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panel work begins
Thursday, September 8 2005
Today I drove to Home Depot and bought two sheets of corrugated galvanized steel, each two feet by twelve feet in size. I'd just ducked in for a moment to check prices and availability for this material, and seeing both factors were more favorable than those at Lowes, I did my business at the hardware megastore that proudly boasts about drug testing its employees. This despite that altercation the last time I went in there with my dogs. While I was there, I also bought two 12 foot treated wood six by one planks, 150 feet of half inch copper pipe, and bags of both angled and straight connector fittings. Getting all of those long things into the car was difficult but not impossible. I had to roll up the roofing to form a U-shaped cross section, but it was so resistant to this that I had to coax it into place in stages. It ended up with one end in the trunk and the other end sticking out the passenger window several feet. Its U-shaped form served as a secure saddle for holding all the wood and copper I was hauling.
Most of the rest of my day was spent up on the solar deck piecing together the solar panel. I started by framing out a simple shallow five foot by twelve foot box using the six by one planks, and then I stiffened it with angle braces and crossmembers that would also be support frame for the galvanized steel sheeting. Finally I laid out the copper pipes in every other corrugation in a pattern that will allow water to cross the panel in a single long flow that switches back and forth in a deeply crenelated pattern.
I found that soldering copper pipe to galvanized steel wasn't especially difficult, except that the steel did tend to warp at the necessary temperatures. The worst problem was that as I soldered I had trouble keeping the pipe tight against the panel. But since it took so long for the molten pools of solder to solidify, I usually had enough time to put down the MAPP torch and pick up something heat resistant to either push the panel up from below or the pipe down from above.
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