Heating Your Home With Mirrors

is it just me or does this system basically say…you will be blinded when you look out your living room windows…can anyone say orange people and skin cancer? your basically making your home into a CPV “power-tower” from my understanding.

Seems a bit impractical to me.  Are we sure the company is not called ‘Impractical Solar’

i just went on Practical’s website and i don’t think this article has it right. you obviously wouldn’t shine sunlight from 25 heliostats directly into a house. it looks like you’d use a receiver of some kind for an integrated hot water system. you only shine it directly into windows when you’re doing natural lighting (e.g. 1 heliostat) or space heating (2 heliostats sound like they’re about equal to a space heater—1200 watts). the writer says Practical “cuts out the middle steps” like solar thermal water heaters, but based on Practical’s website, it looks like their heliostats could work together with other solar products to boost solar input and efficiency. it looks like there are tons of applications for these things!

I am the founder of Practical Solar, Inc. and was interviewed by Michael Kanelios for this article. Unfortunately Michael completely missed what I told him about our technology and its applications. Obviously, we would never beam concentrated sunlight through a window. I explaned in great detail to Michael that we would use a remote solar thermal receiver and a heat exchanger to charge a large thermal mass such as an insulated water tank. We do have many users who directly beam sunlight into windows to warm and illuminate dark cold spaces, but these customers use only a single heliostat per window. It is no more concentrated than natural sunlight shining though a window.
Bruce Rohr
President, Practical Solar, Inc

Bruce: I have to disagree with you. I reviewed my notes, looked at your site, and looked at the story. You are trying to deliver heat and light directly into homes through heliostats. I asked how many customers need to buy, and you said 25. You reccommended a water tank for storage, but said it wasn’t necessary. In fact, the site says storage is still under development.

As for light, you are using the heliostats to bounce light into the home. You admit it and the site says so. It doesn’t say all 25 will be used, or that 25 will beam their light through one window, or that light is the main purpose of the system. But clearly, you are beaming light into the home.

But there are other issues here too. Namely, you argue that this is better than PV, but consumers can’t qualify for credits. Also, the heat and light get produced when people aren’t home.

And who really has 2,500 square feet of spare lawn.

Home thermal is interesting, but there are issues that need to be overcome

Michael,
It’s hard to respond to such nonsense. You simply don’t understand anything we discussed or the information contained in our website.