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Make your own solar thermal panel for about $50 - "One of the main uses of energy in the American home is to heat up water. It takes a lot of electricity to heat up water, this cost a lot of money. All day while you are at work, or at school, the sun is busy heating up things outside. If you are a little kid and you get to play outside all day then you know all about this. Lucky for us the sun is free, all we need to do is figure out a way to use that energy to heat water. That's why we are going to build a solar thermal panel, these guys are great at heating up water." [via] - Link.
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Thanks for showing our project. Just thought I would let everyone know that the site has been redesigned and the projects can now be found at
http://www.thesietch.org/projects.htm
We will be developing a 2nd generation solar thermal panel soon. It should be much more efficient and much cheaper to construct.
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The new solar thermal panel has been constructed, and boy does it work well! Check it out here http://www.thesietch.org/projects/solarthermalpanel2/index.htm
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The next step for this would be to couple it with a Stirling Engine (since it uses heat or more correctly, differences in heat) and see if it could drive a generator or pump.
It's 90 degrees here today and it seems like a lot of energy is just falling on the ground. I could bet several of those panels -- 30 square feet of heat collector -- would generate a lot of energy.
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