Pleasant Beach Solar water generator produced 1.7 times Goal for Summer June-3-2016
Solar Water maker produced 170% of our summer goal on Jun-3.
I couldn’t be more pleased with the results from our Pleasant Beach test system. I think there is still some optimization available for power allocation but I think we can make customers happy at this level of production.
Design for 83S is good enough to exceed promise.
This unit is built on exactly the design blueprint we will use for the model 83S units we are currently accepting orders for so we can substantially exceed our promised production without further design enhancements. This level of production places us at 1.5 sq meter per gallon of water. It would be great to bring it down even further but there are always cost versus optimization constraints.
Always seeking improvements
This is what the system looked like today when it produced 170% of goal. It performed pretty good. My only complaint is that blowers ran slower than I think could have been optimal. According to the data logger the blower speed was chosen based on constrained power available from the solar panel.
I suspected the unit would be power constrained with the larger cooling blowers so I installed this unit with brackets to make it easy to add an additional PV panel to make it easy to test how more electricity would affect production.
After adding some additional PV Power
Here is the same unit with the addition of a 100 watt solar panel. My theory is that this will charge the battery faster during the day and allow more power to run the condenser and cooling fans faster. This should increase the temperature drop across the condenser and increase the amount of water harvested.
The flip side risk is that it will extract heat from the main chamber faster so there will be a balancing act where it is able to extract heat too fast. We have elements in the software to protect the required tDelta but if these elements are activated the extra power may not help.
If this works like I expect then it should increase production on equally sunny days. I expect about a 20% increase but it would be great to see even more increase.
A successful increase in water production based on more power will indicate that we can increase water production with a larger solar panel or by improving the efficiency of air flow though the condenser and or condenser cooler. Everything in this product is essentially a compromise between amount of water produced, cost and weight. Ultimately I learn all I can and then make a judgment call on changes.
Some Videos showing parts of the system
Please note we have USA and International patents on this process.
