Holistic and Affordable Approach to Supporting the Sustainability of Family Houses in Cold Climates by Using Many Vacuum-Tube Solar Collectors and Small Water Tank to Provide the Sanitary Hot Water, Space Heating, Greenhouse, and Swimming Poole Heating De
Authors: E. Juanicó Luis 
Published: May 2022

This work presents a new proposal for supporting the sustainability of a single-family house in very cold climates by installing many vacuum-tube solar collectors and a small water tank in order to fulfill the whole dweller demands of heat: space heating, sanitary hot water, and warming both, a greenhouse (spring and autumn) and a swimming pool (summer). This way is obtained a sustained demand that maximizes the utilization of heat from solar collectors throughout the year. This system is designed intending to use the smallest tank that fulfills the winter heating demand, supported by vacuum-tube solar collectors and a little help from electrical heaters working just on the valley tariff. This innovative design gets the most sustainable (but affordable) solution. This goal can be achieved by using a small well-insulated overheated aboveground water tank, instead of the huge underground reservoir of heat used by most projects tested up today. These large communal projects use huge reservoirs to provide seasonal thermal storage (STES) capacity, but their costs are huge too. Besides, it was observed that all these huge STES suffer large heat losses (about 40%), due to constraints for thermally insulating such very heavy systems. On the contrary, our small aboveground water tank can be thermally insulated very well and gets affordable costs. In this work is developed dynamical solar-thermal modeling for studying this novel approach and are discussed its major differences with traditional design. This modeling is used to study the whole demands of heat for one family living in the same conditions of the Okotoks’ project. The Okotoks’ project is based on many flat solar collectors (2,290 m2) and a huge (2,800 m3) rocky-underground STES system in order to almost fulfill (97%) the space heating demand of 52 houses (15,795 kWh/y ea.) in Alberta (Canada), having an overall cost of 9 MU$ (173,000 U$ ea.). We have already shown in previous work that this new proposal could reach noticeably lower costs (€30,500) than the Okotoks’ project in order to provide the same heating demand, by taking advantage of using 18 vacuum-tube collectors (solar area 37 m2) and a small (72 m3) well-insulated (heat losses 18%) water tank heated up to 85°C, which is the same temperature used in Okotoks and other traditional projects. Now, this proposal is enhanced by using a holistic approach to include other low-temperature demands (sanitary hot water and warming a greenhouse and swimming pool) that enhance the sustainability of dweller living. This way, the full production of heat from solar collectors is utilized (about six times larger than the single space heating demand, but using only 20 vacuum-tube solar collectors (21 m2 solar area) and a very small (10m3) water tank, reaching about a lower overall cost (€20,000), and so, the economic performance is enhanced as well. Besides, it is shown that using a small fraction of electrical heaters as a backup system (2%) and slightly overheating the water (up to 120°C@2 bar), which is feasible by using commercial stainless steel water tanks designed for such purposes, its economic performance could be again noticeably enhanced (reducing the overall cost to €20,000, and getting payback period less than two years). This way here is demonstrated the overall solar-STES system can be reduced by about half size meanwhile the energy output can be increased up to seven times. Hence, the thermal analysis performed suggested us strongly critic the traditional approach of using flat solar collectors instead of vacuum-tube collectors. This analysis shows that this choice has strongly driven the selection of a huge STES, which in turn increases noticeably the overall costs of the system since for such huge STES is mandatory to use underground reservoirs. However, this analysis also shows that without including those secondary demands, this proposal achieves a modest economic performance (payback period about 11 years) regarding its lower energy saved and compared against the “most smart” standard solution (one water tank with electrical heaters, costing about 5,000 U$ and exploiting the valley tariff of nocturnal electricity costing 0.1 €/kWh). On the contrary, when these secondary demands are included, the payback period is reduced by two years. Beyond the particular case studied here, this analysis suggests that the right design of any solar + STES system should be led by the solar production. On the contrary, the traditional design intends to fulfill one demand (space heating) concentrated during winter, and so, its performance is noticeably penalized, and the solution is definitely not to put a larger tank. Unfortunately, up today the poor performance of these projects has shown that this solar technology is (by far) unaffordable. Maybe its best days have gone, considering the enormous improvements achieved by another solar technology (using photovoltaic panels + heat pump + small daily-storage water tank), as it was discussed here.