Backyard Solar Dish Melts Steel
The dish is based partly on components invented and patented by backyard inventor Doug Wood. As he says: “They really have simplified this and made it user-friendly, so anybody can build it.”
He says that the smaller size is key. Dishes are affected by the same weight dynamics that affect living organisms. Much as large living organisms would need an inordinate amount of weight support and thus are not favored, larger dish designs fall short in that they require an exponentially greater amount of infrastructure.
They have remade Woods’ design so that it is easily mass producible. They plan on pumping out thousands of these dishes in years to come.
Not only is this made of cheap and abundant materials, but you could just unpack it and clip together the individual mirrors yourself as they are doing here. It is virtually a DIY project, so it eliminates the installation cost. Getting guys on your roof to install it can be up to half the cost of solar pv.
And because it only needs to be one relatively small unit for home power needs (commercial units can be as much as 20 feet high) it doesn’t take much aluminum to hold the thing up.
So it is cheap and light. They could UPS it to you in a flat box. Payback could be just a few couple years.
This lightweight, inexpensive single unit could provide solar thermal hot water to remote regions. Or right in your backyard.
They’ve taken an unusual approach made to making exceedingly cheap solar hot water, by just using simple parts that are readily available, like the clips that you use to put it together.
What an exciting start up! But hot water is only half its promise. Next we need the backyard turbine to turn that steam into electricity. Any MIT students out there?
Via Inside Tech
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August 30th, 2009 at 6:05 am
Zenith Solar has a similar dish and they use it as a PV/T collector with type III-V solar cells that have a low temperature coeficient. I’ve suggested that they run the low temperature themal output frin multiple dishes through an Organic Rankine Cycle generator to produce another 10-20% electricity before using the heat for space, water, process or digester heat. Others such as HelioDynamics, Menova Engineering, Priono AB, Arontis Solar Solutions also have concentrating PV/T systems.
August 30th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
I am iterested in your backyard solar dish, please contact me at fcarrera@comcast.net
August 30th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Hope you’re keeping track; MIT team: there’s a first order!
@Tom, but these companies only serve municipalities, utilities, islands, governments, etc — not individual home owners.
Is it hard to add an electricity-producing turbine to this type of solar thermal at the backyard level?
September 1st, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I’m wondering if anyone has tried this with one of those old school satellite dishes from the 80’s, coupled with a sterling engine.
I know that the Ford Motor Company has been doing R&D on similar projects to this for a very long time. They have the manufacturing capacity to make these abundant and economical.
September 12th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
High-intensity photovoltaic cells, like Spectrolab’s type III-V cells, make better power than do small heat engines. RawSolar is still looking for startup funding, has none.
September 16th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
One of those old fiberglass dishes would probably work great and you could even electro plate it with chrome or some other extremely reflective material