4 ms·
To be fair the most sensible way is as a resistive dump load (which as you mention doesn't care whether it's AC or DC) or as someone else mentioned skipping the
by VBprogrammer 7y ago
To be fair the most sensible way is as a resistive dump load (which as you mention doesn't care whether it's AC or DC) or as someone else mentioned skipping the electrical step altogether and going with a simple solar water heater.
- cr0sh 7y agoI've often wondered why it wasn't more common to integrate solar water heating within the solar electric panels. My understanding is that as the cells heat up, they lose efficiency, so keeping them cool is important. So - mount them to a heatsink (waterblock) with a water (or more likely coolant) loop running thru them to transport that heat to a water tank for showers or other heating use. There's got to be a good reason why this isn't done that I don't know about (maybe it really isn't that efficient, or solar cells don't heat up that much, or something else)?
- VBprogrammer 7y agoI suspect the reason is you want hot water stored at ~60C. If you pump water through it slowly enough / enough times to attain that temperature then you are actually increasing the temperature of the panels (assuming air temperature is less than that). You'd need to use a heat pump to get actual hot water from a small delta T in the coolant.