(Photo: Flickr/woodleywonderworks)
It’s been a great October. Free Hot Water had a great show at Solar Power International, and we’re so excited to learn that the Solar thermal market and pool heating market is growing in 2010.
Want numbers? Sure: According to SEIA’s 2010 U.S. Solar Market Insight, the total number of solar water heating installations in the first half of 2010 was 22,567, which is on pace to exceed the 2009 level by 9%!
Spectacular for a recession, but to put that number in perspective, 22,500 is only a quarter of the 170,000+ systems per year that the industry was completing back in the early 1980s during the first solar hot water boom.
As for solar pool heating, the U.S. saw 16,821 systems installed in the first half of 2010. At this pace, the SEIA report says that there should be 34,000 solar pool heating systems installed by the end of 2010, up 3% over the 33,000 installed in 2009. Not bad either.
Of course, Free Hot Water would love to see your solar hot water business keep growing at an even faster pace. We already have competitive pricing, so doing everything we can there. But beyond giving our products away, we’d sincerely like to know: How can we help?
For example, we’re trying to make things more convenient for installers. We have a new 24/7 online ordering system, and we’ve created new pre-engineered small commercial solar systems for 1-click shopping. But maybe you’ve got other ideas and suggestions that we can work on to help.
So, please share your thoughts in the comments below, or contact us directly. If you’ve got suggestions or comments and we have the resources to help, we’ll get it done. If we can’t, we’ll try to explain why and what we can do. We sincerely want to work with you and get more solar on American roofs.
Thanks for reading.
Good news for our industry! In the mid ’80s, I worked with a builder who decided to include solar energy as a standard feature in all of his homes. He ended up building seventy homes in Jacksonville, NC, about twelve homes in Rome, GA, and five or six in Chapel Hill. Each house has passive and active solar systems. The passive solar system provides space heating during the day and the active solar system provides space heating and hot water in the evening or whenever the passive was spent. Some of these homes had solar fractions as high as 80%!
During this time, solar thermal systems were becoming accepted in the housing market as standard equipment. The market was maturing with proven technology. Unfortunately, the federal government pulled the rug out from under us by repealing the solar tax credits. Most of the marketplace collapsed as a result.
Europe was going through some energy problems of its own but continued to push for energy conservation and solar energy. To my understanding, Germany has mandated solar hot water systems on all new construction. Europe is now way ahead of the US in the adoption of solar therm systems and is selling their equipment to us.
Keep up the good work!
Dr. Ben