[thackney]

First was solar assisted heating/cooling that uses solar to super heat the coolant for the heat pump. In FL this greatly reduced my cooling costs.

How does adding heat to a cooling system help in any way?

[Dad was my hero]

apparently it works off the "coolant". It is called solar thermal air conditioning. (I'm quoting from the article I first saw about it) The collector superheats your AC system's additional refrigerant which reduces the workload f the compressor. This increases the system's efficiency rating and lowers the overall power consupmtion.

I can say that we hooked up the system late August last year and our September elec bill dropped by almost 75%. Of course at the same time we also went live with the solar hot water heater but I attribute most of the drop to the solar AC system.