Acorn Structures/ Solar Metrics solar hot water

[Bill Brown]

Does anyone know how the solar hot water is Designed to work on these 80's Acorn homes ? Acorn has no information and solarmetrics is defunct. Bought a house at foreclosure , appears bank disconnected the tank from the fhw system, curious at what t does and how it works. 

[Steve K.]

Solar hot water systems (popular in the Carter administration), used large, usually tilted up panels on the roof to preheat hot water or glycol in order to lower the homes electricity and/or gas consumption and to heat hot water. Also sometimes the hot liquid was used for radiant heat. These systems are mostly obsolete, except for heating swimming pools usually in commercial applications and there aren’t many installers left in business and even fewer installers that like to work on rehabbing older systems. Does the home still have the panels on the roof and the large tank somewhere in the house? I would remove all of it, if it hasn’t been maintained perfectly over the years it is likely to have leaks. The solar industry today is focused on photovoltaic panels, which create electricity instead of heating water or glycol.