All About Solar Geysers

Looking for a way to cut costs at home on your electricity bill? Solar geysers are the ideal way to heat your water, and protect the environment.

Because of the energy costs saved as well as the Eskom subsidies, a solar geyser will pay for itself in a few years

Our sun pumps about 386 billion million gigawatts into space, mostly in the form of electromagnetic radiation. By comparison, a large nuclear reactor generates about one gigawatt and global energy consumption is a few thousand gigawatts. Only a minuscule portion of the sun’s energy falls on our earth, yet this energy is responsible for running almost every living thing on the planet.

To put this into context, every second the sun produces the same energy as about a trillion one megaton bombs! In one second, our sun produces enough energy for almost 500 000 years of our current needs of our so-called civilization. If only we could collect it all and use it.

The energy from just 20 days of sunshine is equivalent to all the energy stored in the earth’s reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. Every second, the outer layer of the earth’s atmosphere receives radiant solar energy of about 1300 watts per square metre. About one third of this light is reflected back into space, and the atmosphere absorbs a portion of this. By the time it reaches the earth’s surface, the solar radiation has fallen to about 1000 watts per square meter, at noon, on a cloudless day. Averaged over the entire surface of the planet, each square metre collects approximately 4.2 kilowatt-hours of energy every day.

How a solar geyser system works

A typical household solar geyser system consists of a solar panel with a heat transfer fluid flowing through it to transport the heat energy collected to the geyser.