frazelle09
New Member
We are trying to finish building a solar hot water heater. This one is based on the concave mirror design and is 10 ft. long and 40" wide. We have achieved a 100 F degree temp. rise in 20 minutes. Since this collector needs to track the sun, we have received a circuit from Wayne in Canada. His website is greenwatts dot info
We have uploaded some photos of our work at our **broken link removed** website.
Our problem is that our mecatronic student/helper is not going to be able to continue to help us. We have the circuit and at this point it works on two 6volt battery packs and is controlled by a sun sensor. This circuit then controls the motor which moves the collector East to West as the day progresses.
The problem is that the motor we are using is a small 3.6 volt screwdriver motor which, if we connect it to the circuit and then to an AC 110 volt outlet (actually two of them - one for each direction) our circuit burns out. It burns out when we try to rotate the collector towards either extreme (pointed either straight East or straight West). While the collector is moving through the middle of the arc the electro-mechanical system doesn't have any problem.
We think we need a larger motor but we like this one very much because of the planetary gear system that it has. Since we don't have anyone who can help us fix our circuit board again if it goes out, we think that the first thing we need is to figure out some way of protecting our circuit board with some sort of fuse between the wall (AC 110v) and our circuit board.
With this same design we have already burnt out a circuit board as well as a previous motor we were going to use (a car electric window motor) so if we are going to buy some sort of "new" motor, we think we may also need a fuse between the circuit and the motor.
Any ideas? i'm going to upload a copy of Wayne's circuit as well. Any help would be appreciated. Maybe we are going about this the wrong way.
Have a great evening!![Smile :) :)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
We have uploaded some photos of our work at our **broken link removed** website.
Our problem is that our mecatronic student/helper is not going to be able to continue to help us. We have the circuit and at this point it works on two 6volt battery packs and is controlled by a sun sensor. This circuit then controls the motor which moves the collector East to West as the day progresses.
The problem is that the motor we are using is a small 3.6 volt screwdriver motor which, if we connect it to the circuit and then to an AC 110 volt outlet (actually two of them - one for each direction) our circuit burns out. It burns out when we try to rotate the collector towards either extreme (pointed either straight East or straight West). While the collector is moving through the middle of the arc the electro-mechanical system doesn't have any problem.
We think we need a larger motor but we like this one very much because of the planetary gear system that it has. Since we don't have anyone who can help us fix our circuit board again if it goes out, we think that the first thing we need is to figure out some way of protecting our circuit board with some sort of fuse between the wall (AC 110v) and our circuit board.
With this same design we have already burnt out a circuit board as well as a previous motor we were going to use (a car electric window motor) so if we are going to buy some sort of "new" motor, we think we may also need a fuse between the circuit and the motor.
Any ideas? i'm going to upload a copy of Wayne's circuit as well. Any help would be appreciated. Maybe we are going about this the wrong way.
Have a great evening!