Hi John

I would like to address your somewhat aggressively toned post.

Firstly, I had been actively promoting solar heating flat plates and evacuated tubes from 2004-2012, and think solar heating is a brilliant and simple technology.

However, times are a changing, and although I think it is still a good technology, I wouldn’t recommend it anymore for the following reasons.

With the advent of PV heating converters, a simple add-on technology can do this type of work. The money spent on a solar thermal system is now better spent on PV because PV solar panels are more versatile.

PV can contribute to many other aspects of household life. During the three decades of its lifetime, I have no doubt that battery storage will become affordable and charging your EV car will become commonplace. Again simple plugin additions that will benefit you in many ways over the course of the technologies life time.

Life is all about making changes to new information, and although I was one of the first in 2004 to shout from the roof tops about how great solar thermal technologies were, their usage seems somewhat limited today.