Abstract: A solar heating system including a flat plate solar collector having a heat absorber woven basket fashion across a riser grid system containing suitable flow medium for being heated by the solar radiation. A heat exchange column is coupled to the riser grid system for extracting the heat from the flow medium to provide it to heating, hot water, and the like. The heat exchange column includes a number of continuous coils placed within a tank and having a circulating loop pass a liquid from the bottom of the tank to the top of the tank where it will flow over all of the coils transferring heat from one coil to the other. The flow is controlled by means of the load demand and the available supply of heat. Excess heat is stored in a heat storage system having a plurality of blocks of Glauber salt containing matrix material through which pass pipes containing the heated liquid.