Question about manual "tracking" of collectors

  From my limited messing around, it appears that one could simply rotate
the collectors every 3 hours or so and still get almost all (my guess is
about 90%) of the available power.
    Does anyone do this?

A poster recently suggested to me that one could use an old C- band
satelite mount for a tracking device and he sent me to a really neat
site that sells tracking electronics for just such a project.
    This site shows several installations, many of them in the 6 foot ny
6 foot collector size area and up to maybe 12 foot by 12 foot.

    A friend just delivered his old mount to me.   Looking at it's size
makes me realize the magnitude (and power consumption) of having several
kilowatts worth of solar pv panels tracking the sun.
   Maybe that's why many of the large collectors that I see on people's
roofs don't move at all?

    I am afraid that I would eat up all the energy I collect from my
little 3 foot square HF collector just to turn the tracking mechanism.

Pete Stanaitis
--------------------

  spaco wrote:

Maybe you don't see so many trackers because people don't like the
way they look and don't want the possibility of the moving parts
breaking down on them.

I don't think you need to worry about the power consumption of the
tracking motor. It only has to move the panels half a rotation,
once a day. It's not like it's going to be moving very fast or far.

Anthony

 I thought about it but with BIPV, the cost of a "whole house gimbal" was
a bit pricey.....

Sorry.... most people in the urban world have panels or BIPV attached to
their homes so this is not an option... .



Anthony Matonak wrote:

 On Tue, 15 Jan 2008 09:15:26 -0800, Anthony Matonak


I think it's more likely that the main reason is the same as for many
things solar - that the payoff is long term, and keeping up front
costs lowest tends to be paramount. I've also run across a few folks
who never considered trackers or even ground mounting. For whatever
reason they believed that roof mounting is just how it's done.


Yup. Besides, I thought the project in question was an experiment
designed to collect information, not necessarily energy. Extra data is
going to cost extra.  ;-)

Wayne

 
"spaco" wrote in message

My college does volunteer work each year where students go to remote,
poor or disaster-affected regions and install a variety of systems to
benefit the local communities. Past projects have included PV-powered
lighting systems, water-pumping systems, water-purification systems
etc. Systems have been installed in (usually in remote areas of)
Bangladesh, Nepal, the Ache district of Indonsesia (a badly damaged
area after the boxing day tsunmami in 2006) and others. Naturally the
systems require some level of maintenance so a necessary part of our
work is to train locals to operate, maintain and trouble-shoot those
systems. The Nepalese locals whom we trained were keen to maximise
their array output, so we agreed to modify the static collector design
to allow hand-operated (one-axis) tracking. They visit the array 4 or
5 times per day (without fail!) to change the array angle. Output is
improved by about 20%.

Al