an oil well. It produces new energy that otherwise wouldn’t be available.

Henry. With a conversation like this, we get a chance to look at some of the problems we see. But there are also many positive signs—systems work and save energy using simple technologies. And the demand has been increasing recently, enough so that people can have some difficulty finding installers/servicers. I even sometimes have difficulty finding qualified or interested people to work in the field. Solar hot water is clean energy, but it is not always clean work. There are positions available for individuals interested in "working" in the field, not just dreaming about it.

**This article, Solar Hot Water: A Conversation with Drew Gillett and Henry Vandermark, appeared in the Fall 2000 issue of NESEA’s magazine, the Northeast Sun.