Which is more efficient: electric or solar heating?
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at
10:03 pm
I recently did an experiment on this. According to my model, solar panel heating is more efficient. Is this the results that should happen? Why is it more efficient (just a brief little explanation if possible)?
Filed under: Wind Power
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Don’t confuse "green" or cost with engineering efficiency. The efficiency should be calculated as the amount of energy converted into temperature increase of the air or the water (total mass of, say, water times the specific heat of the water time the delta T) divided by the amount of heat put in. If your experiment uses the same mass of water for the solar heater and for electric heater, then heat gained is directly proportional to the delta T (higher delta T = higher efficiency). Then the hard part is figuring out how much heat was put in. With the electric heater, this is straight forward, just calculate Kw-hours or joules. For the solar heating, it is a little more difficult to measure how much heat went in. I would guess that Electric could be more efficient because, with a good design, virtually all the electric power could be converted directly into heating water (with some heat going into the container and some going into radiation heat loss). With solar, there may be more heat going into the container and maybe more radiant heat loss. On the "green" side, the sunlight is free.
hope this helps
solar heating is more efficient
as it cost less and is largely available
what do you mean by more efficient?
any heating system, the energy has to come from somewhere, solar is somewhat available, whenever it is available.
now if you add storage devices to have energy when the sun is not there and if you need to have the output (like the temperature in your home) to be regulated, = constant
then it becomes a bit more difficult
if you measure efficiency in terms of cost, then solar is far more expensive for now in some areas of the world.
But this is changing
eventually it will be affordable everywhere.
Guru
Efficiency is one thing and cost is another.