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Solar Power From Home Curtains
kaliann writes "With the push for more sustainable energy, easy DIY kits for alternative energy sources are likely to become quite popular in the coming years. We may see some big improvements in our ability to 'green up' if these photovoltaic curtains become widely available."
they only produce power when the curtains are closed.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Does the carpet match the drapes?
DIYers have long made use of sunlight so that we can "green up".
I keep my curtains open during the day. I thought was usually the case?
Gone!
"Close the damn curtains! Battlestar Galactica marathon starts tonight."
With the push for more sustainable energy, easy DIY kits for alternative energy sources are likely to become quite popular in the coming years.
Two words. Doubt it. There are all kinds of ways to save money, but most people don't do them. To put it into a computer perspective, how many people do you know upgrade RAM? Out of that many how many do them themselves? How many people upgrade a CPU? How many people salvage CD-ROM drives from old computers? How many save old cases and build computers in them? Very few I would think. Same thing with these, they are a way to save money, but for most people they will just complain about high oil prices, try to get a raise, petition for an increase in minimum wage, repeat. These will be about as popular as running BSD on your toaster. You can do it, it might be cool, but most people don't see the need.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
In winter I open curtains in the day to let the heat in and close them at night. That way I get 100% of the energy into the house. With PV curtains you'd get 10% if you're lucky.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So is the dream of a future where hundreds of watts of power could be pulled from any part of the wall just by attaching (touching?) an electrical device to it?
I consider it a good month when I keep my kids from sticking their fingers in the few, discrete sockets in my house. Now I will need to keep them from touching the walls? I think you can keep your dream future
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Summer months in the Desert: Closing drapes helps keep heat out, solar technology helps to power the Air Conditioner.
Non-summer months everywhere else: Close the curtains to power the lights that you need because the curtains are closed.
Who, tell me, who thought this was a good idea? Why curtains? Why not something that's, you know, outside where the sun can get it. Glass blocks light, light that can't be seen. Windows face one direction and it's unlikely they'll see any more than half the day in sunlight.
And why put it on something that moves, but not to move in order to keep up with the sun?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
The killer app for renewable energy will be to get the cost down.
Once it makes economic sense for me to go green, I will, but in the mean time much as I want to save the planet and everything I have bills to pay :-(
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I thought glass filters out a whole bunch of sunlight wavelengths, such as UV and infrared. I thought it did anyway. Wouldn't this make the curtain's efficiency majorly suck?
Now I just have to block out the sun to get light in my room.
If only there was an easier way...
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
I know we're at a point where solar is looking like a good investment. Still... Isn't it easier for a solar contractor to just make large solar power plants to supplement the grid than worrying about the specifics of installing home to home?
I'm all for the day when I can offset my electricity bills a small amount because I have my house decked out in solar material... I'd rather just have cheaper electricity though especially in the near future. Plugin, hybrid cars are going to start sucking on the power grid. If we don't add more solar or nuclear plants to the grid, we could see an electric shortage in the form of higher prices for one.
Oh and I'm still bummed about the study the government is doing to make sure solar is environmentally friendly. I mean, isn't the waste output from coal plants harmful to the environment? If we had the option to cut that waste back, aren't we helping the environment?
Anyway, the future looks bright to me. The US economy is holding even though it has taken some hits. If we can just get to a new era in surplus solar energy, we can get into some really interesting solutions to getting off oil. Some people think it will be hydrogen. Some people think it will be electric cars. I'm not sure which is going to take off in the long run. I think it is going to be hybrids that make the most initial impact because they don't have the limitations of the electric car's maximum range. For electric cars to have a long range, gas stations will have to be refitted with a tool to swap out battery arrays. Hydrogen faces a similar challenge in that it'd need special fill up stations too. Plug in hybrids work off traditional gas stations.
I like Nanosolar's approach because it is so high tech and also economically feasable. Still low tech solar options such as parabolic mirrors to focus sunlight and run steam turbines could be good at first. I think we have a lot of unused land on Earth, and the faster we can cover it, the faster we can have surplus energy. Surplus energy makes transportation costs go down so you can travel all that you want even if you're poor. And even more interesting is that surplus energy lowers the cost of transporting food, so impoverished people can be supplied better. Oh yeah, and surplus energy also means that everything is cheaper so people have more disposable income which incidentally, also helps poor people.
God spoke to me.
The trend is the other things will become more expensive. So you will pay, do not worry.
I have a window with a pretty bad shade and too thin of curtains in my room. After waking up when the sun rises instead of 10:30-ish like normal too many days in a row, I got some black rodeo fabric that lets absolutely no light through and VHB taped it to the wooden frame around my window. Now it's totally black but I leave it on all day and whenever I need to open my window, that fabric feels about 100 degrees and the air trapped behind it is about the same. And that's with my shade closed! If I left it open, black fabric alone could absorb a ton of heat energy. So I think solar curtains would work great.
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I think there is a misunderstanding about the usage of the word "curtain", possibly even by the author of the article. No where in the article does the researcher who is working on this imply that they would be curtains in the normal sense. I think they are just flexible, fabric solar panels. Because they catch the light, they can be called, "curtains".
why not make roofing material photovoltaic = kills two birds with one stone...
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Unless they post the watts/hr it can produce under normal conditions. Its like seeing a car in a car lot without a price on it... You just keep on rollin. Seeing this 'form of energy coolness' seems worthless without some type of qualitative evidence. I want to see the watts/curtain/hr.
The main reason you'd keep your curtains closed on a sunny day is to keep your house from warming up. Solar panels, unlike curtains, do not reflect sunlight so your house is going to heat up quite nicely (ie: they convert most of it into heat). Well at least that's what I understand of how solar panels work.
Ohh speaking of energy harvesting textiles, how about a beach blanket/umbrella that powers my beer cooler? Maybe charges the cell phone.
It's curtains for the electric industry.
How do photovoltaic curtains help you smoke pot? I guess they can hide the fact from pesky neighbors. Just a minute, I think someone is at the door. Odd - nobody I know knocks like a cop.
Not only that, but it's coitens for you, Jack! Coitens, I say!
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
And, moving right along, look at the growth of things like Maker Faires. Or of Make, itself. Plenty of people are doing just this sort of thing.
I could go into waaaay more detail on this but frankly, afaic the store locator on either of those sites says it all. No. You are wrong. Plenty of people do just this kind of thing all across the developed and developing world. Evidently they just don't hang out with you.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Actually I think they will save more power with the curtains open than closed.
I'm shooting from the hip here but looking at the picture I expect there's a serious flaw here. The Curtains look black so they are absorbing a lot of light energy. We know they are highly inefficient. So they mainly heat your house.
SO in summer time you will pay more in cooling costs than you gain in electricity. Either that or be warmer. Logically you want the drapes outside where they would be amiently cooled.
Now if you draw the blinds and thus it gets darker and you need to turn on a light well. So much for any gains.
Finally most houses are designed to have their windows shaded more or have an oblique incidence in summer time. Thus during the time of maximum sun, and warmth you get the least electricity.
In winter time when the solar flux is less and there will be fewer hours of daylight the direction of incidence will be better. But chances are you'd like the light.
The drapes have no thermal mass so they act like the worst kind of traum wall where they heat up and cool down quickly. No thermal damping.
Seems like archecturally this is a bad idea from the get go regardless of how the solar fabric technology improves. Maybe in northern canada or something it makes sense.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
son, all of this will be yours."
"What, the curtains?"
They look pretty ugly, but I think the real problem would be price/performance. I think solar will really take off either when home kits use tracking mirrors to concentrate light onto the photovoltaic panel, or when Solar Thermal Energy plants are built on a large scale.
I can tell you this much: Walmart, of all places, now sells a little set of LED room lights, all connected to one little power block, and designed to plug into a solar panel. And more and more solar panels, not just ones for cars, are designed with little suction cups to attach to the inside of a window. When Walmart does it, you *know* that it's going mainstream.
Oh, and fwiw, here in Portland where we get 37 inches of rain a year, I've met several people who are working on tiny little hydroturbines on downspouts and other water lines, both within and outside of a building.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
We do what we must because we can:
Beware your curtains (especially shower curtains) may be used to power gladOS
...I can get my non-photovoltaic cats to not scratch the circuit to shreds!
The problem I see is mostly that somebody needs to start manufacturing such turbines, complete with standard output to a battery, the way that they do with some solar panels, and putting it in the retail channel, all tidy and consumer friendly. If I weren't already running a publishing company and working on five different local green-oriented projects, I'd take the damn job on myself.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
i read the headline as if the article were about solar power from home getting the kibosh.
curtains, i tell ya, curtains...
Does anyone else think it strange that we use power-consuming devices to illuminate the interior of our houses and other buildings when we built them with a large covering over the top that blocks out the daylight by design? Seems it might, just possibly, be a bit more practical to design them so we don't block out the light in the first place. We westerners consider ourselves "high tech". Ha! An advanced technology would use daylight directly during the day and store the excess for use at night.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Alot of southern states encourage the use of solar screens to block a great deal of the sun's energy from getting into the house. The drapes would get significantly less energy with this type of screen. I like the idea of "little" improvements to reduce energy consumption, I just don't think this one qualifies. It reminds me of people who supersize the fries and then get a diet coke with that.
You people really need to get out more. DIY is one of the biggest trends in the industrialized world. Let me suggest an exercise: go to Barnes & Noble or some other megacorp outlet and just bloody well look at the number of DIY-oriented magazines out there. Now I agree that many of them are, to some degree, "aspirational". I used to work for This Old House Magazine so I know this all too well. But plenty of people actually do customize things in just these ways. While you've got one of these magazines in your hand, look at the ads. Those ads aren't from non-profits, my friends. People advertise all of that stuff, and its equivalent in Popular Mechanics and the magazines you'll find in Home Despot, and auto stores, and a dozen other huge demographic pools because people buy assloads of the sorts of DIY tools and parts that those advertisers make.
I hate to break it to y'all but we're not marginal anymore. Customization, the kind that involves wrenches and soldering and sandpaper, has gone mainstream.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Solar power can never reliably provide all your energy needs - cooking, water heating, gadgets, lighting and so on.
Say I lived in London, the average solar energy on a an area in London is 109 watts per square meter. Given a spectacular 20% efficiency, a solar cell will get 22W per square meter over the year.
Last month my family averaged 1.4KW (we have a new son, and had the heater on most of the time, but we do use a wood fire too!). Even if I were able to store all my summer power to use in winter, I would still need 60M^2 of these magically efficient solar panels.
In December, the incident solar radiation averages only 22W per square meter (yes, London must be a grey place in winter). I would need to cover 600M^2 to get enough power to meet my average demand.
And given that I would need storage capacity for a bad storm, maybe 5 days usage (168KWhrs). A 'car battery' sized Deep Cycle Cell holds about 2.4KWhr, so I would need 70 of these!
There is no way on earth that each London household can have 600m^2 of solar panels and 70 deep cycle batteries. And I don't even start to allow for an electric vehicle
Solar will not save us from needing other forms of power - especially not solar curtains. Who's dumb idea was that?
Even if they don't produce much electricity, having a curtian of cloth over your roof will reduce your air conditioning needs. Getting electricity too is a bonus.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What is the ecological cost of the photovoltaic cells? I know that the batteries for Hybrids do tend to have a high cost (I am not speaking in terms of money) but due to the chemicals and manufacturing process. Is it more ~effective~ to be on the grid or to use a green technology? If it is more effective to be on the grid (for a period of time), when does it become effective (provided no failures) to be using a green technology such as photovoltaic cells?
Just food for thought. Flame away/Mod up..sadly the Karma or lack-there-of will go to AC.
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This assumes that your house is oriented properly and that your windows are large.
In northern climes, windows exposed to the north and to the prevailing winds tend to be small. Windows to the south tend to be big. You want that southern light and heat in winter. Home Design Basics
Curtains are an element in interior design. They have colors, they have folds, they have textures. That does not make for an efficient collector. Your wife may have other plans for that window.
Apparently they aren't anymore though, the product is listed as discontinued...
PPI (Price Per Inch) seems a bit steep too, but I'd have to check my comparisons.
Rigging several crtains to your home power grid sounds like a pain. You'd have to run cables to each window! Why not just put panels on a south facing roof, where you get power delivered at all possible times?
This idea sounds like a gimmick to me.
There'd be something ironic about plugging an EV into the road for power... -Randy
Trust me folks, General Electric and the other companies who end up in charge of most huge power stations are even more corrupt and untrustworthy than Microsoft. And while a bad copy of Windows may corrupt your files, a badly run power plant can kill you.
As for economies of scale, think about the physics. A steam turbine may be more efficient if it's bigger, beyond a square meter or so, a photovoltaic panel won't. And given the huge loss of power (up to sixty percent) that comes from having to step the power up, put it over power lines that have their own resistance problems, step it back down again to 110 volt, and route it that "last mile" to your home, even a power source like a wind turbine may be more energy efficient being within sight of the person using it than being part of some huge installation trying to meet the demand of several million people.
And even beyond this, part of how sustainable power systems work best is taking advantage of changes in conditions on a tiny scale, one far too small to merit utility power involvement. Somebody further up suggested a regenerative door stop. Another suggestion was of using the power from water dropping within a structure as it leaves something like a sink. Think of the power that could be recovered doing this in a modern twenty story residential tower, let alone a fifty story office building. Especially since putting back an old-fashioned water tower within the building would make it possible to disproportionately push that water up to the top in the first place in the middle of the night or other times when power is cheap.
There is a place for centralized power generation. But the less power we get that way, the closer we get our lives to being what all this open source stuff is supposed to be all about. Both "free as in beer" and "free as in speech".
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
You could always greenroof part or all of it and, at the least, superinsulate that way, not to mention perhaps having fresh munchies if you have easy access to it. I'm also seeing more and more people phasing this kind of approach in by getting a fifty or hundred dollar panel that is connected to a battery charger and little by little switching to battery-powered devices, including using it to charge their laptops. The toxics from most batteries are an obvious downside, but it's still a good start for some folks.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Again, I don't know what world you're living in, but there are millions of us who are getting this stuff done as fast as we can, including plenty of real companies like Sequential, with stock and everything, who are making quite a nice living selling biodiesel and are already tying up every rational source of supply they can get their hands on. Oh, and those of us who understand things like cellulosic sources never thought that corn-based approaches were ever anything but yet another bit of agribusiness welfare.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
You are off a lot, manufacturing payback is 1.5 years tops, owner payback is around 5-7 years but that is changing with fast rising conventional energy sources. We've just about nailed parity with wind versus natgas, coal will be right behind it, and solar concentrator thermal is only a few years away now from parity with just about everything nukes included, and solar PV maybe around a little less than a decade, worst case is around 2017 for that according to latest projections. And that is with today's prices, following the energy markets, you certainly are going to be paying more and more for your electricity and so on from here on out unless you go to personal home production and get a locked in price. You have zero long term contracts available from the conventional electricity suppliers as a regular homeowner so you have no realistic way to make any projections with the kwh prices you will be paying to them in the future other than personal wishful thinking. Buying your power from those guys is like having an ARM mortgage with scrooge mc duck setting the rates on you. And I would guess at least 99% of all the alleged professional and internet amateur economic experts failed to predict todays conventional energy prices even just one year ago, they all underestimated it mostly, only a few of them got close.
I agree with you on the drapes, conventional passive solar techniques work better, no need to hang circuitry in the drapes, use the roof and walls for solar PV, and well built glass for the windows. Your best money and fastest return is really spent on just a lot more insulation and sealing cracks around the home, heating and cooling are by far the usual highest costs, and it is easier to keep the home level and stable than it is to throw more power at it, because it is a one time fixed cost versus arbitraging your wallet against speculator prices for energy. You are going to lose more often than not, no matter the original power source, because they aren't going to offer you anything less than market parity..ever.
Agreed on the NiMH batteries, seize it like any other public good under the 5th amendment, pay them a billion or two and allow the patent to be freely used by anyone. It's a bullshit patent anyway, the size of a battery? Ridiculous.
Disagree on solar PV, it is the best (genertally speaking given a minimum solar potential at your site) for decentralizing power production and letting consumers become actual owners, so they can eventually build equity and pay one bill off. Break down the energy cartels in other words, that has been an over priced controlled and contrived and conjob filled market for years because of that reason. PV scales well, too, and can be purchased and installed in stages, it doesn't have to be all at once, so you can invest early and add to it as the tech gets better and you can afford it more. If all we do is just keep reinventing the centralized power distribution model, we'll just keep paying the same huge bills every month to the same giant consortiums who will eventually own all that, exactly the same as they do now. We need to trash that idea, vendor lockin is not good for anything, history has proven that now pretty clearly.
Wouldn't it make more sense to capture the solar energy outside via panels on an awning or roof, before it gets inside the building and generates heat? I doubt that these things could produce anything worthwhile if not exposed to direct sunlight.
Stupid idea, the whole gimmick.
If you want to do solar power, better do it properly and mount decent solar cells in a place where it really can generate power (eg on the roof in the right direction with the right inclination).
The idea of those curtains is just stupid, because you dole out good money to get some crappy cells which end up being mounted in a bad place.
If you happen to live in a hot area, it would be far more ecological if you invested in some proper shading that the load on the air conditioning can be reduced. That saves more that those stupid curtains will ever produce. For the money saved, get decent cells on the roof.
If you live in a cold area - usually with only few hours of good sunlight - the curtains are even more stupid, because they produce even less. Invest in good double or triple glazing to keep the heat in and catch the few sun-rays you get to heat the room.
To sum it up, this junk gimmick is exactly what home shopping TV would try push to ride the eco-wave. Do the environment a favor and forget about that stupid idea.
Well, actually, downspouts are what the folks I know are looking at first. In fact, just last night I shared a few drinks with one of the folks in the local downspout disconnection program and we talked about this a bit. Keep in mind, though, that I live in one of the rainiest places in North America and even here, even focusing on industrial buildings with flat roofs, everybody I know who is working on it is having trouble making it pay.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Oh, as for toilets, folks are actually starting to design raised tank toilets again.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
are these curtains perhaps manufactured by the Aperture Science lab? ...
Yeah, folks will shell out the money for photovoltaics, only to put them inside the house, and at an odd angle where they will be even more inefficient. Then they'll shell out for the grid-tie inverter... all to shave $1 off of their electric bill each month.
Yeah, that will happen.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The coming energy crisis isn't going to be solved by any one thing, but dozens of small sub systems that work together
What nonsense, we all know that our energy needs can only be met from one source, a regulable, profit-generating source ... like oil, or nukes, or hydrogen. Energy from non-regulable sources is socialism at it's worst ...
People usually open the curtains during the day, and close them at night...
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bzzzzzappppp
Unless you have a Mac. Not sure about power consumption, but my MacBook Pro requires at least a large deep-freeze to keep it running at temperature where I can actually touch it.
I can understand that they would have trouble making a good living from it at this point, but can they make the technology pay for itself? I've always wondered if the initial challenges can be overcome with simple products out of a recycle bin plus a rotor.
testing out my trending skills
The more I think about the current situation we are in with power, I am coming to realize that we are here because the power companies/governments want us to be dependent. If we all had solar/wind power our house and fueling the electrolysis fuel cell to create hydrogen for our car, we wouldn't need them. We wouldn't be "contributing to the economy." So rather let's destroy the economy to maintain the status quo. /soapbox
Oh wait..
This is, I admit, really cool. Until you do some math.
The problem with any technology that assumes a very short time to charge an electric car, whether that's batteries or supercapacitors or something else yet to be invented, is that the electricity has to come from somewhere. And for a short charge time, it has to come from somewhere VERY FAST.
Wander around in Wikipedia, and you'll see estimates for electric car ranges around 5 miles per kWh of battery capacity. Sometimes less, down to 2 miles per kWh, but I'll be generous. So a 200 mile range electric car needs 40 kWh of battery capacity.
40kWh of battery capacity, charged in 10 minutes. 10 minutes is 1/6 of an hour, and I'll happily assume perfect charging efficiency. Your electric charging station needs to provide 240kW of electricity PER CAR.
Your house in the US gets about 10 kilowatts from street power lines, that's 110 volts with a 20 amp rating. You might get 15 kilowatts if you have a 30 amp feed.
The gas station I usually fill up at has 6 pumps, and can fill cars on either side of each pump, total of 12 cars at a time. And sometimes its full. 12 cars at 240kW each is nearly 1.5 megawatts of electricity.
That's a neighborhood electric substation completely devoted to a car charging station. Oh, and to feed it, you need the substation feeder lines, which are... 15kV lines?
How many gas stations are there in your city?
Fast charging for batteries for electric cars does not scale. Not with our current power generation and distribution system.
Slow charging overnight (6-8 hour charge time) when the electric grid has excess capacity works very well, and will scale in the US to about 30 million cars. With our current electric generation and distribution.
Personally, I'm looking for a good math-based analysis of the usefulness of covering parking garages and parking lots in solar cells, and doing slow charging while the car is sitting there during the workday. How much do you really gain considering if you cover a parking lot with a solar-cell-covered roof, you need to put in 24-hour lighting, which consumes electricity?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
Given that they contain mercury, how you doing at getting all those compact fluorescents recycled as they go bad?
How much energy (gas, etc) does it take to do that recycling? (Primarily, taking them to BE recycled...)
beowulf clusters of weather cocks ;-)
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
Double-wall heat exchanger.
Yes, looking at the post again, I realize that I misread what was meant by "solar". But my point still stands. The answer to "how do renewable sources provide 10KWhrs/hr?" is "they don't; we change our behaviors to reduce usage."
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The hard part is the fluid dynamics. Man, it seems like every time I look at the design of hydroturbines they've advanced another generation, because they've found that based on velocity, concern for noise, desired RPM, and so on, the right blade shape is far from a given and, once found, usually pretty hard to cast or otherwise make. Do things like stereolithography change this equation? Yes. But it's still non-trivial if it's meant to be anything beyond a proof of principle.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
How about blinds that are made of this material. For example we here in Finland as well as in other a bit colder countries have double glasses. So the idea would be use of those blinds between those glasses to reduce amount of heat that gets inside. No and we don't need more heat. Believe me, sometimes its way too hot here in summer(for us of course).
... is available here. It has lots of interesting information, allowing you to substantiate statements like "If Nuclear generation was increased 3-fold solely to generate H2 for Automotive use, it would only make just over 1/3 of the current energy used in transportation.". I can not see solar curtains fitting in there anywhere at all...