Are you interested in solar hot water? Ecologic can give you accurate estimates of how much money you'll save based on your actual circumstances.
Solar hot water systems are typically more expensive upfront than an equivalent electric or gas boiler hot water system. However, by using free energy from the sun, they are cheaper to run and will pay themselves off over time. The estimated bill savings and payback period depend on a wide range of factors including the sunlight available on your roof, the amount and timing of hot water you use, and the cost of electricity or gas that you'd otherwise be using.
Until now, calculating the bill savings and payback of a solar hot water system was incredibly difficult, largely owing to the number of variables in play, and the complex physical and financial calculations involved. This means households and businesses have been forced to rely on often inaccurate rules of thumb.
The Ecologic platform provides a series of innovations that together address these challenges. Instead of applying a rule of thumb to estimate your energy savings, our cloud-based simulation engine estimates the amount of energy incident on your roof each hour through the year, based on our database of weather around the world and some tricky computational geometry. We then simulate the physics of the thermal exchange to calculate the amount of electricity or gas required for boosting. We also estimate the amount and timing of hot water used on the property, incorporating key variables such as the number of residents and the flow rate, duration and timing of showering and other hot water appliances. We also run a range of alternative scenarios to calculate the likely bill savings, including the estimated electricity and gas bills occurring with your existing hot water system, and the estimated electricity / gas bill required for your new solar hot water system.
To get your personally tailored solar hot water business case simply log into the free Ecologic tool available at www.getecologic.com, answer a short list of questions about your existing hot water appliances and click 'Run Simulation'. The estimated bill savings and payback period for solar water heating should appear in your list of recommendations.
As always please reach out to us if you have any questions or suggestions over email, Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter.