New consulting relationship with GreenTecAuto begins
What actually goes wrong with the batteries????
A look at todays Hybrid and EV battery packs
Battery packs exposed
Keeping Warm In New England
Plugging into the SUN
Making a small solar concentrator
Building MIMA and the plug in adapters
Converting a telephone truck to electric
DIY dual pulse Capacitor Discharge Spotwelder
Chevy Bolt EV joins the family
Getting in shape while making electricity
Retirement
Replacing gasoline with solar electric lawn equipment
What is Genesis One?
How to stop the aging process DIY
MIMA Install Day 2005 a Big Success!
Building a hybrid car grid charger
Tapping into the Wind
Expanding MIMA with the Distribution board ( users projects )

The sun is dropping 1KW/SQ meter

The sun is dropping 1KW/SQ meter
Solar thermostat

To put that into perspective, your microwave oven uses about 600-1kw when running.
I put the mirrors and built the stand for this old radar dish in the early 80's but never got the thing to do any useful energy gathering until this week.
Sue loves organically grown veggies, and has canned pickles, tomatoes, and beans for many years. When I see her heating the large canning pot to a boil and holding it there for nearly a full hour start to finish, It hurts me to think that the free veggies have sucked so many electrical watts to preserve them. I finally got a working canning system going.
The dish needed a tracking system, and a way to hold the pot so it was properly heated at any solar position.
The first run of the system showed me that I had way too much power.The cover had blown out on one of the jars, as the boiling was so intense, as to bring the tomatoes to the boiling point, and turn the internal water to steam. I needed a thermostat.
The first approach that came to mind was to move the container to a different point in the focus, but I did not want to have to play with the tracking system calibration and wanted to have the system self operating.
I thought of how oriental fans fold up and spread out, and built a rather crude and rude dual fan one for each side of the dish. The "Thermostat" is part open in photo.