I've become an expert at recognizing the mistakes I've already made.
FYI, there are regulars here who know much more than I about the
science and engineering of these things. I'm just a hacker who's
willing to make one mistake after another until I finally manage to
make things come out right. The people who want to learn deserve
better than an old geezer enumerating the shortcomings of their
design - they need someone who can explain /why/ in terms they can
understand, and I'm sorry to say that someone isn't me.

I bet you'd be surprised.
I bet if you posted one link to your website you'd have an avid
audience in no time. though makezine.com is probably more to the point
than gizmodo.




Building a really good solar heating panel requires knowledge from a
number of disciplines in which I've had no little or no training:
physics, heat transfer, materials, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics,
architecture, etc. ad nausea. The field positively _begs_ for
multidiscipline collaboration.


all them highfalutin' science thingies are meaningless without some
nuts and bolts shop practice to hold them all together.


Most of the people building this stuff think that temperature and heat
are synonyms, that hotter is always better. They choke when told that
_cooler_ is better, and that there's more than twice as much solar
radiation that can't be seen as can be. Some get downright angry when
you tell 'em that /painting/ a collector black is begging the
question, and that what's really needed is to design the collector to
/be/ black (no matter what the colors of its components are!)

see? you said all of that real stuff in plain 'ol english.....