Obviously it is going to cost more than $5 to be able to actually use this for something, but I had never thought of using the coil from the back of a refrigerator as the tubing inside a flat plate collector before. Don’t get me wrong, I find junk laying around all over the place and love to think up ways to use it, this is just one piece of junk I hadn’t considered for a flat plate solar hot water collector.

They claim pretty decent heating with their not so great setup, so with some small improvements it would probably work quite decently. To do any decent scale I would probably connect a few of the coils in a parallel arrangement with headers of a larger diameter than the coils themselves.

Well reading about all that got the wheels in my head rolling and I ended up at this post on PhysicsForum about using a car radiator as a heat exchanger in a solar water heater setup. This particular setup was for preheating biodiesel to cut down on electricity costs during production, but had some excellent points. Unfortunately they never followed up with any results.

So then I stumbled over to this site about a Solar Water Heater made from a car radiator. This is also in a flat plate setup.  But of course they want you to spend money on some book rather than sharing information about it.

Well being put off by being asked to pay for access to information, I dug around some more and found this crazy long usenet forum post with lots of good info about solar water heaters, mostly related to using a car radiator as a solar collector.

From there I ended up at the Iowa Renewable Energy Association’s website where I found this little blurb about using a car radiator and a fan in a solar heating system:

“Storage of solar energy in water has been a proven method over many years. This water can be used as DHW, but also can be used to heat some or all of your house, garage, or workshop. To install enough solar panels and storage to heat an entire older home would be expensive, so most people try to do just some space heat. If your house is modern and very energy efficient, then solar could do a large part of your heating. An easy method is to install “kickspace heaters,” which can be as simple as a car radiator and a fan to distribute the heat from the water storage to one or two rooms.”

This info comes from their page on Solar Thermal but definitely check out the rest of the site as they have loads of good information.

Using recycled parts is great, especially in something like a solar water heater, and so stuff like this really makes me think. If anyone can think of any other relatively common objects/materials that can be repurposed for a solar heater (yeah we’ve all heard about the soda can heaters, and recycled pipe and fittings are awesome but hopefully most folks would think of that), leave a comment here on this post.

That’s all for now, just wanted to ramble about my thought process and the various places and things the internet can lead you to see and read about in a short period of time.

These links have been added to the Electricity page of SolarDIY as well.

“How to Install an RV Solar Panel“  - Might be a little too step-by-step for some, but has some good points that will make you think about your install beforehand. One thing that I do not like is that they assume the panels will be fix mounted, and a few people have expressed interest in the ability to move around one or two panels to get optimum sun on the panels when in an area with tree cover, without having to move the RV.

RV Boondocking has a set of articles detailing the installation of their 780 watt roof mount setup as well as information on an RV solar tax credit, and their battery bank system.

RV Solar - article on RV Solar Electric Power. I like the way this one was written, and it has some excellent points.

Holy Solar has two articles about the Unisolar 64w thinfilm panel they installed. one and two

12voltsolarpanels.net has a good article about RV Solar Chargers as well

Thanks for stopping by, and if you have any questions about RV/camper solar setups or the links, feel free to leave a comment on this post. I will add more as time progresses, and will also try to free up more time to add content to the site.

Here is a link to a little information about Lake Flower Apartments, although there doesn’t seem to be much out there on the internet about the place.

What is very cool about the building, is that they installed a 48 collector solar domestic hot water system in March of 1987. Why they did this is anyone’s guess, but it was certainly a great idea.

The history of the system is a little fuzzy but essentially it was used to an unknown capacity from 1987 (when installed) until sometime in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. In 2006 the system was drained and refilled, and some maintenance was performed by another contracting company. This included replacing some insulation as well as rerouting some piping and installing a propane fired on demand water heater as a backup to the solar system.

The solar array on the roof preheats cold water before being sent to the tankless propane fired water heater which will heat it up the rest of the way if needed. From here it goes to a series of three 100gallon storage tanks and then is distributed amongst the apartments in the building as needed.

The building houses 78 residents and with staff, about 90 people total. Between the solar hot water system and the propane tankless water heater, 100% of hot water demands are met.

The solar hot water collector array consists of 48 collectors in groups of 3-7 collectors each. Each group of collectors is connected in series, and the separate groups are then connected in parallel.

I was lucky enough to get a tour of the building and the setup by the maintenance guys, which was coordinated through one of my college professors.

Here are some pictures of the setup for your viewing pleasure.

Click on the thumbnails to make them larger.

First is a picture of the building itself from the gas station across the lake. You can see the collectors on the roof, and they are really not that unattractive or intrusive.

The collectors are mounted on the roof in what seems to be the best setup for space maximization

The mounts are rather straight forward, and the condensation you see here in the panels is normal.

The panels were mounted on trusses that went the span of the roof and attached on the ends

I believe these are 4′x8′ panels but did not actually measure them

Collectors in each group are connected together like so:

There are vents in each collector to let moisture from condensation out as they heat up:

And each foot for the mounting has rubber underneath. This is to keep the two dissimilar metals (steel and aluminum) from causing corrosion.

Air vents on each group of collector were closed. The maintenance people said they were advised to do this for some reason or another, and it hadn’t caused any problems yet.

The view was simply amazing.

As suggested by many, the pipes connecting collectors are insulated, and the insulation is covered in an aluminum sheathing to prevent UV degradation

Most groups of collectors had a thermometer installed in the outlet. This one was reading 90 degrees fahrenheit.

As you can see though this was a rather complicated setup. Much more so than most of us will ever have to endure when setting this up on a residence.

Here is a picture of the SRCC rating label on the collectors. Good stuff, I had no idea SRCC ratings were around in the late ’80s. If you want more information on SRCC ratings, check out solar-rating.org

Some of the insulation was degrading. This is an insulated Tee fitting with some kind of plastic around the insulation

Some of the insulation in the panels was degrading too. There was also some corrosion. I still don’t think this is bad for 21 years of service

Here is the only “shady” part of the install (no pun intended). This is an old barrel they put up here to collect any glycol in case of a pressure related blow out.

Here is the Resol differential controller and the Rinnai tankless propane water heater controller (the brains of the operation)

And a large storage tank

And here is the Rinnai tankless propane water heater

A close up of the Rinnai connections:

If you have any questions about the system, feel free to leave a comment here and I will get back to you. We will be doing some data logging to actually figure out how effective this system is.

I also have some diagrams of the system I will scan and upload in a few days.

The original post can be found here: DIY Solar Panel Mount

This is a mount that I removed from a Dish Network satellite dish.

The elevation and skew are marked on the mount in degrees, making it easy to mount your panel at the correct angle. Here is a link to some great info about the Optimum Orientation of Solar Panels

Here is the mount, with the markings for skew visible:

The solar panel will mount to the part of the satellite dish mount with the skew markings on it. I used two bolts, one on each side.

The elevation markings can be seen here. With the mount oriented as it is in the picture, the solar panel would be face down on the table.

Looking down at the mount, you will see this:

The circular part slips over a piece of pipe which can be mounted to your house or set in the ground. Unfortunately I do not have measurements on the mount with me, but will update with them later.

Here is the part where the solar panel mounts:

The whole thing will then rotate about the pipe collar by loosening the elevation bolt.

Another view here:

The side opposite the elevation markings:

This is how the mount would look when mounted on a vertical pipe.
Here you can see that the elevation of the mount is currently set to an angle of slightly less than 40 degrees. (this is after removing a satellite dish from the mount.. actual angle will depend on your location)

Hopefully this information is helpful to anyone looking to use one of these satellite dish mounts to hold solar panels.

FOR her 10th birthday, Nicole Kuepper received an inspirational present from her parents - her first solar-energy kit.

It sparked a fascination with solar technology that last night led to Ms Kuepper, 23, winning two Australian Museum Eureka Prizes for her scientific research.

She has developed a simple, cheap way of producing solar cells in a pizza oven that could eventually bring power and light to the 2 billion people in the world who lack electricity.

Ms Kuepper is a PhD student and lecturer in the school of photovoltaic and renewable energy engineering at the University of NSW.

“I love working with passionate people who want to help address climate change and poverty by thinking and experimenting outside the square,” she said.

Today’s photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight to electricity are expensive and need sophisticated, “clean” manufacturing plants.

Ms Kuepper realised a new approach would be needed if affordable cells were to be made on site in poorer countries: “What started off as a brainstorming session has resulted in the iJET cell concept that uses low-cost and low-temperature processes, such as ink-jet printing and pizza ovens, to manufacture solar cells.”

While it could take five years to commercialise the patented technology, providing renewable energy to homes in some of the least developed countries would enable people to “read at night, keep informed about the world through radio and television and refrigerate life-saving vaccines”. And it would also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Ms Kuepper said that the solar cells should be of high enough quality to be used anywhere in the world, including Australia.

An advocate of green technology, she gives talks about solar energy to the public, has held miniature solar car races to teach indigenous children about renewable energy, and was a delegate at the 2020 Youth Summit in Canberra in April.

Ms Kuepper was awarded the British Council Eureka Prize for Young Leaders in Environmental Issues and Climate Change and a $10,000 study tour to Britain.

She also won the People’s Choice Award, in which almost 16,000 members of the public voted for their favourite scientist out of six finalists. Twenty Eureka Prizes worth $200,000 were awarded last night at a ceremony at Royal Randwick Racecourse.

Other winners included Professor Robert Clark, of the University of NSW, for quantum computer research, Professor Stephen Simpson of the University of Sydney, for studies of locusts and human obesity, and Professor Matthew England and his University of NSW team for discoveries linking ocean temperature and rainfall.

I can’t wait to see what they have figured out. This could be a major break through.

Necessity is the mother of invention, I suppose..

And with invention, comes innovation. Once this process has been released to the public, others will be able to expand on it to either make it more efficient, or to spur them to create other cheap efficient means of manufacturing solar cells.

Three cheers and six beers for Ms. Nicole Kuepper

Material May Help Autos Turn Heat into Electricity

by Pam Frost Gorder, OSU

Ohio, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]

Researchers have invented a new material that could potentially make cars more efficient, by converting heat wasted through engine exhaust into electricity. The researchers say that the material has twice the efficiency of anything currently on the market.

“We’d been working for 10 years to engineer this kind of behavior using different kinds of nanostructured materials, but with limited success. Then I saw this paper, and I knew we could do the same thing we’d been trying to do with nanostructures, but with this bulk semiconductor instead.”

– Joseph Heremans, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology, Ohio State University.

The same technology could work in power generators and heat pumps, said project leader Joseph Heremans, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology at Ohio State University.

The materials are known as thermoelectric materials, and they rate the materials’ efficiency based on how much heat they can convert into electricity at a given temperature.

Previously, the most efficient material used commercially in thermoelectric power generators was an alloy called sodium-doped lead telluride, which had a rating of 0.71. The new material, thallium-doped lead telluride, has a rating of 1.5 — more than twice that of the previous leader.

What’s more important to Heremans is that the new material is most effective between 450 and 950° Fahrenheit — a typical temperature range for power systems such as automobile engines.

Some experts argue that only about 25 percent of the energy produced by a typical gasoline engine is used to move a car or power its accessories, and nearly 60 percent is lost through waste heat — much of which escapes in engine exhaust. A thermoelectric (TE) device can capture some of that waste heat, Heremans said. It would also make a practical addition to an automobile, because it has no moving parts to wear out or break down.

“The material does all the work. It produces electrical power just like conventional heat engines — steam engines, gas or diesel engines — that are coupled to electrical generators, but it uses electrons as the working fluids instead of water or gases, and makes electricity directly.”

“Thermoelectrics are also very small,” he added. “I like to say that TE converters compare to other heat engines like the transistor compares to the vacuum tube.”

The engineers took a unique strategy to design this new material.

To maximize the amount of electricity produced by a TE material, engineers would normally try to limit the amount of heat that can pass through it without being captured and converted to electricity. So the typical strategy for making a good thermoelectric material is to lower its thermal conductivity.

In Heremans’ lab, he used to work to lower the thermal conductivity by building nanometer-sized structures such as nanowires into materials. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.

Those nanostructured materials are not very stable, are very difficult to make in large quantities and are difficult to connect with conventional electronic circuits and external heat sources.

For this new material, he and his colleagues took a different strategy: they left out the fancy nanostructures, and instead focused on how to convert the maximum amount of heat that was trapped in the material naturally. To do this, they took advantage of some new ideas in quantum mechanics.

Heremans pointed to a 2006 paper published by other researchers in the journal Physical Review Letters, which suggested that elements such as thallium and tellurium could interact on a quantum-mechanical level to create a resonance between the thallium electrons and those in the host lead telluride thermoelectric material, depending on the bonds between the atoms.

“It comes down to a peculiar behavior of an electron in a thallium atom when it has tellurium neighbors,” he said. “We’d been working for 10 years to engineer this kind of behavior using different kinds of nanostructured materials, but with limited success. Then I saw this paper, and I knew we could do the same thing we’d been trying to do with nanostructures, but with this bulk semiconductor instead.”

Heremans designed the new material with Vladimir Jovovic, who did this work for his doctoral thesis in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Ohio State. Researchers at Osaka University — Ken Kurosaki, Anek Charoenphakdee, and Shinsuke Yamanaka — created samples of the material for testing. Then researchers at the California Institute of Technology — G. Jeffrey Snyder, Eric S. Toberer, and Ali Saramat — tested the material at high temperatures. Heremans and Jovovic tested it at low temperatures and provided experimental proof that the physical mechanism they postulated was indeed at work.

The team found that near 450° Fahrenheit, the material converted heat to electricity with an efficiency rating of about 0.75 — close to that of sodium-doped telluride. But as the temperature rose, so did the efficiency of the new material. It peaked at 950° Fahrenheit, with a rating of 1.5.

Heremans’ team is continuing to work on this patent-pending technology.

“We hope to go much further. I think it should be quite possible to apply other lessons learned from thermoelectric nanotechnology to boost the rating by another factor of two — that’s what we’re shooting for now,” he said.

This research was funded by the BSST Corporation; the State of Ohio Department of Development’s Center for Photovoltaic Innovation and Commercialization at Ohio State University; the Beckman Institute; the Swedish Bengt Lundqvist Minne Foundation; and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Pam Frost Gorder is an assistant director of research communications at Ohio State University.

Couple this with some heat from the sun, a wood stove, a propane stove, a clothes dryer, or just about anything else that loses a lot of efficiency through heat output, and things would become a lot more interesting. I’m kind of miffed about the working temperature though, wish it was a bit lower.

http://www.solarnetwork.net/

“solarNetwork.net is an open-source project and experiment to test a method of distributed energy production. It relies on continuous participation and cooperation of an online community.

We hope this community develops to both 1) build out the infrastructure of the network, and 2) provide the real-world know-how and data to support a new type of energy company.”

“An Experiment

This is something I am very excited for, and hopefully the rest of you are as well. Especially the fact that it can be adapted to existing solar cells without having to just switch technologies. What a very appealing and uplifting ‘invention.’

Thanks MIT!

MIT opens new ‘window’ on solar energy
Cost effective devices expected on market soon

Elizabeth A. Thomson, News Office
July 10, 2008

Imagine windows that not only provide a clear view and illuminate rooms, but also use sunlight to efficiently help power the building they are part of. MIT engineers report a new approach to harnessing the sun’s energy that could allow just that.

The work, to be reported in the July 11 issue of Science, involves the creation of a novel “solar concentrator.” “Light is collected over a large area [like a window] and gathered, or concentrated, at the edges,” explains Marc A. Baldo, leader of the work and the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering.

As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells (the semiconductor devices that transform sunlight into electricity), the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel. In addition, the focused light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell “by a factor of over 40,” Baldo says.

Because the system is simple to manufacture, the team believes that it could be implemented within three years–even added onto existing solar-panel systems to increase their efficiency by 50 percent for minimal additional cost. That, in turn, would substantially reduce the cost of solar electricity.

In addition to Baldo, the researchers involved are Michael Currie, Jon Mapel, and Timothy Heidel, all graduate students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Shalom Goffri, a postdoctoral associate in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

“Professor Baldo’s project utilizes innovative design to achieve superior solar conversion without optical tracking,” says Dr. Aravinda Kini, program manager in the Office of Basic Energy Sciences in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, a sponsor of the work. “This accomplishment demonstrates the critical importance of innovative basic research in bringing about revolutionary advances in solar energy utilization in a cost-effective manner.”

Solar concentrators in use today “track the sun to generate high optical intensities, often by using large mobile mirrors that are expensive to deploy and maintain,” Baldo and colleagues write in Science. Further, “solar cells at the focal point of the mirrors must be cooled, and the entire assembly wastes space around the perimeter to avoid shadowing neighboring concentrators.”

The MIT solar concentrator involves a mixture of two or more dyes that is essentially painted onto a pane of glass or plastic. The dyes work together to absorb light across a range of wavelengths, which is then re-emitted at a different wavelength and transported across the pane to waiting solar cells at the edges.

In the 1970s, similar solar concentrators were developed by impregnating dyes in plastic. But the idea was abandoned because, among other things, not enough of the collected light could reach the edges of the concentrator. Much of it was lost en route.

The MIT engineers, experts in optical techniques developed for lasers and organic light-emitting diodes, realized that perhaps those same advances could be applied to solar concentrators. The result? A mixture of dyes in specific ratios, applied only to the surface of the glass, that allows some level of control over light absorption and emission. “We made it so the light can travel a much longer distance,” Mapel says. “We were able to substantially reduce light transport losses, resulting in a tenfold increase in the amount of power converted by the solar cells.”

This work was also supported by the National Science Foundation. Baldo is also affiliated with MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

Mapel, Currie and Goffri are starting a company, Covalent Solar, to develop and commercialize the new technology. Earlier this year Covalent Solar won two prizes in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The company placed first in the Energy category ($20,000) and won the Audience Judging Award ($10,000), voted on by all who attended the awards.

Fact Sheet: MIT’s solar concentrators

Elizabeth A. Thomson, News Office
July 10, 2008

News release: “MIT opens new ‘window’ on solar energy”

A Q&A by the MIT research team led by Marc A. Baldo, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, on solar concentrators.

What did we do? We demonstrated a large improvement in the performance of low-cost solar concentrators. Our new devices increase the power obtained from solar cells by a factor of over 40 without needing to track the sun. Our results are at least a factor of four better than previous results.¹

Why is this important? The sun is an inexhaustible source of clean power. The major impediment to widely deployed solar-power systems has been cost. Unsubsidized solar electricity is over three times as expensive as the average grid prices for electricity derived from conventional energy sources, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Dramatic cost reductions are needed. Clean, renewable electricity at affordable prices would be an attractive alternative to conventional electricity and the related fossil-fuel dependence, greenhouse-gas emissions and peak-time grid constraints.

What is a solar cell? Solar cells transform sunlight into electricity by using a semiconductor device, typically made of silicon. Solar cells are packaged into solar panels, which can be installed on rooftops or large fields. The solar cells are typically some of the most expensive parts of an installed solar panel.

What is a solar concentrator? Solar concentrators collect light over large areas and focus it onto smaller areas of solar cells. This increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell. Solar concentrators can reduce the cost of solar power since more electricity is obtained per solar cell, and fewer solar cells are needed.

What is wrong with existing solar concentrators? Conventional solar concentrators track the sun to generate high optical intensities, often by using large mobile mirrors that are expensive to deploy and maintain. Solar cells at the focal point of the mirrors must be cooled, and the entire assembly wastes space around the perimeter to avoid shadowing neighboring concentrators.

What is our technology? Our devices are based on a concept from the 1970’s that was largely abandoned: the luminescent solar concentrator (LSC). Our version of this device consists of a piece of transparent glass or plastic plate with a thin film of dye molecules deposited on the face and inorganic solar cells attached to the edges. Light is absorbed by the dye coating and reemitted into the glass or plastic for collection by the solar cells.

Why did LSCs fail in the 1970’s? Two reasons: the collected light was absorbed before it reached the edges of the glass or plastic plates, and the dyes were unstable.

What precisely did you do to reduce loss of the collected light? We borrowed some ideas from lasers, introducing what is known in lasers as a four-level system. In practice, we added a small concentration of an extra dye that collected all the absorbed light from its surrounding dye molecules. We also introduced a new class of dye molecules, known as molecular phosphors, that are extremely transparent to their own light emission.

What about stability? We tested one of our devices and found that it was stable (to 92 percent of initial performance) for three months. This isn’t good enough yet for products but we are confident that the technology developed for organic light emitting devices (OLEDs) in televisions will be portable to this application.

When will these concentrators make it into production? The technology is being further developed for commercialization by Covalent Solar, a company being spun out of MIT by three of its inventors: Michael Currie, Jon Mapel, and Shalom Goffri. The team believes that it could be implemented within three years.

References

1. Currie, M. J., Mapel, J. K., Heidel, T. D., Goffri, S. & Baldo, M. A. High-efficiency Organic Solar Concentrators for Photovoltaics. Science. In Press.

“Marburg, a German college town of about 80,000, has become the first in the country to make solar heating obligatory for newly built or renovated buildings. The green bill has some residents and politicians up in arms

 The law, passed on Friday, June 20 by a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, has sparked a storm of criticism in the town of Marburg in the state of Hesse in western Germany.
“We are facing a green dictatorship but nobody dares to say anything,” said opposition politician Hermann Uchtmann.

Marburg’s Green Mayor Franz Kahle pointed out that installing the solar panels would cost around 5,000 euros ($7,800), but the price would be offset by energy savings over 15 years. The German news weekly Der Spiegel, however, pointed out that the mayor is a tenant, not a home owner, and would personally enjoy the energy savings but not incur the cost of the panels himself.

But regardless of who picks up the tab, some feel that the first step has to be made, even if it’s uncomfortable. Klaus Vajen, a solar energy expert at the University of Kassel said that “sometimes one has to twist consumers’ arm for their own good.”

Fines await those who don’t comply

Slated to take effect on Oct. 1, the bill stipulates that the solar panels have to measure one square meter (10 square feet) for every 20 square meters of the building’s surface area. Those who don’t comply with the new law will face fines starting at 1,000 euros — dramatically reduced from the initially proposed 15,000 euros.

Exceptions are to be made, however, for buildings that are principally heated from a district heating network, a combined heat and power generator, or a wood pellet oven

Though Marburg’s measures are the country’s most ambitious so far, it is not the first town to take legal steps toward saving energy and slashing carbon dioxide emissions. The right-wing government in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg already requires new houses to meet 20 percent of their heating needs with renewable energy sources

In addition, the federal German cabinet recently approved a comprehensive climate plan aimed at reducing CO2 emissions by nearly 40 percent by the year 2020. The package includes higher standards for energy efficiency in new and renovated buildings as of 2009

From http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_2344648,00.html

Solar panels become mandatory
23/06/2008 07:26  - (SA)  

“Berlin - The central German college town of Marburg has become the first in the nation to require newly-built or renovated buildings to have solar panels installed.

The city says the new law was approved by the city council on Friday and will take effect on October 1.

The law requires any newly constructed buildings, as well as existing buildings that are expanded or altered, to include solar panels as part of the heating system.

The city says those violating the law will face fines starting at $1 500. The city is home to Marburg University and has 79 000 inhabitants.

The German government aims to slash the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions 40% from 1990 levels by 2020. “

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/solarpower.greenbuilding

German town forces homes to fix solar tiles
The Guardian
Monday June 23, 2008

Solar panels will soon grace the roofs of the quiet medieval town of Marburg under a controversial new law forcing owners of all new or renovated buildings in its limits to include solar panels, setting a national precedent.

A coalition of Social Democrats and Greens passed the ruling late on Friday to counter climate change and soaring energy prices. Anyone failing to comply will face a €1,000 (£790) fine.

The law stipulates that, from October, a 1 sq metre panel must be built for every 20 sq metres of surface area. It applies to new homes or existing buildings undergoing renovations to heating systems or roofs.

Conservatives said the law went too far: “This is an environmental dictatorship,” said the local Christian Democratic Union leader, Hermann Uchtmann. A local energy trade association said it was investigating legal action to reverse the ruling.

A few German towns have beefed up regulations to encourage energy conservation in new buildings. But Marburg, which is home to 80,000 people, has gone a step further by including the owners of older houses in the new legislation.

Installing the panels could cost homeowners up to €5,000, a figure largely offset by energy savings over 15 years, the town’s Green mayor, Franz Kahle, said.

Environmentalists predicted Marburg would become a trendsetter: “This town is a pioneer for renewable energy in Germany,” said Andree Böhling, an energy expert at Greenpeace in Hamburg.

Solar panels have been adopted at a comparatively rapid pace in Germany, despite its cloudy climes. This is largely because of a law that guarantees local power firms pay an above-market rate for 20 years for renewable energy fed into the national grid.

 

 

All I really have to say about this is: “What’s up, Germany?”

I have read of a few smaller places that have done this, one of which I believe was in Africa, but this German town is really stepping up to the plate on this one. Hopefully others will follow the trend.

We found this real nice 45 watt kit on ebay for a good price. Much cheaper than buying three of the 15w panels I have (at $80 each). Plus it comes with two 12v compact fluorescents, a charge controller, and a light duty stand to set the panels up with if you choose.

For this purpose the stand will likely be scrapped and we will set up something more practical for setting up and taking down the kit while camping.

Here is the 45 watt setup with just the charge controller and a 12v compact fluoro:

Just to make sure it worked I hooked up a deep cycle battery that needed to be charged:

I was impressed with the charge controller, as it is much more useful than the standard $10 ebay junk. It has DC outputs for 3v, 5v, 9v, and 12v, as well as a 5v USB connector for charging your camera or mp3 player or whatever technogarbage you feel like hooking up.

The 12v compact fluoros use a 1/4″ headphone/microphone jack to hook up to the charge controller:

and here is the fancy connector for using the various DC outputs

The panels themselves seem to be of good quality, and quite durable. They have an aluminum frame rather than the plastic frame that my 15w panel has.

The wiring is all pretty straightforward as well. Everything has connectors on it already so really all there is to do is hook it up. It is all labeled and everything for you.

Here are some pics I took just for fun:

More later when it has been set up and used for more than a half hour.