Solar Adjuct?

Hoping to replace my old stoker boiler this year. As long as I'm going to have things torn up, I've been wondering about using solar to preheat the water. Anybody have any thoughts about or experience with this?

Solar hot water works. How well it works in dollars depends on how it's done. If you dial a phone number & say "Come intall solar hot water", You could be looking at a 10 to 20 year payback. If you build your own panels to temper DHW, much less payback time. I did a pile of research this last Fall wanting to do solar hot water & get the 30% state rebate only to discover the rebate is only if done by a "solar licensed" installer. They are so few and far between it's silly, anf they charge so much extra it would have been cheaper to hire a plumber and skip the rebate!

Freddy,
I have hot water solar, I posted it in this forum here is the link:
Post by syncmaster - Solar Hot Water Panels VS. Stoker Boiler

bottom line, it will save you about 400 gallons of fuel oil a year.

but if your making hot water with a coal stoker boiler (12lbs of coal a day in summer) the savings will be alot less.

hope this helps

Cool sounding system, Sync. From the numbers I crunched it looks like it works much better for you on LI than it would for me in Maine. At first I thought I'd be saving 200 gallons of oil a year, but it ended up more like 100. I was looking at two different systems, one was two 4' by 8' panels, the other was 30 vac tubes. Both called for an 80 gallon tank.

I heat 30k of pool water in the summer and it stays at a constant 86. We like it warm. I'm using 7 4 x 8 panels on the roof. I was thinking of using one panel just for hotwater. You could get the panel from solardirect for about 300 but it would have to be winterized in the winter. You would also need controls to shutoff the circulator when the water became to cold. Basically on rainy days and at night you wouldn't want the water to circulate through the panels.