Plumbing

We used to have solar hot water heating. It's not cost effective as it's expensive to retrofit and water heating while expensive, it isn't enough compared to space heating when it comes to the typical household bill. At our last house rather than repair an obsolete system, we replaced it with a modern combi boiler which was cheaper to run that the old boiler and the solar heating system and electrical immersion heating that was required.

When we started to look at our current house rebuild I suggested solar thermal or air-source heat pumps as options as part of the process. We're having solar photovoltaic but that's elsewhere in the process. I'm not super keen on solar thermal, but we've no mains gas so our water is electrical immersion heated and actually quite expensive. The architects latched onto the solar thermal and here it is being installed. Given the size of the holes they had to dig I would have actually prefered ground source heating to this - but I didn't know that at the time or I would have still gone for it.

Since I took this picture, one more doomy global warming report has been published - were up the creek without a paddle, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine has sent energy prices soaring and I think we're in for a long term bout of inflation, so solar water heating doesn't seem as bad now. My savings will be wiped out if we have 10% inflation for long, so may as well get something useful from them while I can...