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‘You basically have free hot water’: how Cyprus became a world leader in solar heating
(www.theguardian.com)
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I would love to see numbers on how they compare against solar panels+ air source heat pump. I guess the solar heater is cheaper, but I would guess photovoltaic+heat pump probably is more efficient all around and it useful for all your home, not just water.
From the point of view of efficiency, solar heaters beat pv. With pv you need to convert the sun's energy into electrical energy, with losses, then convert electrical energy into heat by extracting it from the outside with the heat pump. If you store it in batteries to heat up water later, there's even more losses. Depending on the outside temperature, there's a limit to what the heat pump can do, which an internal electric heater inside the water tank takes over to reach usable shower temperature.
With solar heating the sun heats water, that's it. Not only you can yield energy from the sun more efficiently, this doesn't need complex electronics or semiconductors, so it's also better from an environmental impact point of view.
And it doesn't have to be either/or. In my country, solar heating usually comes as a package deal with pv heating. Some companies are making hybrid pvs. Solar panels become less efficient as they heat up, so a hybrid pv would use coolant to keep them within their most efficient working temperature and extract that heat to be used for space heating, using radiators or floor heating or forced air systems, and/or water heating. Having both just makes sense, since it makes your pv needs (and your upfront investment) smaller and the maintenance on solar heaters is much simpler.
Can second this: direct heating of anything is always going to be more efficient. Also, only ~25% of incident energy on a PV cell is actually captured as electriciy (see here for theoretical backing), and the rest is lost in a lot of ways, but much of it is converted to heat at the PV cell, and if you're capturing that you're using direct heating anyhow.