I've always wondered why the solar panel makers don't put water tubing on the
back side of the panels. Boost the efficiency, and get hot water for the house
or pool at the same time. Seems like a no-brainer. {shrug}
Unfortunately for me, I have large trees shading the house (big enough that I'm
hoping I'm coming out ahead with lower air conditioning bills), and a roof
angle exposure that is not solar-friendly even if they weren't there. So I was
thinking, if I had space for just a few panels, perhaps I could go low-tech
with a system built from a scrap UPS. After all, I've got an APRS station -
PC, TNC, radio, and internet connection - using power constantly, and I often
find perfectly good UPSs being tossed out (i.e. free) because the battery is
shot and not worth replacing.
Put the solar cells in place of the UPS' battery, and modify the power failure
detect circuitry to work backwards - give preference to the battery/solar side,
only switching to the line side if there is insufficient "battery" power. This
will give me free 120 vac whenever the sun shines. At night, it would
power-fail back over to the line, and only then would the power company's meter
start to spin. I'd probably put a regular UPS down stream from the hacked-up
one, in case the failover/back from line to solar wasn't real clean.
The biggest problem I see is that most of the solar panels available these days
are in the 50-60 volt range, which means that you'd need to do a conversion
down to battery voltage first. (Maybe put two panels in series and run them
into a regular 12v DC power supply?)
Now, I just need to find a source of free-to-cheap solar panels. I almost
bought a set at a local Ham swap ($10 ea) that had cracked surface glass but
were otherwise functional, but I didn't think they'd survive the trip home in
my car (no place big enough to lay them flat). (I'd need to weatherproof them
too....)
Anyway, just a thought...
Greg KO6TH
> Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 18:46:28 -0700
> From: ptr...@yahoo.com
> To: bruni...@usna.edu; amsat-bb@amsat.org; wb3...@cox.net
> Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: Solar Power (I was wrong)
>
>
> One of my friends installed a water spray system to cool the panels since
> they lose efficiency fast as the temperature goes up. Also, it doesn't
> take much dust or bird poop to cut the efficiency. So if you install a
> system, be prepared to get on the roof every month or so to clean the
> panels.
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Pete
>
> WA6WOA
>
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