Mother's Super-simple Solar Tracker

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

What a difference! As soon as Burkholder's modifications (Fig. 4) were cranked into the Baer design, MOTHER's tracking collector became a real dream machine. Set the unit out in the sun facing any direction (as long as its, axis is lined up north/south, of course) ... and within 10 to 12 minutes the movable portion of the rig will have rotated around and locked on to the sun. And it'll then stay locked on, with no hunting and no slamming ... faithfully gazing directly at Ole Sol all day long until he finally slips beneath the western horizon.

The collector then patiently watches that western horizon all through the night. Until the next morning when-thanks to the way Dennis has mounted its shades (so that the first rays of the sun fall on the uppermost cylinder of freon but not on the lower one) and its eccentric arm (so that as the high tank's freon boils, the collector is cranked around to make that side of the flat plate the low one)?the whole mechanism automatically turns to face the eastern horizon ... where it begins faithfully "watching" the sun move across the heavens again.

THE PRICE IS RIGHT

So there you have it: a supersimple, selfcontained solar tracking device that works just the way you want it to. And the price is right too!

Dennis—one of the world's more accomplished scroungers? picked up his double-acting hydraulic cylinder (which has a 1-1/4" bore and a five-inch stroke, but that's not at all critical) in a local junkyard for $2.00. Nine feet of type "M" hard copper tubing (for the freon tanks) set him back another $8.64. The four sweatweld end caps for the freon tanks cost $2.40, two 1/4" OD (outside diameter) flare by 1/4" IPS (inside pipe size) fittings 70¢, two 36-inch-long freon transfer hoses $13.00, two Schroder valves $2.00, three pounds of oiled Freon 12 $4.50, and one small spray can of flat black Rustoleum $1.25. Grand total: $34.49. Which as anyone experienced in the field can tell you, ain't bad for such a slick little solar tracker.

AMPLIFICATIONS AND DETAILS

MOTHER's solar tracking mechanism, essentially, can be called a small and very slow "vapor engine". As Dennis has designed it, the apparatus consists of two reservoirs (both painted black to increase their absorption of the sun's rays) of a low-boiling-point working fluid (Freon 12). The reservoirs are mounted one on each side of a pivoted solar collector, and the two tanks are connected by freon transfer hoses to a double-acting hydraulic cylinder (one tank to one input on the cylinder and the second reservoir to the other).

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print