On Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 10:36:46AM +0100, Tim ODriscoll wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 20:12 -0400, Byron A Jeff wrote:
> > Any solar electrical supplement would help. I'm wondering about concentrated solar
> > onto a PV panel now.
> 
> If you took a 1m^2 PV panel and used 2x 1m^2 sun-tracking mirrors to
> focus the sun onto it, would that not be a cheaper way to double the
> output of the PV panel than just buying another PV panel?

Yes. The only problems are...

> I suppose the PV panel's aren't designed for that much sunlight,

Actually they will produce more power with more light. However,

> and  might not like the heat..

And this is big time. The efficiency of PV panels drop precipitously
when heated. They need to be cooled to be effective.

The more I think about it, I believe that every house needs to have
a couple of watertight cisterns built below them. There's so so much
you can do with huge tanks of water. For example with the PV panels
you could heat exchange with cool water during the day heating up a
tank, then at night when the ambient temp cools, you could radiate the
heat back into the night air cooling the water for the next day.
Of course you could get all of the hot water you ever wanted from such
a system and possible even get water based radiant heat in the winter.

But you need a huge tank of water to do it.

BAJ
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