Solar Hot Water Monitoring
The Perks of Monitoring Solar Hot Water Systems
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Solar hot water systems make dollars and sense in commercial water heating applications at hospitals, hotels, office buildings, correctional facilities, laundromats, apartments and condominiums — anywhere that large volumes of hot water are used.
As a solar hot water installer or Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) service provider, your customers look to you to ensure efficient production of hot water for many years. You want to meet this need, and make sure that you maximize your returns in the process. That means keeping your support and maintenance costs under control while maximizing output. In order to accomplish these goals you have to be able to find answers to the following questions: How can you effectively support widely dispersed systems? How will you know if a system is operating correctly? How can you demonstrate results to your customers and to your project financial backers? How can you make sure that production and asset data are secure yet easily accessed when you need to? How can you generate a usage invoice based on accurate, verifiable data? Fat Spaniel can answer these questions, and more.
Fat Spaniel delivers monitoring and reporting services for solar thermal systems. Our onsite monitoring systems collect the relevant flow and temperature data for your customers’ solar hot water installations. The data is automatically communicated over the Internet and securely stored at the Fat Spaniel data center. This information is made accessible to you and your customers through graphical Web views, XML data feeds, and downloadable data. Real-time and historical data are available online 24x7.
Benefits
- Provide 24x7 remote monitoring of your customers’ solar hot water systems
- Manage multiple/multi-tenant sites and multiple customers easily and efficiently
- Access system data anytime, from any Web browser
- Track production, usage, and environmental statistics with real-time and historical data – via online downloads or XML data feeds
- Increase customer satisfaction with improved service and higher uptime
- Gain additional revenue from performance-based incentives
- Accurately measure energy generated and used under Power Purchase Agreements
- Ensure Renewable Energy Certificates or carbon offsets are recorded and validated
- Educate customers through Web views and use these views as effective sales tools to sell more systems to new customers
System kWth Capacity Calculation
Fat Spaniel uses the formula recommended by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which was developed with participation from the U.S. Solar Energy Industries Association and the Canadian Solar Industries Association, to calculate solar hot water system capacity. This allows for comparison across solar hot water systems, aggregation of system data, and consolidation with other renewable energy systems.To calculate a system’s kWth capacity, multiply the collector aperture area in m2 by 0.7, and multiply the result by the number of collectors in the system.
You can find the aperture area of collectors certified by the the Solar Rating and Certification Corporation (SRCC) on their website at www.solar-rating.org. Please see the IEA document “Recommendation: Converting Solar Thermal Collector Area into Installed Capacity (m2 to kWth)” for the detailed conversion explanation.
