[The Working Man]

I’ve had Solar Hot Water systems on both my Florida house and now my Kentucky Farm house. The technology is amazingly efficient even in the winter, (barring snow on the panel). I especially like the Heat transfer coils in the Hot water tank.

The system in Florida used direct water and I had one panel fail there due to a steam flash blowing out some of the pipes.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Too many big oaks and hickories for solar to work here.
We put in a ground source heat pump when we built new in ‘01. It has four 200 foot wells under the driveway and the main floor is warmed by the same unit.
Not cheap to buy but the payoff is about 4-5 years. Our power bill goes down when we switch the ground source to AC...

[Myrddin]

I installed a nice thermosyphonic system at my house in San Diego. 100% hot water generation from March to November. Pre-heat mode from November to March. It was wonderful until the hard water destroyed the holding tank. Calcification ate through the tank and sprayed water all over the insulation. It ceased insulating. The contractor also cheaped out on the freeze plugs. Cheap PVC versions were used and we had a hard freeze one night. They popped and continued leaking. I found good brass replacements that lasted until the holding tank failed.

In the end, I removed the system and donated the tanks to a local solar installer/maintainer. There was no market for my nice silicon glass window/anodized copper collector panels. Even with the federal subsidy, I lost almost $7,000 on that bit of green stupidity. Three years in service didn't come close to the claimed service life of 20 years. Even at 20 years, the natural gas prices never went high enough to offset the investment.

[WVKayaker]

The technology is amazingly efficient even in the winter, (barring snow on the panel).

Panels = old technology. The new versions use vacuum tubes, as pictured, which have glycol inside. The boiling temp is around 685f and they transfer into a copper header via a copper heat pipe inside a glass cylinder. If you have a hail storm, the worst case scenario means you replace a pipe of two, at a cost of $30-60 depending on size. The efficiency is about 150-240% greater than flat panels with the fluted tubes.

In addition, snow does not build on them. BUT, on a Rochester, NY home, with flat panels and 6" of snow overnight, the panels cleared within 45 minutes of sunrise. Snow is just frozen water, and the sunlight is diffused, but it's still hot!

My license plates:

[WVKayaker]

SHOULD READ!!!
...The boiling temp is around 65f and they transfer into a copper header...