We Will Design & Build the Right Solar Thermal System for Your Needs

Sustainable Future sells, designs, and installs solar thermal systems to provide hot water and/or space heating for your home or business. Our customers enjoy lower utility bills and the knowledge that they are reducing pollution and fossil fuel consumption every time the sun shines. Unlike photovoltaic solar panels, solar thermal collectors gather the sun's energy and transfer this energy (heat) directly to your water. Many of our customers have both solar hot water and solar photovoltaic systems.

We will help you design a solar thermal system that will meet your specific needs. Some of the initial considerations involved in the design process include the following:

• Determining the best location for your solar thermal collectors with a HW.stm"> solar hot water evaluation . Our staff will use a Solar Pathfinder and work with you to determine the best location based on your specific site and individual needs.
• If you want to mount your solar thermal collectors on your roof, how should you mount them? You will want to consider whether to mount them flush with the roofline and possibly reduce efficiency, or mount them at the ideal angle for solar heat collection. We suggest tilting solar thermal collectors at a 45 degree angle on the roof. This provides a winter-time efficiency bias to help boost heat collection when days are shorter. You will still have plenty of hot water in the summer.
• Choosing a system that will meet your needs based upon your hot water demand. In East Tennessee, we recommend a two thermal collector systems with an 80-85 gallon storage tank for households with 1-3 people. For 4-6 people, we recommend three solar thermal collectors, and a 105-120 gallon storage tank.
• Protecting your system from weather conditions. In East Tennessee, winter freezing temperature must be taken into consideration. We install and recommend drainback type systems, which provide automatic freeze protection for your solar investment.
• Ensuring that you will have hot water whenever you need it. Eastern Tennessee winters can be cloudy for days at a time, and the days are short. While the solar storage tank will store hot water for several days, it's wise to have some type of backup heat source to provide hot water. Our solar storage tanks come with a backup heating element for these situations. When the sun is out the system will collect solar heat first, but if enough sun isn't available the backup heating element may be used. Solar thermal systems with electric backup heat use solar energy more efficiently than those with gas heat backup.