Power your Dairy Hot Water with Solar Panels

Absolutely not, the system is owned outright by you to enjoy the benefits of solar hot water heating powered by the sun for many years.

Within our system you can specify the Required Temperature and Schedule, for afternoon milking and morning milking:

• By setting Afternoon Milking to 85 °C @ 4pm, our system will utilise all Solar generated, and will supplement the Solar with additional afternoon AC Mains (if required) to make sure your tank is at 85 °C @ 4pm.
• By setting Morning Milking to 85 °C and a heating schedule of 1:00am to 5:00am, you will ensure you are using overnight off-peak rates to make sure your tank is at 85 °C by 5:30am.

A 10 panel installation into a Dairy Shed will have an expected payback of approximately 5 years, and your panels will produce electricity for more than 25 years - that's a great return on investment of around 20% pa.

Every 10 Panels deployed will produce approximately 20kWHrs / day (summer) & 15kWHrs / day (autumn / spring), equating to:

• For preheated water: 20kWHrs will heat approximately 490L from 50 °C to 85 °C.
• For non-preheated water: 20kWHrs will heat approximately 230L from 10 °C to 85 °C.
• Any energy shortfall, is topped up from AC Mains to ensure the tank is at temperature, on time.

Yes, during mains power outages our system will continue to use all the electricity available from the Solar Panels, however if an additional AC Mains boost is required to reach target temperatures, then during power outages the target temperature may not be attained in time for milking.

Absolutely not -

• For every 10 Panels deployed our system will heat up approximately 230L by 75 °C.

• For a 500L tank with no preheat, we would recommend 20 Panels which would take approximately 460L of non-preheated water from 10 °C to 85 °C.

If the equipment fails and you receive an Alert from the Cloud advising your water is not coming up to temperature as expected, then you are able to manually switch a Bypass switch. All installations are fitted with a bypass switch to ensure that you can bypass the Solar Equipment to heat from AC Mains to ensure you always have a backup plan, in the event of equipment failure.

Yes - our system is cloud based and you can specify multiple Alert criteria. For instance, you could configure an alert if the tank has not reached 60 °C by 3am, and an alert if the tank has not reached 80°C by 3pm. These alerts are generated from the Cloud, so even if the Solar Equipment fails, you will receive an alert from the Cloud.

Solar produces the greatest economic return to consumers when they self-consume all the solar energy generated. Grid-Tied systems sell excess energy back to Energy Retailers at low rates - our view is that it makes no sense to over-invest in Solar systems to then sell excess electricity back to your Energy retailer. By implementing OneEnergy’s Solar Electric Hot Water system to heat hot water and store all of the energy generated as hot water, Dairy Farms get the most economic return for the least outlay, with the comfort of grid-boosting to top up any Solar shortfall.

Lets say we deployed 10 Panels for heating hot water:

• Over your milking season, your Panels will produce approximately 5.8MWHrs that will be directly utilised to heat your hot water. Solar Panel output also degrades marginally over time - so let's also assume an industry standard 0.5% output degradation each year.
• Assuming you pay 30c (ex) per kWHr of power during the day, then this equates to $1,740 (ex) of mains power expense that you have avoided in year 1, and this benefit increases to $1,921 for Year 5 if we assume day time power rates will increase by 3% each year.
• Lets also assume the Installed system costs $8,000 (ex GST) and you utilise the 20% Investment Boost Deduction together with 16% diminishing value depreciation on the balance - this equates to 32.8% ($2,624) of the installed price that may be depreciated in year 1, with diminishing depreciation thereafter.
• Projecting the math out to year 5, then the net impact is that your After Tax Payback / Net Cashflow becomes positive after 4.8 years , and your ROI is almost 600% over a 25 year system life equating to 24% pa.