So do you have a thermostatic mixer valve on the shower? If it's working fine, then that's good to know, the only solar thermal system I looked at the owner said they'd been told they needed a water softener, and un-vented tank to give decent water pressure on the hot. If it can work fine without then I stand corrected. Maybe there's another reason why you hardly ever see solar thermal along with PV on new (PV) installations because otherwise you'd think it would be a no-brainer with the efficiency gains to be had.
Solar hybrid advice
- Thread starter speccy
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If that's addressed to me, yes. We have a cold tank in the attic feeding the hot tank in the 'airing cupboard'. Then hot and cold feeds, directly to the shower pump, have identical pressures and this feeds a thermostatic mixer shower. We also have very hard water. The one place that this causes an issue is that every 20 years or so the calcium carbonate builds up where the hot water first exits the hot tank and starts to cool. Never actually had any resulting problem though.
The solar thermal, as I say, works well. However, the installation is quite a bit more complicated. For example, to prevent over-heating and stagnation I had to modify our S-Plan system to dump the excess heat into the radiators, by switching off the boiler, and switching on both zone valves. And there is a fair bit of pressurised piping in our attic. Running a twin and earth would have been much simpler.
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