GROVER wrote:
| Thank you for posting such interesting pictures of your solar
| installation. It looks like an excellent piece of work and I'm sure
| your customer will be a beneficiary of future lower utility bills.
| Its one small step on the path to make our country less dependent on
| imported fossil fuel.
I'm fairly proud of this installation. Iowa farmers (like farmers
everywhere, I suspect) are very careful about any move away from what
they /know/ works. This customer installed a geothermal heating unit
in his ~3K sqft home and claims that his highest monthly heating cost
over the past two years was $29 (a year ago January) - and he was
courageous enough to be the "guinea pig" for a new panel design. It
knocked my socks off that he was willing to tell me that he was
well-satisfied within a half-hour of a March installation.
Solar heating isn't free (a friendly nod to JClarke here), but the
energy used /is/. I'm not much of an eco-freak, although it might seem
otherwise - but I'm all for anything that harmlessly and inexpensively
improves the quality of life for everyone.
It's not about "big steps" - it's all about small steps - and it's not
so much about where petroleum comes from as the fact that there's only
a finite supply of the stuff and the that supply is being consumed at
a globally accelerating rate. The geopolitics is a result of the
supply situation - not vice versa.
The performance of these two panels is the result of some 35 years of
small steps - small steps like using highly reflective aluminum ribbon
in the heat absorber and /using/ that reflectivity to trap energy,
like bending and spacing that ribbon to trap _all_ wavelengths from RF
to IR, and choosing ribbon dimensions that provide a "black body"
behavior aimed at imparting the absorbed energy to air molecules in an
optimized fashion...with all the limitations of a wood shop with
low-precision tooling and low-cost materials. (I never claimed I don't
enjoy challenges. g)
Lower utility bills? Not a chance! What I've done is provide the
warmth he wanted so he can walk in, turn on the lights, fire up the
dust collection system, and run his multi-horsepower tools when it
might otherwise be too uncomfortable to work in the shop. :-)
--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/solar.html