Solar Tracker.

[pyrocasto]

I saw a damaged satelite dish standing in someone's yard near my house. Wanting to start my scrounging career I stoped by and talked to them about it. Half way new motor on a good stand. 12ft screen dish, and all I had to do is take it, which turned out more work that I had planned.

We got to the site with shovels thinking we could dig and drag. Boy were we wrong.

The dish was cemented into the ground about 2ft wide about 2.5ft deep, which we expected. What we didnt expect is there was another 1ft wide section of concrete on the bottom where we couldnt see, going down another 2 ft. Well our shovels didnt work out as we expected. We ended up using a 4 wheel drive tractor to help pull it out, after we dug down 3ft, and pryed it up.

Then, we put the base and pole in my truck ready to go. We figured we could put the "8ft" dish in our box truck we have. Unfortunantly, my guestimation was WAY off. The dish was actually 12ft wide. We had to take out dozens of bolts on the spot to get it out. The whole process took about 4 hours.

When I did get it back to my shop though, I started to go at it. Here's what it looked like after un-instalation.





Ok, so I started taking apart and sanding down the base, because that's the parts I was wanting anyway. Here's what I started the whole thing for... The actuator...

 After sanding put it in the spray booth(nice to have) for a nice rustoleum coating.



While that's drying I head over to the dish itself and start the disassembly. Half of the bolts broke off, half came out. Tear off the screen, salvage the middle bracket and I'm done for the night!

Now I have a nice little pile of parts I plane on dropping off at a metal yard to Monday, to see if I can get a few bucks out of the couple hundred punds of aluminum.

[Volvo farmer]

I did the same thing. I've got a couple of 80W panels on an old satellite mount. Had to steal the actuator for my dish that I watch TV with so the solar tracker is currently stationary. Are you planning on using one of these LED devices for tracking?

http://www.redrok.com/electron.htm#led3

Keep us informed as to how this project turns out. The one thing I haven't researched very much is how to get the thing to turn back east in the morning. In my part of the country, a guy could get a dozen of these satellite dishes for free, just for the asking. I've picked up three of them now and usually try to finagle my way out of taking the pole. Either that or see if they'll let me torch it off at ground level.

[pyrocasto]

Yes actally I should have mentioned that. The Led3 is the one I'm getting from RedRok.com. I'll probably order it today.

As for the turning back in the morning, that does sound like it would be a problem, and I thought I would put a little blocker(wood, tape, something...) on the right side of the tracker device. That way, it will turn back the right direction in the morning, but the blocking plate will off the device enough to follow the sun. I just dont know how long it will take in the morning to get enough juice on the panels to power the thing back. I dont want to hook it to the battery, because that's more wire I have to run, less voltage, and if this Led3 device is very sensitive than I dont want someone's barn light or headlights draging my panel around at night.

[baggo]

I finished my tracker last year using the Redrock circuit and it performs very well. I didn't buy a kit but built the circuit on a homebrew pcb and used higher power discrete mosfets rather than the smt ones. The circuit has the facility of auto return at the end of the day (just involves adding two resistors) and this also works perfectly. Great fun to see it working!

John

[pyrocasto]

But if it turns back at the end of the day, you would have to hook it to your battery, correct?

[baggo]

Yes, mine is connected to an old 12 volt car battery so has power all the time. I suppose in theory you could do away with the battery and power the tracker electronics directly from the panels, as the power consumption (of mine anyway) is quite low. The panels would then stay pointing to the west overnight but as soon as the sun rose in the morning and the panels started to produce power there would be enough to drive the mounting back to the east. What I intend to do is mount a small 12 volt panel between the two main ones purely to keep the drive battery topped up. In this case a small SLA battery should be sufficient.

John