Comments on: Project Idea: Solar Sidewalk Melter

By: Keith Neufeld

Keith Neufeld — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:59:15 +0000

Jin, very cool! Thanks a bunch for remembering my project idea and coming back to let me know about this!

By: Jin

Jin — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:56:01 +0000

Saw this on hackaday, sounds very similar to your sidewalk melter idea:
http://hackedgadgets.com/2008/12/06/sun-track-reflects-light-into-your-home/

By: Keith Neufeld

Keith Neufeld — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:20:46 +0000

Hi, Dave!

I shovel my walks, and the sun does a nice job of drying the front walk and melting any residual slush. I’d be delighted to achieve the same level of meltage on the walk beside the driveway, which in theory should be possible.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:12:10 +0000

One of the problems that you’ll encounter is that snow is quite reflective. Thus, most of the solar energy you end up directing onto the sidewalk will be reflected back into space.

I’m wondering if you might not have better luck with a modified version of a system like this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071231/ap_on_hi_te/solar_roads;_ylt=AuEFouXxz16nP8MRlInTJMms0NUE

In the extreme case, you could chip up the existing side walk and pour a new one with heat pipe built into it, with the collector powering them located in a sunny spot, but even a retrofit version which simply collected heat from a sunny location and blew it (via heated air?) onto the sidewalk might work reasonably well.

Dave

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:46:51 +0000

I built a small solr concentrator out of a small satellite dish.
I wanted to motorize it but never got around to it.
Check out this great link for a bunch of solar trackers though!
http://www.redrok.com/electron.htm#led3x

By: Marcel

Marcel — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:00:26 +0000

Interesting… I’m playing with the same idea for solar cooking and heating. I’m using an Arduino board with a couple of LDRs as a voltage divider then strapping that assembly onto the top of a servo. The servo is then swung to balance the LDR at a value of 512 (centre). I then know where the sun-servo is as an angle so do some simple math to drive another servo carrying a mirror. With a pot to determine where I want the reflection I …. is this making any sense?

Without some math beyond my ability I’m only bouncing the reflection off within the plane of the track of the sun – not tracking a sidewalk in 3D!

If I get somewhere with it – and get some pics online, I shout.

[m]

By: Kevin Reid

Kevin Reid — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 01:05:26 +0000

You can bisect the angle using a linkage of four bars in a diamond. One joint is fixed, two are attached to the two trackers, and the fourth points where the mirror should. (It also moves in and out, so you need a slotted fifth bar which the mirror is mounted to the fixed end of.)

If you’d really rather use gears, then you can do it with three bars, the outer two of which have meshing gears at their pivot points.

If these descriptions aren’t sufficient, let me know and I’ll build examples from Lego. Or draw diagrams.