Build a Solar Powered (Interior) Kitchen

Build a Solar Powered Interior Kitchen

Solare Brücke is an organisation that promotes the distribution of solar thermal technology, both in developing countries and in the first world. They offer detailed construction manuals, which can all be downloaded for free.

One example is the Scheffler-Reflector (see the picture on the right): “To make cooking simple and comfortable the cooking-place should not have to be moved, even better: it should be inside the house and the concentrating reflector outside in the sun. The best solution was a eccentric, flexible parabolic reflector which rotates around an axis parallel to earth-axis, synchronous with the sun. Additionally the reflector is adjusted to the seasons by flexing it in a simple way.”

The Scheffler-Reflector can be built in steel or aluminium, and there are additional manuals available for the mechanical tracking system, a stove and a baking oven. There are also plans for a solar tunnel dryer and a smaller solar cooker.  Find all manuals at Solare Brücke. Thanks to Eric Blair. Related: The bright future of solar powered factories.

August 10, 2011 by kris de decker Filed Under: Cooking stoves, DIY, Random, Solar

Window Orientation and Shading

window orientation and shading

“In sunny southern locations, protecting your windows from the sun is an important component of good window management. The first step is to know how the sun moves through the sky and to orient the building and place the windows in it so as to minimize direct solar admission through your windows.” Read more.

“Sustainable By Design provides a suite of shareware design tools to calculate the right dimensions and placing for your specific location, wherever you are.

  • SunAngle: our premier tool for solar angle calculations.
  • SunPosition: calculates a time series of basic solar angle data.
  • Sol Path: visualization of the path of the sun across the sky.
  • Window Overhang Design: visualization of the shade provided by a window overhang at a given time.
  • Window Overhang Annual Analysis: visualization of window overhang shading performance for an entire year.
  • Overhang Recommendations: suggested climate-specific dimensions for south-facing window overhangs
  • Light penetration: visualization of the penetration of sunlight into a room
  • Louver Shading: visualization of louvered shading system performance for an entire year.
  • Vertical Fin Shading: visualization of a vertical fin shading system performance for an entire year
  • Window Heat Gain: calculation of monthly heat gain through windows.
  • Panel Shading: visualization of the shading of rows of flat panel collectors throughout the year.”

Interesting follow-up at Treehugger.

June 28, 2011 by kris de decker Filed Under: Air conditioning, Architecture, Cooling, DIY, Random, Shading, Solar, Windows

Solar Heating System with Water Battery

Solar Heating System with Water Battery

Dutch inventor Kees van der Geer sends us this paper and wants to know what we think of it. Comments are open.

“Heating with a sun collector costs nothing and contaminates nothing. In this article I propose a solar heating system consisting of a large solar collector, suitable for the heating of a house and a heat store, capable to bridge a week of cloudy weather. Both are made from simple materials.”

“Maybe a practical solution to make a heat store is to buy a inflatable swimming pool of 17m3 and construct an insulating box around it. ”

Large area solar heating system (pdf), Kees van der Geer, 2011. (Artículo en Español).

May 30, 2011 by kris de decker Filed Under: DIY, Heating appliances, Pools, Solar

Solar Powered Laser Cutter

Solar powered laser cutter “This project explores the potential of harnessing sunlight directly to produce objects. The Sun Cutter is a low-tech, low-energy version of a laser cutter. It uses pure sunlight, focused by a ball lens, to repeatedly cut programmed shapes in up to 0.4mm thick plywood as well as paper and card.”

The Sun Cutter.

More projects from the RCA Design products Department.

Related: The bright future of solar powered factories.

April 22, 2011 by kris de decker Filed Under: Solar

The Receding Horizons of Renewable Energy

Giant windmill 1 “Widespread installed renewable electricity capacity would be a very good resource to have available in an era of financial austerity at the peak of global oil production, but the mechanisms that have been chosen to achieve this are clearly problematic. They plug into, and depend on, a growth model that not longer functions. If we are going to work towards a future with greater reliance on renewable energy, there are a number of factors we must consider. These are not typically addressed in the simplistic subsidy programmes that are now running into trouble worldwide.

We have power systems built on a central station model, which assumes that we should build large power station distant from demand, on the grounds of economic efficiency, which favours large-scale installations. This really does not fit with the potential that renewable power offers. The central station model introduces a grid-dependence that renewable power should be able to avoid, revealing an often acute disparity between resource intensity, demand and grid capacity. Renewable power (used in the small-scale decentralized manner it is best suited for) should decrease grid dependence, but we employ it in such a way as to increase our vulnerability to socioeconomic complexity.

Giant windmill 2 Renewable energy is best used in situ, adjacent to demand. It is best used in conjunction with a storage component which would insulate consumers from supply disruption, but Feed-In Tariff (FIT) programmes typically prohibit this explicitly. Generators are expected to sell all their production to the grid and buy back their own demand. This leaves them every bit as vulnerable to supply disruption as anyone who does not have their own generation capacity. This turns renewable generation into a personal money generating machine with critical vulnerabilities. It is no longer about the energy, which should be the focus of any pubicly funded energy programme.

FIT programmes typically remunerate a wealthy few who install renewables in private applications for their own benefit, and who may well have done so in the absence of public subsidies. If renewables are to do anything at all to help run our societies in the future, we need to move from publicly-funded private applications towards public applications benefitting the collective. We do not have an established model for this at present, and we do not have time to waste. Maximizing renewable energy penetration takes a lot of time and a lot of money, both of which will be in short supply in the near future. The inevitable global austerity measures are not going to make this task any easier.”

Read more at The Automatic Earth. Pictures credit.

March 3, 2011 by kris de decker Filed Under: Solar, Wind turbines

Solar Box Cookers Only Work When the Sun is Shining – So What?

“By now, I suspect, some of my more skeptical readers will doubtless be jumping up and down, eager to point out that solar cookers aren’t viable everywhere, and only work when the sun’s shining. This is of course true, but it’s also beside the point. Nothing in the appropriate technology toolkit is suited to every context – that’s one of the implications of that word “appropriate,” after all – and nothing ever again in human history will provide our species with the kind of instant, context-free torrent of energy we now get from fossil fuels. Once those are gone, the entire approach to technology that’s built on the assumption of abundant, highly concentrated, highly portable energy supplies goes whistling down the wind, and the approaches – in the plural – that will replace it are going to be less convenient, less portable, and less capable of ignoring the rest of the cosmos than what we’re used to”. Read at the Archdruid Report + solar cooker plans.

January 11, 2011 by kris de decker Filed Under: Solar