Solar panels and combi boiler

Blacky50

Hi
Like many people I fitted a combi boiler and it works fine. I’m now thinking about solar panels. If I fit a hot water tank I can use the excess solar electricity to heat the water. Could I then feed this into the combi boiler? If the water is already hot presumably it won’t get heated further by the boiler, but if it isn’t then the boiler would heat it up. This would save money without having to re plumb the hot water pipes.
Thanks for your thoughts
Simon

Niv

Not strictly answering your question, but even if you already have a hot water tank it is not financially the best option for your excess solar. You would make more by selling it back to the grid.

Keep_pedalling

We have solar panels and a combi boiler in the bungalow we purchased last year. We get 15p pkWh to in SEG payments to export so it would actually cost us more to heat hot water with solar than it does with our combi.

sheenas

Some people do use their immersion heater to heat their hot water from solar. The first thing to consider is that solar would heat the water during the day, so you would have hot water at night. In many cases people want hot water in the morning for showers etc. In that case you would be need a battery and then you could power your evening use and heat some water in the morning. If the that what you want to do the you could have a tank a new boiler (unlikely the current boiler would be compatible)  and a tank with a long heating rod installed. Personally I would look at a battery as being a better option.

QrizB

Blacky50 said

Like many people I fitted a combi boiler and it works fine. I’m now thinking about solar panels. If I fit a hot water tank I can use the excess solar electricity to heat the water.

As a couple of others have already said, it makes no sense to use electricity that you could sell for 15p/kWh to replace gas that you can buy for 6p/kWh.

It makes even less sense when doing so would involve spending £1000 or more on buying and installing a hot water tank.

Screwdriva

I agree with the above comments but would strongly recommend fitting Solar PV regardless. You can offset the cost of gas by selling your excess PV to the grid for £.