Roorkee: A research scholar of Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IIT-R) has claimed to have developed a cost-effective heating system using stored solar energy which will work on minimal power and can be used to heat homes in rural areas at a nominal cost The system has been developed by Vikas Verma, who completed his PhD from the mechanical and industrial engineering department of the institute in 2017 and is currently an assistant professor in the department of energy, Tezpur University, Assam. The research on the ‘Solar-Assisted Ground Source Heat Pump System (SAGSHP) was done as part of an MoU between IIT Roorkee and Geo-environmental Research Centre of Cardiff University UK. A communique from IIT-R said,“The most interesting part of the research is that it demonstrated that the solar energy available during the winter season could be used effectively for space heating with the help of a heat pump.” Elaborating about his research, Verma told TOI, “The invention would be especially suitable for hilly areas where huge amount of electricity gets consumed for room heating during the winter season.”A unique feature of SAGSHP is that it enables solar energy available in the day time to be stored and used for space heating in the night time. According to Verma, the system requires only 25 percent of the electricity used in the electric heaters to produce the same heat energy.According to Krishnan Murugesan, professor at the institute who supervised the research, the device is “a step forward in replacing the electric heaters operated by high grade energy which are currently used widely in the cold regions of northern part of India”.

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