Mother's Super-simple Solar Tracker

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The hose on Steve's system does not run from the top of one tank to the top of the other one, though. It runs from the bottom section of one container to the bottom of the other. Which means? Which means that a slightly higher gas pressure in one of the vessels can push a lot of the liquid freon from that tank over into the other one. And, unlike a gas, that liquid freon is heavy. And when it shifts from the tank mounted on one side of the collector ... to the tank mounted on the other side ... it just naturally causes the pivoted collector to tip in the direction of the shifted weight.

This action is illustrated in Fig. 3 ... which also shows the function of the shade mounted on each of the freon tanks. As you can see, by put: ting together a couple of tanks of Freon 12, a connecting hose, and two small shades just the way that he's put them together ... Steve Baer has created a remarkably simple and low-cost solar tracker that wants to "lock onto" the sun and follow it all day long.

DENNIS BURKHOLDER IMPROVES THE BAER DESIGN

All well and good ... at least In theory. When MOTHER researcher Dennis Burkholder built one of the trackers, however, he soon found that Steve Baer's beautiful theory left a great deal to be desired in the real world. For one thing, a collector equipped with one of the tracking mechanisms tended either to follow the sun very sluggishly (if at all) ... or to become so hyperactive about the whole idea that it wanted to endlessly "hunt" back and forth across an area extending 10 to 20 degrees on either side of Ole Sol's actual position. And for another, the mere shifting of the freon's weight wasn't a very positive method of keeping the collector pointed at the sun: Even small vagrant breezes—let alone the real he-winds of a summer storm—were enough to slam the trackerequipped flat plate from one extreme of its travel to the other.

Clearly, as good as the basic idea was, Steve Baer's solar tracker could be improved. Which is just what Dennis did by [1] severing the hose that connects the two tanks of freon, [2] inserting a doubleacting hydraulic cylinder, [3] mounting the cylinder's case to the supporting base of the flat-plate collector, and [4] connecting the cylinder's piston to an eccentric arm fastened to the pivoted collector itself. He also moved the shades from the outside edges of the two tanks to their insides (originally just to make the whole assembly more compact but, as you'll see, this change added a certain very important flexibility to MOTHER's tracking collector).

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