Hydronic radiant floor heating if you have a hydronic radiant in floor heating system your solar hot water can then be used to heat your home.
Solar panel to power underfloor heating.
A solar thermal store cylinder can be used to combine floor heating and mains pressure hot water.
This is then used to heat your water which is stored in a hot water cylinder.
It is true that 100 of the electricity put into an underfloor resistance heater will turn into heat but getting the sun s heat into and back out of the battery that stores that is around 80 meaning the best you could get from 22 pv panels would be 18 of the stored solar heat.
Solar thermal panels use heat from the sun to warm fluid passing through them as the diagram below shows.
How solar underfloor heating works.
The cylinders are designed to work with solar panels and a boiler but can also be adapted to take additional heat sources such as stoves back boilers and heat pumps.
To get a solar pv contribution to the hot water or under floor heating you would need to install a cylinder to be heated by the boiler which would in effect now not be a combi boiler having been converted to heat a cylinder rather than heating water instantaneously.
There are many benefits to the combination and this appreciation has taken the practice of solar heating design to an entirely new level.
The combi boiler could power a wet under floor heating system but there will be no direct contribution from the solar pv.
There are two tappings in the thermal store to provide heat for underfloor heating.
It is most efficient to use solar energy directly to make underfloor radiant heat.
The solar coil is positioned at the super cooled lowest part of the thermal store to ensure maximum solar benefit.
An immersion heater unvented hot water cylinder might be needed as a back up heater or to get the water to the temperature you want.
Solar pv panels convert solar energy into electricity which can be used to power the appliances around the home and this can include solar underfloor heating.
The water in the thermal store.
Earlier solar heating systems would first heat a storage tank and then distribute the stored heat with radiant heating tubes.
An off grid solar power system for heating and refrigeration illustrated in figure 4 has two dual output off grid solar power inverters where a master unit is daisy chained with a slave unit to form a 2 4 kw system.