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
Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Whether you have solar power or not, please complete our latest solar power survey.
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica's Comment Policy
