Does anybody have any experience of Firebird Sydney solar tube systems?
Apparently they are made in Ireland. My plumber has recommended them over the Kingspan Thermomax. He said they perform better and are cheaper.
They are made in Ireland and SEAI registered
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I am sorry but that is a complete lie, apart from possibly the cheaper part!
Firstly, Firebird's tubes are manufactured in China. There are purchased from an independent Chinese factory. Firebird imports the tubes and then the other system components from other manufacturers and then assembles "the kit" here in Ireland. It's the old cliche, Argentinian chicken with Irish cling film on it can be called Irish chicken! Once they assemble their kit, they give it to Solar Keymark for certification as their kit. You and I can do exactly the same and never make a single component. We could even call it AAM Solar!
Secondly, all Sydney tubes of equal diameter will perform the same. Only increasing the diameter of the tube will increase the performance as the surface area of the tube is increased. You will find that most companies who sell their systems use the same tube manufacturers in China.
There is only one manufacturer of solar tubes in all of Europe and that is Kingspan and they are manufactured in Portadown. All others are as above. Even some popluar branded systems that claim to be manufacturered in Italy, Austria and Germany use the same Chinese tubes. They just manufacturer their other components in Europe and assemble the kit in Europe.
With regard to efficiency, Firebird's efficiency is 60.5%
http://www.dincertco.de/logos/011-7S663 F.pdf, whilst Kingspan's HP200 is 72.6% [broken link removed], whilst the HP250 is 76.1% [broken link removed].
The main difference between Kingspan's tubes and all others is Kingspan's Patented anti-stagnation device built into the condenser of the tube. Other differences are there also to increase efficiency, such as the strength of the vacuum and the heat pipe being surrounded by a complete vacuum rather than the Sydney tube heat pipe being open to normal atmospheric pressure.
The may well be cheaper than Kingspan's, however, you will require a heat dump with Firebird's system and therefore when the heat dump is maxed out, it will stagnate the glycol. This leads to more frequenty service costs, i.e. at least servicing every two years. With Kingspan's HP systems, this will not happen and servicing should be carried out every 5 to 10 years, but more likely to be at the higher end. This is checked with a refractometer.
You can check any system efficiency on Solar Key Mark's website on
http://www.estif.org/solarkeymark/regcol.php. Once you input the name of the company you are looking for, click the Data Sheet Link Button and you are looking for the No efficiency on the data sheet.
The final point is as Wav asks, what is the manufacturer's warranty? Kingspan offer 5 years warranty or 20 years warranty when the system is installed with a Kingspan registered installer. You can look at their website to view a list of installers in your area [broken link removed]