[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey folks engineer 775 here wanna share with you today a really cool product I was so excited when I went to SPI last year in Utah and I met the folks from pursuit solar and they had this cool track it was the last thing I got to look at for the day and I just they had to kick me out of the place as I went over it and looked at it I was really excited you know I've done videos on trackers where I haven't been too excited about it because of the cost now tractors are still obviously more expensive than a fixed pole mount or ground mount but this one really caught my eye as a mechanical engineer because there was no motors no controllers no PLC's no anything to make this thing track so it really caught my attention and so let me tell you a little bit about it it uses an industrial wax and a piston and a parabolic dish and combination with a mechanism so basically as the Sun is picked up in the parabolic dish and you can see that up here where there's a collector that hits like it looks like an evacuated tube almost and it collects on that tube which heats the wax which moves a piston now this is a demo unit so this you're like what is going on why are you doing with one panel this thing is strong enough to actually track 18 full 72 cell panels so this is just a demo model showing how much work it can actually do so the actual tractor doesn't look like this this is just showing the force you see if I move this you'll see the weight this is basically 2,000 pounds of blocks it picks those blocks up about 4 inches which allows this mechanism to go through its full range of motion so it's kind of in the morning here it's about 10 o'clock in the morning and this will rotate all the way over to the west southwest side in the afternoon and so it's already started tracking because we got a pretty good sunny day and it'll just track through the full range so they the estimates are that it'll increase your solar production by about 20% so there's always this trade up and there's the cool factor which this really caught my eye but there's also the increased production but in so there's I'm always in this conundrum of cost per watt versus cool factor and cool technology but again no power required to do it the only thing that you know it's a demo unit I've been watching it now for two months looking at it every day I come home and I see where its position so sometimes what we have here is sometimes if it's in the early morning there's no snow sunshine and it's rainy day or very cloudy day it won't start to track and if it doesn't start to track it can't catch up because of where the Sun is in relationship to the parabolic collector so that's the only negative part of it so sorry about that pursuit this is something that for me when I come home I want to see my tracker tracking over with the Sun and this doesn't do it for you know I would say five days out of the month from what I've been observing the concept is still amazing maybe there could be some tweaking of the collector to allow it to capture more and not skip a beat but super strong I just love the concept it's all mechanical they can't fail I've been watching this pal two blocks go up and down from for two months and so it's pretty cool so the concept is called heliotropism basically using this concept like of a sunflower sunflower well in the morning it'll be reset to where the Sun is going to come up and then it'll kind of the sunflower will track that Sun all day long and then reset and that's what this does it tracks the Sun all day long and then resets you can the standard model will hold 12 72 cell panels they do have an 18 panel version but for production the I think the 12 panel is where they're heading for the most part so this is just a demo this panels not hooked up to anything it's just to show you that it does track it's extremely powerful piston very reliable so if you look back here this is the the mechanism isn't the same so the demo unit is just running a piston as the as it rotates this piston moves and it lifts this cable up lifting 2,000 pounds of material just to show you how strong it was so it does track very well when their son is is on it so so this is it's it's interesting this year for some reason I'm getting a lot of requests about trackers and why don't you do track your sky why don't you do tractors in a lot of times the cost of solar is so high and we can't have kept pursuing at the same time cheaper fixed ground mounts so it's this you have the space if you don't have the space the tracker becomes very attractive if you have the space then you can add more panels to a cheaper ground mount and compensate for what this would actually produce so it's just math you can figure out if this makes twenty percent more power you can add twenty percent more panels and on average your fixed ground mount is going to equate to what a tractor is if you don't have the room tractor is a great option if you're into cool factors which is really what caught my eye at SPI is this is it's pretty awesome so check out pursuit solar Eddy bug is the owner there you can talk to Eddie about the tracker he knows everything about it he will walk you through an installation how to set it up and there's a little bit of setup education on it he's they'll they'll walk you through some of them he'll come out and actually help you install it so that's about it on this so let me know what you think let me know if you think about trackers because I'm actually about to debut another tracker I know there's several trackers on the market and there's some that have gone out of business because the tracker market was big when there was small and when panels were so expensive and then it kind of phased away with panel prices going way down and for some reason trackers have come back and there's several companies in about a two months gonna talk to you about another horizontal shaft this tracker it is timed and it won't have a parabolic dish it's totally different more of a traditional style tracker but less expensive so anyway we'll be talking to you about that kind of questions about tracking let me know this engineer 775 saina I wouldn't what do you think my new cool sure I got a new cool shirt today so I'm like official I got my first branded t-shirt so anyway I'll see you later folks bye [Music] you [Music]