I assume you’re on the grid? Yeah, sadly, it’s crazy. Solar heaters are expensive and require a large area to get decent BTUs out of. If you can find free sola

I assume you’re on the grid? Yeah, sadly, it’s crazy. Solar heaters are expensive and require a large area to get decent BTUs out of. If you can find free solar heaters that someone’s giving away, that can make the difference, but they’re often a few thousand dollars and that’s about equivalent to a Fujitsu or Mitsubishi heat pump base install, especially when you factor in all the extra plumbing and pumps to/from the solar thermal array. WORSE, there’s maintenance. You’ve got the potential for leaks (probability rises to 1.0 over the years), and you have to worry about the water freezing. That can be mitigated by using a glycol mix, but then you’ve got glycol and that lowers the efficiency. And then you have to think about climate. Is it reliably sunny in the winter? Or is it only sunny 1 out of 3 days, with long stretches of gray days? You are probably better off plowing that money into efficiency/insulation improvements to lower the overall heat load (and those improvements often have zero maintenance). I’d suggest looking into an air source heatpump that can produce domestic hot water, paired with a large storage tank. Check out Artic Heat Pumps: https://www.arcticheatpumps.com/ https://www.arcticheatpumps.com/