Model Solar Collectors - Our First Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLhG6EqiVfw

My brother, Bob, narrated this video that we made to introduce our work.

Solar Collector Model Showing Target Image in Fresnel Lens

Plants “banked” solar energy as fossil fuels long ago.  It’s been easier to rob these underground vaults than harvest sunlight ourselves. But why not make solar more exciting than dirty energy?  A solar collector that runs itself, reports how much energy it harvests, displays issues that occur,  and even documents free energy going to waste? Why not have them make power, cook, dry laundry, dehumidify basements, and dehydrate food, warm hot tubs, saunas or swimming pools? One day even make liquid fuel for vehicles or energy in bad weather during long winter nights.

Though freely available everywhere, it takes good equipment to power and condition homes and even energize vehicles. Harvesting intercepts an area of sunlight so it does a variety of tasks on its way to warming the outdoors that would happen without a solar collector. They don’t change climate. We use inexpensive glass mirrors to intensify sunlight 500 to 1,000 times and direct it into a tiny receiver that captures it. Because the parts that do the work are small, this minimizes cost. The receiver of a backyard solar collector is the size of a waste paper basket. By following the sun from rise to set, these perform well all day capturing 40% more energy than a stationary collector.

We hope that others will become interested in learning about this technology and help us develop controllers that make them easy to use. Once these little models work well, it’s straightforward to progress to larger equipment since the same controllers that operate models can just as easily run much larger solar collectors.