If you are interested in getting a hot water system for your home from renewable means then one of your options is go get ground source heating from a ground source heat pump. There are also air source heat pumps and solar thermal panels will do the same job with Solar Energy. We'll be looking in to the financial benefits you can accrue in this way.
Heat Pumps: Efficiency?
The money that you can save with ground source heating comes from the efficiency of a heat pump as opposed to boilers. Actually the efficiency of a heat pump is not, technically, the most important part of it. The efficiency of a system describes how much useful energy comes out, out of all the energy that is inputted.
When you're looking at a heat pump, the reason that the efficiency rating is not the most important part is because we don't have to supply all of the energy for it the way we do with a boiler. The heat actually comes from a natural resource, the latent heat underground.
There is a different term, which describes how much energy we get out in contrast to the amount that we actually had to supply in the first place. That is the more useful term for heat pumps, and it is "coefficient of performance".
When you look at a ground source heat pump you are going to see that you get out 3-5 times more energy than you had to put in. This means that it is has a coefficient of performance of between 3 and 5. A boiler would have to be 300-500% efficient to match that.
It would, of course, be impossible for a boiler to be that efficient. It doesn't matter how well it is designed, you can never get more energy out of a system that you put in to it. That is one of the basic laws of the universe. The consequence of this is that you'll always need more energy to create heat with a boiler than you will with a heat pump.
Finances
What this means for your finances is that you will immediately be making savings on your energy bills by using a heat pump. That's because for every unit of energy that you have to pay for, you get 3-5 units of energy free out of the system.
The exact amounts that you'll be able to save depend on so many different factors though that it is impossible to make a generic statement about that. It will depend on things like the sort of heating system you're presently using, how much you pay for it, as well as how much energy you use of course.
What can be said though is that the financial incentive is soon going to be even higher. That's because the government is soon going to introduce the renewable heat incentive, and when that comes in to effect you'll be able to make even more money on every unit of energy that you produce.
This is a form of financial incentive which has already been used to good effect by the government with PV solar panels. In that case the scheme is called the feed in tariff, but it works in the save way. For every unit of renewable energy your system produces, you get paid some amount.
The renewable heat incentive will work in exactly the same way for ground source heating, as well as other forms of creating renewable heat energy such as with solar thermal panels. The result is that using renewable energy becomes an even better financial investment for you.
To discover more about ground source heat pumps, Noah Rose has written lots more about this subject at http://groundsourceheating.org.uk. Find out additional information about how all of it works, for example the average amount of money you can make, and get a free quote for an installation.