Thread: Future House | Robotic Flower Solar Panels

Just an interesting variation on a common theme ... sun tracking solar.


2 min

A full video is

7 mins

From the BBC article

Just more things to go wrong. Nothing wrong with standard solar panels, fastened to your roof. Been living with them for 30 years.

It does look nice, but I suspect would cost nearly as much as my car port extension...

Made by Austrian Company GmbH?

Load of bollocks GmbH just means limited liability company in German. Like LLC.

Charlatans

Originally Posted by Takeovers

GmbH is a very common company type. Nothing wrong with that.

Exactly but it is NOT on its own a company name. Someone made up a byline to make it sound impressive.

Like saying it is a UK company called Ltd.

Charlatans.

Originally Posted by Takeovers

But I agree that there is a reason why sun tracking solar arrays are not common.

I would expect there will be innovation with flat panels where the cells or the glass will alter to track the sun for more efficiency

When in my teens I built solar panels for my fathers company. They were hydronic hot water systems. Many of the panels were affixed directly to roof tops of residential homes.
The array we had in our backyard placed several 4×8 panel s in a row. Their was a mechanical lever one would use to move all the panels in that row all at once. We stamped the months of the year into the aluminum frame / lever locking devise so the user knew the position they should be at depending on the time of the year.

Not exactly rocket science. We had twelve panels in the back yard that heated a 500 gallon fiberglass tank in the basement. This coil set was powered by a grundfos 3-speed electric pump that circulated propylene glycol through the panels and gave up it's heat through copper coils in the tank.

We had one coil for domestic hot water that came off the well pump prior to the electric hot water heater wich was switched off.

The other coils ran via Grundfos electric 3 speed pumps and circulated through hydronic Heat exchangers that were basically a radiator with a fan behind it.

This heated our home throughout the winter. Originally the home was built with electric baseboard heaters. They remained as a back up heating source. If it were cloudy the tank would stay warm for several days as it was 1/3 full of rocks. Yes, rocks.

I made 3.50usd for each coil I soldered together in the garage at our house. Then we took them Via a work van to the factory where they were painted with a special paint called, get this, solar black prior to entering the oven where the paint was baked on.

A company named Alcoa made the parabolic curves that we assembled using a fixture in the shop. It was quite the production from start to finish. When we weren't building panels we were installing them. On houses, barns, in the yard ect. I made 3.50usd an hour to chase pipe through people's attics, in insulated ductwork in the ground, where ever. Quite the experience. Man I'd love to do it all over again.

We had an in ground pool that was 45 feet long 25 or so feet wide and 11ft deep on the deep end. Two panels kept it warm using the filtration pumps return line untill November and we'd bring it back in Late March early April.

Folks would come to our house to see this stuff operating. Again not rocket science but the systems worked well.

A walk down memory lane with.....

the fish.

My water-in-evacuated-tube HWS will boil the tank for six months of the year if I don't cover some or most of the tubes.
The passive solar design of my house means that I haven't lit the fire yet this year - stays toasty warm day and night.
Appropriate technology = excellent.

My blue plastic pipe along the southern wall heats the water nicely. The more loops one has the greater the volume.

It would be an idea to add LED lights that changed colour during the season to indicate different colour leaves and developing/mature flowers. A quick software up date could also change the apparent tree type.