Exactly. Any mechanism that moves the panel to follow the sun, must be sturdy enough to also withstand high winds, which is inevitably costlier than proof of concept ideas.
Better to add more panels.
A better way to ensure more power output is to have a set of panels with a small battery back to automate cooling of the panels and cleaning of the panels.
Interesting that the limiting factor is energy and wind. I wonder if you could devise a locking mechanism or something purely mechanical to solve it. Something closer to gears in a watch.
The intverter should be able to be configured with export limits. In a lot of jurisdictions that's mandatory anyway. Still better to over-specify so that in Winter you get the full amount while in Summer you just throw some away. Or take up a power-intensive hobby like Bitcoin mining in Summer.
Nope, at least for ours it limits on export produced (on a technical basis, not a planning permission one). It will deliberately downgrade the energy produced to ensure it doesn’t exceed export limits. You get used to optimising for sunshine for when you run power heavy equipment eg car charging
From the cursory look it seems like most states have limits like those. A lot of them are generous enough so you don't have to worry about it. But there are some states where covering an entire roof of a moderately sized building would put your over the limit.
Are panels cheaper than the servo motor & Arduino used in this tool? Not to mention that at mass produced scales chip costs are usually 1/5 the price of an Arduino. What if every panel used these tools, we could increase the amount of power we gather from solar.
Yes. A 400w watt panel is 250$. When you account for labor and cost of all. The parts for a moving panel that can withstand high wind speeds…Placing more fixed panels is cheaper.
I don't know what, where, or how many you want, but these are by the pallet (~30ea) and about $6500. You can get much cheaper with used ones.
You get conservatively ~3hr of effective peak power per day (so a 400W panel will give you 1200Wh). You also need a DC converter for these to charge a battery or go to AC. Of course you'll want to mount them at the correct angle with a good view of the sun.
You generally have to buy them by the pallet-load, FOB ("free on board") at the source, which means you arrange shipping. Home Depot marks up 4x for local purchase.
But used panels, at 80% rated output, are even cheaper, as low as $150. A few of those will fail, so you keep spares. They are often repairable in a few minutes if you are not afraid of a soldering iron, e.g. replace a diode or MOSFET.
Any roofer will put in mounting brackets, and almost any electrician is happy to put in the panel.
Decent vendors such as sunelec.con will easily quote you a price for a one pallet load LTL freight shipment of a pallet of, say, 22 panels. Not like you have to arrange your own freight and often they get a better price because of they great monthly spend with the major us48 state LTL freight carriers.
Be sure to specify if you need liftgate service at the destination or not, because that will affect cost, otherwise by default a pallet by LTL freight will need a loading dock to receive.
That includes labor, mounting hardware, inverters and grid tie in. It also assumes high efficiency panels.
Watch out before buying older technology (lower efficiency) panels. Some have significant efficiency losses per degree Celsius increase in temperature.
I bought 42 Sunpower X21-335 panels used for about $4700 shipped to my door a few years ago and couldn't be happier. As far as I could tell they weren't actually ever unboxed.
> $3 per watt, installed on your roof is typical these days
Which is why I was so fascinated by someone saying that you could get panels at 250USD/400W=0.625USD/W; I suppose it's possible that all the other stuff (electrician, mounting, inverters) is the difference, but a factor of 5? That feels like an chance to do something hacky and come out way ahead (like, say, DIYing a panel to run your computers, thus cutting out rewiring the house and needing an inverter).
> $3 per watt, installed on your roof is typical these days
In Germany, around 2019/2020 depending on the size of the installation it was around 1€ to 1,30€ fully and professionally installed on your roof. Right now with the increasing demand and very bad availability we are back at about 1,50€ to 1,80€ per Watt.
In Europe they are even cheaper as we don't have high tariffs on Chinese panels. I can buy a 350W panel for €150 including taxes, or €100 if I go to the equivalent of Craigslist and don't care about warranties.
Our solar panels are rated to 115mph winds. What are these servo mounts rated to?
Also, installation of the panels currently costs more than panels. They don't say (or I didn't find) how efficient the optimal fixed mount is, but the agent starts at 80%, so assume some fixed position is 80% of optimal. They increase that to 96%, so they reduce the number of solar panels by about 13%. If the installation labor cost increases more than ~26% because of the servo mount, then the servo mount hardware and frame would need to be cheaper than fixed mounts for it to break even. Similarly, the amount of aluminum being consumed by solar panel installions is non-trivial, and the movable frame is likely to increase that.
However, this is still a cool hobby project with a nice writeup.
tl;dr - sun rises, temperature rises, wax material expands, motor actuates, solar panel tracks the sky as if it was a sun flower. Maybe the gloop is sentient or something.