The original SolarWall® Single-Stage system is a favorite of facility managers and design professionals alike.
The SolarWall technology is a solar air heating system that uses the power of the sun to heat your building’s ventilation air. It minimizes energy consumption, heating costs and carbon emissions throughout the heating season. It directly addresses one of the largest sources of building energy consumption: Indoor space and ventilation heating. SolarWall heating also allows buildings to increase their ventilation air without increasing their energy costs or carbon emissions.
SolarWall systems are all-metal and have no ongoing maintenance associated with them.
Available in a variety of panel profiles and colors, the system brings a measure of architectural versatility that sets it apart from other renewable energy technologies.
How it Works
Buildings with centralized heating and ventilation systems draw fresh air through HVAC units.
In winter, these units consume tremendous amounts of energy to heat the cold incoming air to comfortable indoor temperatures. With a SolarWall system, incoming fresh air is solar heated before it reaches the fresh air side of the HVAC or the HRV/ERV unit, minimizing building fuel consumption throughout the heating season.
When the sun’s radiation heats the surface of the SolarWall facade, fresh, solar-heated air accumulates on the surface of the collector. The existing HVAC units draw this solar-heated air through thousands of tiny perforations in the SolarWall panels.
This solar-heated air gathers in the air cavity behind the SolarWall panels, and travels to the existing HVAC unit’s fresh air intake via mechanical ducting. In the summer, when solar-heated air is not desired, the SolarWall system is bypassed and the HVAC system will draw direct from ambient.
SolarWall Single-Stage systems can heat the incoming fresh air up to 75°F above ambient temperatures. In this configuration, significantly less heating fuel is required to heat the building’s fresh air supply. In fact, independent monitoring studies have
shown that effectively-designed SolarWall systems can displace 20-50% of the building heating load.
The SolarWall technology is sometimes referred to by different names in the marketplace, from unglazed transpired collector (UTC) or transpired solar collector (TSC), to solar heated wall, solar ventilation preheating or solar perforated wall. Whatever the nomenclature, give us a call and we will design the best SolarWall system type for your facility.