Analysis of heating a space by evacuated-tube collectors and auxiliary heater

In our climate zone, it is not enough to heat service water, swimming pools and houses by only solar energy throughout the year.Therefore designing solar systems, which can be operated combined with another heat generator, is much more appropriate. In this study; two different systems have installed to perform thermal performance analysis of a 198 m² building located in Gazi University Engineering Architecture Faculty which is heated by the energy supplied from evacuated tube collectors that are used as solar energy collectors and by auxiliary heater. In the first system, evacuated tube collectors were placed inclined with an angle of 40º from the horizontal plane and electrical resistance in the boyler tank was used as auxiliary heater; in the second system, evacuated tube collectors were placed perpendicular to the horizontal plane and any auxiliary heater was not used. Analysis of heating a space experiments by the installed systems were performed in October 2008, November 2008, January 2009 and May 2009. In this context, the experiments performed in October 2008 showed that the whole energy demand for space heating could not be meet without auxiliary heater. Based on this, auxiliary heater in the inclined collector system was put into operation in November 2008 and January 2009, the experiments were performed, results of the experiments were compared and system performances were determined by comparing the rate of energy supplied from collector systems to the energy demand. Also the evacuated tube collector efficiencies were calculated by using the datas obtained from the experiments.