11–20 of 33 posts
This is called a clepsydra (water clock) tracker. A group at New Mexico Tech added water pumps to the technology to take out the need for manual refilling. What people tend to forget about trackers are they cost money and have to be massive to hold their angles in the wind. They are also less space-efficient users of land than fixed mounts, which is why standard PV's never tend to use them. It also costs less per wat…
Anything that moves will one day break. I hesitate to move away from the reliability of a static panel. Adjusting the drip rate in this scheme would also be constant battle of weather, temperature and season. You'd never get it perfect. Compared to a simple solar setup it may be more efficient, but compared to more complex, yet still static, combinations of a panels and a reflectors I don't think the improvements are…
Cool link! But would you add a motor and microprocessor to assist with the monthly angle adjustment, please? :p Seriously, this is a new idea to me. It looks like the chief weakness is it doesn't really help in the winter, which is exactly when you need the most efficiency.
When it's overcast, the best position is pointing straight up, eg fixed at the correct angle for that latitude.
To put it another way, a tracker optimises your panel in sunny conditions, which is not worth doing. That's when you have a surplus of charge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool link! But would you add a motor and microprocessor to assist with the monthly angle adjustment, please? :p Seriously, this is a new idea to me. It looks like the chief weakness is it doesn't really help in the winter, which is exactly when you need the most efficiency.
Yes, you must size your panels for the worst case, not the best case. When it's overcast, the best position is pointing straight up, eg fixed at the correct angle for that latitude. To put it another way, a tracker optimises your panel in sunny conditions, which is not worth doing. That's when you have a surplus of charge.
This is called a clepsydra (water clock) tracker. A group at New Mexico Tech added water pumps to the technology to take out the need for manual refilling. What people tend to forget about trackers are they cost money and have to be massive to hold their angles in the wind. They are also less space-efficient users of land than fixed mounts, which is why standard PV's never tend to use them. It also costs less per wat…
I think we we potentially getting there with energy storage as well for off grid installations. Rather than trickle charge a storage system that can supply short bursts of massive power (think running a welder off of solar), purchase more generating capacity and feed it directly into the inverters and use storage for the minimal case. Excess can be shunted into a opportunistic load.
Anything that moves will one day break. I hesitate to move away from the reliability of a static panel. Adjusting the drip rate in this scheme would also be constant battle of weather, temperature and season. You'd never get it perfect. Compared to a simple solar setup it may be more efficient, but compared to more complex, yet still static, combinations of a panels and a reflectors I don't think the improvements are…
Anything that moves will one day break. I hesitate to move away from the reliability of a static panel. Adjusting the drip rate in this scheme would also be constant battle of weather, temperature and season. You'd never get it perfect. Compared to a simple solar setup it may be more efficient, but compared to more complex, yet still static, combinations of a panels and a reflectors I don't think the improvements are…
But the efficiency difference is dramatic, especially for monocrystalline. I got full power in the middle of winter near sunet (4pm) by tilting the panel almost vertically.
Consider the effect of solar ray incidence on Earth: it's why the tropics are hot and the poles are cold. It's the difference between summer and winter.
A human has to refill the bottles.
A human has to refill the bottles.
Another mechanical approach that is relatively cheap and doesn't require refilling bottles is to use a closed system of a hydraulic cylinder and two exposed freon tanks, one facing east and one facing west: http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/solar-tracker-zmaz77ndzgo... These mechanical approaches are generally awesome because they hold up well in bad weather. If you wanted to go all out I don't see why you couldn't…
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It'd be interesting as well to have some sort of mechanism which, when the panel receives power, keeps it locked in place. When the panel has no power for a period of time (ie: after sunset) the mechanism disengages and the panel falls back to its default position pointing towards sunrise.
Anything that moves will one day break. I hesitate to move away from the reliability of a static panel. Adjusting the drip rate in this scheme would also be constant battle of weather, temperature and season. You'd never get it perfect. Compared to a simple solar setup it may be more efficient, but compared to more complex, yet still static, combinations of a panels and a reflectors I don't think the improvements are…
This system doesn't seem very expensive or difficult to repair. And in any case, the worst-case scenario is that the solar panel becomes static.
Anything that moves will one day break. I hesitate to move away from the reliability of a static panel. Adjusting the drip rate in this scheme would also be constant battle of weather, temperature and season. You'd never get it perfect. Compared to a simple solar setup it may be more efficient, but compared to more complex, yet still static, combinations of a panels and a reflectors I don't think the improvements are…