Photovoltaic heat in a 400-year-old farmhouse

A newly renovated agricultural building is used as a weekend house and is powered by the sun. The heating system is supported with the AC•THOR 9s.

The 400-year-old agricultural building, renovated in 2023, has so far only been heated with a pellet heating system. With the aim to reduce the load on the primary heating system in the future, the innovative owner of the home was searching for a practical addition. His property offers a sufficiently large roof area to equip it with a large photovoltaic system. 30 kWp are distributed in the cardinal directions east, south and west, installed in the angle of the roof structure.

The downside of the old building: Even after the renovation, the quarry stone walls of the old farm are anything but well insulated. Therefore, a lot of energy is required for heating. The owner was looking for a solution to solve this issue.

The path to my-PV

The large photovoltaic system of the renovated building, which was mostly used as a weekend house or holiday home, produced a large surplus, which was fed into the public grid. However, this should be changed in summer 2023 when Mr. Malinowski became aware of self-consumption optimization via the Internet. There is a simple and cost-effective retrofit for photovoltaic heat to use the photovoltaic electricity available to the house from the three roof surfaces in the household.

Using a photovoltaic power manager from my-PV, namely the AC•THOR 9s, it is very easy to increase the degree of self-use – linearly and depending on the photovoltaic surplus.

With the help of the videos of the my-PV YouTube channel, the owner developed an understanding on how the device works and his decision clearly went in favour of the photovoltaic heat solution from my-PV. A little research on the website and the decision was made that an AC•THOR 9s should be purchased for the renovated agricultural building.

The further project details and Mr. Malinowski's experiences are summarized in the detailed reference description.

In the video, we explain in detail how a an 18 kW application can be implemented with a 9 kW power manager.