Solar

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There's almost no remaining photos of the solar reflecting panel i made. I'd still have the panel, intact and probably working, but once assembled it was heavy and delicate, and i had no one who would come over and help guide it up stairs and outside.

I made up the approx 3x7 ft panel, an inch thick, of 1x1 square steel tubing. The 3x7 dimension was chosen to make it fit inside a 4x8 pickup truck bed, because at the time i thought this would be important. I then set it up with a temporary target on a 2x4 lumber to get an idea of the angles the 1x1ft mirror would need to set in the rails. Once the mirrors were installed, it was heavy and fragile, and i could get no help guiding it from the building location up to the roof. This is it in the driveway doing preliminary alignment, before i even had all the mirror for it:

Unfortunately, the neighbors had dogs that prefered to be over with me, and not necessarily in a good way. So i moved everything up to the roof, which has a 32x24 flat-ish area to work in. I set the mirror edge on the 2x6 and drew lines to show the angle needed to hit the target. The thin strip clamped to the 2x6 was to quickly make a repeatable angle as the sun moved and i manually tracked it by moving the jig.

To make up smaller panel assemblies, for a parabolic instead of a trough, since i couldn't get any humans to help with anything for any amount of money, i made this jig to clamp them up. This thing is very square, and ultra flat. It's made of the remains of cutting the 3x7 panel apart. This is a pic taken just a few weeks ago, of the bottom of the generator cage clamped up on it to be square and flat.

Here's the 1.25 diameter steel pin i set in buried concrete. The parabolic was to pivot around this pin, on a circular track i never got to pour. The white pvc pipe is over the pin just so i don't fall on it. The electrical service entrance conduit runs underground thru the circular area, so i could have tapped in and fed power to the house easily. I still have a V6 car engine to convert to steam, and a 30hp generator (more power than i ever use). If this had worked out, my back property line is 1280 ft long, and could have provided enough power to sell to the power company, or convert to any other form of power i'd need.

To relocate a very large boulder, the backhoe operator ripped the pivot pin, with 2ft of concrete buried, out of the ground. It's landfill now. There's no parabolic or tough on my propery. I have 150 watts of photovoltaics that i bought 5 years ago, and was threatened with bodily harm if i put them up on the roof where no one would see them. They think making your own electricity here is stealing from the power co and a moral deficency.

That 10 inch square steel tubing in the background, the rock in the ground in the foreground lower right, the pile of rock shards, and the little pile of white ash,, that's another story.

Here's the stack of photovoltaic panels, measuring ~3x1 ft and an inch thick. I've been told i will be physically assaulted if i put them up, and using these is a moral deficency related to stealing from the power company.

Because i had to put up a dog fence, even though i have no dog, the parcel delivery people toss packages over the gate. Here's two broken panels out of ten delivered. I cannot make any money selling these if i have 20% breakage on delivery.

This is the engine i wanted to turn the 3 ton flywheel and the really big generator. This was to be a fairly large private thermal solar installation, home designed and built, with all electricity not used immeadiately to go towards heat (melted lead sounded good at the time) or cold (ice) storage, and then hydrogen generation for use in engines (generator or car or truck).


The really big generator is 1800rpm, 3phase, 75amps per 120v leg. It's totally enclosed. It's been sitting there since the neighbors moved in, over 10 years ago now, and i have no other use for it.