Installing a solar geyser can typically save your household up to 40% on the monthly electricity bill – but it doesn’t produce any electricity! A solar geyser is a system that heats the water in your geyser directly via the sun by means of a solar collector. The solar collector sits on your roof in the sun and gets extremely hot internally . This generated heat is passed into your geyser water as it flows through the collector. Electricity doesn’t come into it and you can’t run your lights or computer from this energy.

Typical Solar Geyser Collector

Solar electricity is typically produced by photovoltaic solar panels. These panels are designed to produce electricity and can’t be used to heat your bath water (actually in theory they could, it just wouldn’t be at all cost effective). A photovoltaic panels consists of cells of positive and negative silicon wafers housed under a layer of extra-strength glass. When photons of light from the sun’s rays hit the panel, electrons begin to flow from the negatives cells to the positive cells, thus producing an electrical current. This current is captured and fed from the solar panels in the form of DC electricity to a battery bank or in some cases directly to the electrical load.

Photovoltaic Solar Panels

It costs around 14 cents to boil water for your cup of tea.

Running a 60W lamp for 1 hour costs around 5 cents.

If you have an 18W CFL lamp it will cost less than 2 cents per hour to run

Your tea heating costs you nearly 4 times as much as an hour of 60W lighting and over 7 times as much as your CFL lighting!

Disclaimer: Based on 85c per kWh. Figures are illustrative only.