Specialising in large COMMERCIAL applications.

• Reduce your annual energy savings by 60 to 100%  
   
• A proven technology – widely used throughout the world 
  
  
• Superior materials and construction mean long system life
  
  
• Works effectively over a wide range of mounted angles and directions
  
  
• Maintains its working efficiency and is self cleaning
  
  
• Perfect for cold, humid and hail-prone areas
  

Solar collectors work by absorbing solar radiation and transferring this heat to a fluid (normally water).

There are two main types of collectors.

• "Flat plate" technology which has been around for decades.
  
  
• "Tube" technology which is newer but has still been around for many years.

The efficiencies of a collector to absorb and transfer energy is depended on many factors, but are generally covered in the following 3 groups;

• Site conditions
  
  
• Collector Design & Performance
  
  
• System Design and Performance

Site conditions include factors such as geographical location, but also include many other factors such as roof alignment (south) and pitch, shadowing, wind speeds, roof area, distance from the collector to the water usage points to name a few.

Collector Design & Performance determines how well a particular collector performs for the particular site conditions.

Over the years the manufacturers of the various collectors have tweaked the products to improve their performance for a particular site condition or have improved the overall performance of the product. As a result of these manufacturing variations each collector product has a different performance characteristic which is normally measured against a standard site condition and a performance curve is generated that can then be used to predict the performance for all site conditions.

System Design & Performance is primarily concerned with how well the collector transfers the collected heat to the hot water storage volume, however there are many other design factors in a complete system that can also affect the overall performance of a system, including the insulation of the tank and pipe work and the location of ports, sensors, pumps and the like. Due to the wide variation in the products and the way these products are designed and assembled each system can have a different performance. 

A system that has high performance, plenty of design flexibility and is easy to install will be a good a place to start, but how do you work out what is the most suited system?

If it's a domestic application with typical domestic site variations then its fairly simple to select a system as most packaged solar hot water systems are designed for domestic applications.

When you start looking at larger hot water needs such as  hotels, resorts, hospital and apartment blocks it gets a lot harder. That’s where Microstrain comes in.   
All our solar products are well designed and manufactured to achieve the highest possible performance while still maintaining the flexibility to customise the assembly to maximise the solar energy collection for the application and site conditions.  

The Sunflow collector uses evacuated tube technology. The tubes consist of 2 layers of toughened glass with a vacuum between these 2 layers. This evacuated layer in the tubes acts much like a thermos flask, retaining about 97% of the energy absorbed from the sun. This helps increase the efficiency of the collector and also protects it from the effects of cold air.

The sun's energy is absorbed by the tubes and transferred to the water via special pipes located inside each evacuated tube. The Sunflow collector is an efficient collector that can be installed at almost any inclination.

For assistance in designing a Sunflow hot water solution, contact our technical team today.