Hi,

I'm located in the Northeast & given the recent soaring oil & gas prices, I wanted to look into alternate clean ways of heating my home and/or using less oil in the winter.

I had a new buderus oil fired boiler installed about 3 years ago which is about 86% effiecient. Being an old home, I had the windows replaced as well with new double pane argon gas insulated units.
These help, but being a large home, it still is quite expensive to heat & oil is far from affordable any more. (at least for me anyway!)

I wanted to see if anyone knows of a way, or can point me in the right direction to install a solar panel system that would "help" heat the water effectively in my boiler heating system? I was just curious if anyone has done this, or could tell me what would be the most effective way would be to do it. Thanks for any info on the subject.

I wanted to see if anyone knows of a way, or can point me in the right direction to install a solar panel system that would "help" heat the water effectively in my boiler heating system

You will have to install a completely separate solar system to do the job. Reason is that your oil powered boiler runs at to high a temperature to allow a mix in with solar.

If you lower the boiler water temp to meet the solar your system will not operate as designed.

Thanks hvac1000, So I guess what I'm hearing (or reading) is, I would have to put in a separate solar system & go with radiant floor circuits?

I guess I am thinking if a solar system were to pre-heat the water at even a lower temp, & then the boiler took over to finish the job, (during bright days) could that work? In my mind, it would save "some" of the water heating from the boiler. I have old cast iron radiators in my home & they hold heat for quite a while compared to base board units & usually don't get super hot anyway. The whole solar thing is a bit new & confusing to me. I understand the basics I guess, but it would seem that there must be a viable solution out there somewhere. Anyway, thanks again for the response.

hvac1000 is correct. There really isn't any way to do what you describe. The water returning to your furnace from your baseboard (to be reheated and sent out again) is hotter than what you would get off a solar heater on any but the clearest winter days in the northeast. And to heat a house your collector would probably have to be larger than your roof. Efficiencies, collector gains, piping losses, heat exchanger losses and all that technical stuff... Put in a solar domestic hot water heater and be happy that you are saving some fossil fuel energy.

EPM