Photovoltaic heat for holidays at the farm

Family Wolfsgruber from Traunkirchen is running a beautiful family business with a view of the mountain Traunstein and the lake Traunsee, located in the Salzkammergut in Upper Austria. In addition to the family of five, the parents as well as some holidaymakers live in the well-booked holiday apartments on the farm. The energy requirement is correspondingly high, not only for the power supply, but also for space heating and hot water supply. The conventional heat supply works with a wood chip heating system that is often used in agriculture. This system heats a 4,000 liter buffer tank located in the garage.

As it is usual on agricultural buildings, there is a lot of space on the roof: the innovative and environmentally conscious farmer Stephan Wolfsgruber had a 40 kWp photovoltaic system installed on it in various directions (south, west and east). According to the farmer, it was never the goal to simply feed the resulting surplus into the public power grid. It is important to him to achieve as much self-sufficiency as possible for running his farm and at the same time to relieve the existing biomass heating as much as possible, which protects the service life of the boiler.

With two 9 kW immersion heaters, which were simply integrated into the buffer tank via a 1.5 inch thread, the photovoltaic surplus from the AC•THOR 9s has been continuously used for some time using the 18 kW mode for heating support. The experiences with the solutions from my-PV are best summed up by the owners of the farm themselves. We visited them in summer 2022:

“Anyone who has the opportunity to mount a photovoltaic system on their roof should do so. Let’s use the energy that nature gives us to do something good for the environment.”

More information on the technical details and possible further expansion stages on the farm can be found in the reference description.