Evacuated tubes - field trip

Trying to finalize the evacuated tube design for the house. I was thinking that the panels that would be providing the hot water and heating for my home would be kinda window-sized on the south wall. But with two 5.5'x7' panels and two 7'x7' panels, that's a lot bigger than window size.

Why evacuated tubes? Evacuated tubes are a newer technology to replace flat panels. They are recently affordable and much more efficient. They can provide higher temperatures than flat panels can, which is critical to providing enough hot water and space heating on cold days. For more about the Thermomax brand of evacuated tube collectors, visit http://www.thermotechs.com/Solar_Products.php, as an example.

Eric Doub of Ecofutures, my contractor for the project, ordered up a field trip. I went into Boulder and saw two installations of evacuated tubes. The first panels were mounted on a garage of a house near North Boulder Park. The second iinstallation was on Lighthouse Solar in Boulder. A couple things I realized: 1- you don't get a glare off these panels so they're not annoying in that way as PV panels can be when mounted at eye level. 2 - the tubs are somewhat transparent, with an outer glass (?) layer, then the vacuum layer and something inside. Okay I need more details, but the point is they are somewhat transparent so they are bit less imposing than I'd imagined. After being up close to these, I have a warm fuzzy feeling about them, so I say, let's continue forward.

Ali at Ecofutures spilled up the sketchup model a bit to note the actual sizes: the blue panels on the south wall are the evacuated tube panels. (The black panels on the roof are proposed PV panels.)