All weather Cover for solar Panel - for winterising or summer damping

[Poolguy]

I'm developing a cover for the Navitron panel collection.
Its going to be a cover that will survive the storms, sun, rain and most things that can be thrown at it.

It will be plastified material for covering the tubes so that the system can be disabled if required without disconnection of the pressure circuit and/or used to reduce the performance in Summer if the system is overproducing.

Does anyone see any use for such a cover themselves. Thought I'd ask so that I can make it the most useful it can be.

It will be either retrofit or supply with a new panel already fitted.

Andrew

[desperate]

Hi Poolguy

Would your cover be permanently fitted to the panel? and if so would one be able to operate it remotely, or does it need access to the roof?

I can see it would be usefull for maintenance purposes.

Desperate

[langstroth2]

It'd have to be a material good at preventing sun's radiation getting thru (opacity?). I covered my panels last year around Sep time with blue plastic "ground sheet" type material - and found it wasn't sufficient to prevent the panels from getting near boiling in direct sunlight. In the end a thick blanket and the ground sheet cover did the trick. I guess something highly reflective would have worked better.

[Poolguy]

Desperate

Manually covered.... access to panel essential. Motorised, infrared botton so on is getting too fancy and expensive.

Langstroth

Metalized PVC 1.5 mm completely opaque and able to withstand both continual UV exposure and high winds.

Thanks for the responses.

Andrew

[rt29781]

Hi Andrew,

I have thought about this issue quite a lot and the best i could find was the green mesh used in greenhouses to cut down the efficiency.  My concern with solid tarpaulin type covers is the wind stress on the panels.  Is the proposed material a mesh or solid ? 

[stephendv]

I like the idea of using PVC tubes cut lengthwise in half and fitted over each evacuated tube.  Durable, strong and they'll look great as they just need to fit around the tube itself.  Would be dead easy to motorise too.  Half turn = covered, another half turn = open.

There's a Spanish company who's doing the roll up/down sail thing: http://energia-termica-avanzada.com/videotubos.html  not sure if it's commercially available yet.

[arizmanor]

That looks a good idea, but I have a nasty feeling in my water that this would not stand up to aerodynamic forces in a gale.  It looks that the designer has failed to consider or understand the large forces involved.  I had wondered if modified shopfront shutters might be utilised - metal or plastic (for lightness).  But this would have to be made with reliability as one of the main criteria.

If some sort of shading arrangement could be manufactured, it would be possible to hugely overspecify the area of tubes to cater for the winter and then have the control system open and close the shading as required.

[renewablejohn]

I like the idea of using PVC tubes cut lengthwise in half and fitted over each evacuated tube.  Durable, strong and they'll look great as they just need to fit around the tube itself.  Would be dead easy to motorise too.  Half turn = covered, another half turn = open.

This is what we are doing for our thermal solar but the PVC tube is 3 times bigger than the solar tube and has a reflective bottom to focus the sun and a freschnel lens on the upper surface. The tube is also tracking using a 24 hr central heating timer but could be out of sequence by 12 hours if you needed to shade the tube.