Is this your new finish??

Previous solar heating panel designs - every one that I'd ever seen - began with someone asking: "What can I build on the cheap?" and the end product was generally not worth the cost.

I took a slightly different approach by asking instead: "Just how much heat can we get out of a panel?" and made peak performance a higher priority than cost. I figured that once I'd figured out what it took to get really good performance, I would know enough to be able to make good trade-offs to control/adjust the cost.

The heat exchanger/absorber is critical to performance and I tackled the design as a physics/radiation problem. It turned out to be a bit more than that, but that was a good starting point. No matter how I looked at the problem, the answer always came up "aluminum ribbon" of a particular thickness and width, formed and arranged in a particular geometry.

There was only one way to know if that was a correct solution to the problem...

Ed - but that may have been an anglicized nickname for my convenience.

On Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:08:47 -0600, the infamous Morris Dovey scrawled the following:

And that was to borrow some of that specific material from a friend, right?

-- "Just think of the tragedy of teaching children not to doubt." -- Clarence Darrow