Heliostat
Justin
Justin Bruen
When I was just a kid I would watch for hours while my grandfather built small steam engines. Then he would show to me how another contraption he had hooked up to a car battery was splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. He always declared that hydrogen and steam would one day power the world and that they were the answer to the pollution being released into the air. The "infernal combustion engine will be the end of us all " he would rant.

My grandpa was a great inventor but suprisingly he never used the sun in any of his energy eperiments. Sometimes I wish that he were still alive today so that I could join his knowledge of steam and hydrogen with my infatuation with harnessing the power of the sun.

In 1996 I built my first solar panel tracker to steer a Solorex 53 watt panel. I used what was on hand ... a windshield wiper motor, some bicycle parts, scrap lumber and some spare parts from Radio Shack. I spent many hours marveling at the magic of turning sunshine into electricity.

Solar power, steam, electricity:
These are concepts that have been researched thoroughly by scientists with greater minds and deeper pockets than mine, but recently when I went shopping for some sort of mechanical mirror capable of reflecting sunlight on a stationary solar energy collector, I couldn't find anything affordable. "C' mon", I was thinking, "there has to be some contraption out there that can reflect a meter or so of sunlight to a target for a few hundred dollars. So I set out to make something myself.

Now several friends have joined me in the heliostat and solar tracker obsession. This is our vision...

Eliminate our dependence on oil one solar tracker at a time.

Justin