• perestroika@slrpnk.net
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    5 hours ago

    They have made the fences tall, which creates an impression of fragility, but we don’t see how deep the posts run into ground. :)

    I have a solar fence in operation for 1 year. My version is 1 panel width tall - about 1.2 meters tall, and I built it extremely cheap - 5 cm rectangular wooden posts with a metal screw tip running 30 cm into ground. Assembly using household screws and luck. During storms, it does change position, but I haven’t noticed disassembly.

    During hail, it would survive events that would smash my other panels, because a vertical surface exposes less target area and offers more oblique angles of collision to hailstones.

    As for efficiency, my vertical array is the most efficient array I have during winter. It’s never covered by snow and catches low sunshine better. In summer, it is the coolest (but not most efficient) array that I have, because it creates verticial convection and gives away heat more efficiently. But it differs from theirs because it’s an east-west array (they seem to have used a north-south geometry to catch morning and evening sunshine).

    As for what they said of their results:

    The panels generated much less electricity than a standard tilted array, but it was produced in mornings and evenings. “It matches better when there is high electricity demand in the system,” says Victoria.