Steam Dreams
I’m in the process of designing a simple 3kW steam engine for both a combined heat-and-power gasifier system and our solar power generator system. I can’t help but think about the future possibility of small-scale steam power for both stationary...
October Progress Report: Major Success in Crowd Funding
Thank you to all the people that supported us for the month of October – our transition to support via crowd funding. The October funding and corresponding progress were a major success. Here is the progress report. Overview: We are on our way to...
Going Further Off Grid
We are setting up our 15 kWhr battery bank and solar panels – so we’ll be off off-grid for the next few days as we set up the system. The new system is sufficient to power all of our facility except for the welder. You may not hear from...
The Bell Tolls for PV
– Guest post by Benjamin Gatti from our Solar Turbine Google Group. This post features an eye-opening perspective on photovoltaic (PV) panels. The claim is: it is very unlikely that PV will ever be cheap. Personally, I’ve been following PV...
Factor e Live – Part 6 – Solar Turbine Beginnings
Here is video documentation for making the first two parabolic reflectors for the Solar Turbine project: The Solar Turbine Convergence is here – Elliot and I are continuing on the next reflector version, and we are picking up Stuart today. We’d...
Solar Breakthrough
The trick for making solar thermal electrical generation a reality is to reduce the cost of the solar thermal collector system to absolute minimum. Why? If one familiarizes oneself with the costs of putting such a system together – it becomes apparent...
Solar Conversion
Factor e Farm would like to announce that we are finally in the process of converting our operations from generator-based electricity to 100% solar electric. Thanks to Ronny’s behind-the-scenes work while he was with us this winter, we recently...
