Solar Panel for Domestic Hot Water

Harryp_24

This isnt the correct place but maybe one of you is knowledgeable?
recently bought a house, i spent my first week here after renovating for 6 weeks.
Basically i have a privately owned Domestic hot water solar panel that gives off loads of hot water right now, But im having a problem with the fact that its a small 2 bedroom terraced house and the hot water tank is in the bedroom. I work nights aswell and wake up around 1 PM.
At around 11 AM every day the Hot Water tank starts dumping water because it gets too hot (This is a guess). It maintains the water at around 50-60 Degrees.

There is two problems,
1) its wasting water (it comes on for about 3 minutes every 20 minutes or so when it gets too hot
2) its woke me up at 11 AM every day so far. (which means im currently getting 5 hours of sleep)

Is there any way to change this that people know of?

Thanks.

Slinky

Get rid of the panels? We've been quoted £500 to remove the hot water solar system from the roof of the house we are buying, as they are at the end of their life. We've decided this is better than replacing (£5500). The EPC reckons hot water savings are £60 per year with the panels. Given you're only using hot water for bathing and washing up, free hot water isn't as useful as it used to be when washing machines also used it.

ETA the water being dumped must be costing you something also.

ComicGeek

When you say the hot water cylinder is dumping water, how is it doing this? Is it through the discharge pipe? If so, then it's possibly a problem with the cylinder rather than the solar panel - if the hot water cylinder is already at temperature then the solar pump won't run, and the solar panel will just keep getting hotter and hotter until it activates the pressure relief valve and discharges the glycol fluid.


Or is it the sound of running water that you hear? Could then be the solar pump running to bring the heat from the panel back down to the cylinder for storing. The solar system will be monitoring both the temperature in the solar panel and in the cylinder, and will operate the system once the panels are hotter than the cylinder. It's possible that this is happening at about the same time each day if the weather is consistent.


As Slinky says, the annual savings from the system are likely to be very small, £50-£60 at best. If it's bothering you that much (and sleep is precious!), then either remove it or drain the system and turn it off.