I have a 40k gal pool , surface area appx 900 sf . I live in Hawaii so plenty of sunshine but 1/2 the year the pool is too cold . Anyone out there have an opinion regarding PV with an electric pool heater vs Solar thermal heating system ?
Best way to heat my pool Solar or PV ?
- Thread starter AprilFrancesca
- Start date
Welcome to TFP!
Plain and simple, using PV to power an electric pool heater is incredibly inefficient, extremely expensive, and just pointless. Attempting to convert sunlight to DC electricity, then convert that to AC electricity, then convert that to heat, is a lot of lost power. Using solar water heating converts sunlight directly to heat. It's also a fraction of the cost to install solar heating panels than to install a PV system.
There isn't any opinion to have here, once you run the math attempting to heat a pool with PV loses in every possible way.
Plain and simple, using PV to power an electric pool heater is incredibly inefficient, extremely expensive, and just pointless. Attempting to convert sunlight to DC electricity, then convert that to AC electricity, then convert that to heat, is a lot of lost power. Using solar water heating converts sunlight directly to heat. It's also a fraction of the cost to install solar heating panels than to install a PV system.
There isn't any opinion to have here, once you run the math attempting to heat a pool with PV loses in every possible way.
- May 23, 2015
- 25,681
- Pool Size
- 16000
- Surface
- Plaster
- Chlorine
- Salt Water Generator
- SWG Type
- Pentair Intellichlor IC-60
There was, I stress was, a company here in Tucson that did exactly just that - installed solar PV and a small heat pump (around 75k BTU/hr) to heat swimming pools. It isn't the fastest or most efficient way to heat a pool, but it is certainly doable. I believe there is a company in Australia where they also use a solar PV array to drive the pool equipment and actually pump pool water up to the array to cool it since cooler panels generate electricity more efficiently that hot panels. One upside of installing solar PV is that it can cut the cost of running the pool equipment to next-to-nothing if the array is sized large enough.
So you can certainly investigate it as an option, but it will definitely cost more to do that than to just use regular solar heat collectors. Regardless of what you choose, any heating option requires the pool to be covered! If the pool is uncovered, then you are simply wasting the heat added to the pool as overnight evaporation or wind-driven evaporation will very quickly cool a pool.
So you can certainly investigate it as an option, but it will definitely cost more to do that than to just use regular solar heat collectors. Regardless of what you choose, any heating option requires the pool to be covered! If the pool is uncovered, then you are simply wasting the heat added to the pool as overnight evaporation or wind-driven evaporation will very quickly cool a pool.