After we left the still for 2 days, we check the water level in both trays. The water evaporated out ~ 1 cm height(~0.8 L). So the rate is about 0.5 cm per day (~0.4 L/day). Our target is about 3L/day, so if we can’t increase the evaporation rate, we would need to increase the…
Solar still: Add the output pipe and glass
We used PPR pipe for the drain tube, cut it in half with a hand grinder then sanded it clean. We drilled a hole in the side to insert the pipe through. then we screwed the wood to support PPR pipe. The pipe needs to slope down to make sure that water will not get…
Solar still : continue assembly
We painted the outside with weatherproof paint, inside with black to absorb heat. After we left it for a day to dry, we added a bolt lock and EPDM (the black foam stripon the last image) for sealing the lid.
Assembling the Solar Still
Today we screwed the wood parts together. We used EPDM insulated rubber (Link) for the base insulation:
Building a Solar Still
We stumbled across this page on Mother Earth News: https://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/home/how-to-make-a-solar-still-ze0z1209zsch So we decided to give it a try. We get a lot of sun here on the land… Today we cut all the wood parts
Building a solar hot water heater
I’ve been trying to put together this project for most of the year. We finally got to it about a month ago, but I was too busy over that period to blog it. So here is a summary… I was inspired by a few of the projects on the Internet for DIY solar water heaters….
Mounting the solar panels on BaanLoiNaam
We mounted the solar panels on the roof of BaanLoiNaam a week or two ago: If anything, I think it makes the tiny floating house look kinda cool. Here are some wider shots: (You’ll notice we removed the “green wall” in the bathroom in order to paint the floor.)
BaanRimNaam gets light
I’m still getting caught up on the posts I didn’t get to over the New Year’s weekend. I mentioned in my last post that we moved into BaanRimNaam, but I forgot to mention that we got the lights up and running. We haven’t yet mounted any solar panels onto the roof, but when we ran…
Solar powered pump controller upgraded
Almost exactly a year ago, the prototype for the solar powered pump controller was installed and working. It was a hand wired and soldered on a perf board but it worked fairly well. But it is usually good to switch to printed circuit boards (PCBs) once the design has stabilized. We actually printed these a…
Mounting solar panels on the floating house
We installed a number of fairly standard solar mounting rails on BaanLoiNaam last week: The goal is to have space for at least 12x 300W solar panels. Initially, I’m only planning on installing 8 of them, which should yield approximately 12-14 kWh of electricity per day on average. This would be more than enough for…