Did you know that solar heating and cooling is a far better alternative to heat or cool water or air in your buildings? They eliminate the need of natural gas and electricity. Studies have revealed that lot of energy is spent every year for the purpose of heating and cooling of air and water both for domestic as well as commercial set ups. On the contrary if solar heating and cooling mediums are used it will surely offer much better economic and environment friendly solutions. The best thing about solar heating and cooling is that it reduces global warming to a large extent. When a family uses solar heating to heat water the carbon foot print decreases considerably so it is obvious when solar heating and cooling is used to heat water and air both, the results would really be fascinating.

 It is possible to generate thermal energy from renewable sources like solar, biomass, and geothermal source of energy. All these systems are together known as renewable source of energy. To put it simply, the systems that change sunshine into usable thermal energy are referred as solar heating and cooling technologies. The sun’s energy is captured through solar heating collectors and the heat gets efficiently transferred to buildings both for heating and cooling purposes.

 Let us know a little about the solar water heating technology. Solar water heating systems can be easily installed in most of the US homes and three main elements of these systems comprise the solar collector, the insulated piping, and a hot water storage tank. For colder climates one can use electrical controls as well as a freeze protection system. The process is such that the solar collector gathers heat from solar radiation and transfers the heat to the potable water. The heated water then flows out of the collector to a hot water tank and is used as per requirement. If one desires one can keep the auxiliary heating connected to the hot water tank for any sort of back-up.

 As far as solar air heating is concerned, energy from the sun is captured and is used for heating the air. Air heated with the help of solar heating is used for space heating as well as agricultural drying. It is seen that most of the solar heating systems are wall mounted so that they can capture maximum amount of solar radiation during the winter. In a solar heating system specially perforated solar collector panels are installed several inches from a south facing wall thus creating an air cavity in the process.

 Last but not the least, it can be concluded saying that the initial establishment cost of solar heating and cooling systems can be quite high but in the long run they prove to be quite beneficial. For instance, the payback period of such systems ranges anything between 4 to 8 years. Besides, the non-toxicity that is associated with such systems is incomparable with any other forms of energy. So it is a better idea to switch to these greener forms of energy instead of using the non-renewable forms of energy.