Horseshoe house

The inspiring Grand Designs series county Antrim 2015, showed the beautiful home of Michael Howe of 2020 architects design for the renovation of an old forge.
This got me thinking, resulting in the following rendering, also shown on youtube,

Solar VW combi, Solar Renault Trafic

1966 VW bus goes solar LINK
Read the story, as he has some interesting things to say.

Below some pictures and some 3D renderings of what he has done with the VW combi ( app 1.170 Wp) and what could be done with a Renault Trafic van with 2.340 Wp of panels. All within regulations.

Hope to inspire.

My renderings of the VW combi show the immense area of the panels. Looking at the photo's he used 9 panels of 130Wp. Panels of 1482mm bu 676mm are available, 4 base-cells wide.

Renault Trafic, is pretty wide and boxy so well suited for conversion. The 2.380Wp of the panels would on a sunny summers day easily allow driving in a town and a battery pack of 15kWh could be charged in a day. Interesting numbers.
The Renault Trafic is cheap second hand, and with a conversion to electric, one would not have to bother with the quality of the motor, which would probably be in bad shape as the Trafic is a typical builders van..

Regulations even allow for much longer roof panel rack, ie 3.5m in front of steeringwheel center and 5m aft of aft axel. I did the drawing, looks/feels not OK.

This solar Renault Trafic is within the narrower limits of the law. One meter in front of and one meter aft of the vehicle. Still looks pretty impressive (and impractical?)

Louis Brennan mechanical gyro stabilization

Just my design for building my Brennan mechanical gyro stabilization,
see also blog of January 2015