Mounting Our Solar Panel

The solar panels are now at Lwemodde inside the youth center. Today we devised and constructed the mounting mechanism which should be safe and tunable for the best angle towards the sun.

The panels have made it!

A diagram of our complete system is below. It involves bolting the panel's frame to a plank of wood and then sandwiching this plank of wood against the roof with more bolts and a plank on the underside of the roof.

The overall mounting plan. Two planks of wood are sandwiched against the roof (which is thin corrugated tin). The plank on the top part of the roof also has blots to the solar panel.

Assembly diagram the planks, roof and solar panel. All nuts and washers are shown in the diagram.

This morning we got all of the nuts, blots and washers in Kalisizo and then headed back to the center to begin building.

Junior gets to work, sawing part of the frame.

Half of our mounting mechanism.

The advantage of the two nuts used to fix the panel is that we will have some variation of the angle of the panel when it is on the roof.  By moving the two nuts up or down the thread of the blot we can choose a height for each of the the four blots which go through the panel frame. We will aim to have the panel point directly at the sun for solar noon.

Since the panel is going to be there long term it is important that the wood doesn't rot. Lydia applied the first coat of varnish on the wood and then the members did another two that afternoon after we had left.

Varnishing the frame.