My PV system produces about 55KWH per day. The inverters (SunnyBoy and Beacon) are about 90% efficient. So that means about 5KWH is waste heat off the heat sinks. I wonder if it's worth the effort to run cooling water to pull the heat from the inverters and store in a small insulated tank? The warm water could be used as input water to the water heater.
I need to work out the math on this one but thought I post it in case someone has already done the work.

Thanks,
Rich
NJ

Have you looked at what cooling the PV panels down a few degrees might do in extra power generation? Might yield more return.

I never bother to reply to this tread, I guess since its always the same ideas getting recycled.

For the original question, sure you can heat something, but the btu's in a square meter of panels equals the heat your talking about and you have what 30-40X of these?. As for cooling the panels, I have seen NO method that passes the common sense cost analysis, it cost money to cool panels, if you use water, that's not free and any type of cooling requires cost to build and maintain.

You can get about a 10 to 15% boost by cooling, I've tested with garden hosing the array, but unless you have a constant large volume of water it doesn't do much good.

There is a GOOD reason no-one does cooling, its cheaper to add panels that the cost to build and maintain ANY type of cooling for the panels

Are the inverters really only 90% efficient. I just purchased a Sunnyboy SB6000U and the California weighted efficiency rating is 94.5%. What models are you using and how old are they?

The Beacon M5 is the 90% one, Sunnyboy SB2500U is 93%+ depending on the power output.

My Xantrex GT4.0 is running at a solid 95-96% efficiency during the important part of the day. (Computed as AC-W / (DC-V * DC-A), ignoring the efficiency reported by the inverter)

Since it's rarely at full 4kW, figure 5% of 3kW or 150W is dumping into the heatsink all afternoon. I can't imagine doing anything useful with that -- certainly not enough to warrant running tanks, plumbing, and pumps.

As for chilling the panels, I wonder if you could make a combination PV/Solar Water system that only makes one pass under the panels with the cold water feed into the traditional water heater.

It may not be a win, if the heated water actually holds the panel temps UP when they would be cooling off in a breeze.