I experience a difference in sun light hours of about 8 hours Summer verses Winter. Currently I manually turn 1 of my arrays a total of may be 240 degrees (E/W) in the summer. This works great! (when I remember to turn it!) In the winter I only need to turn it maybe 70 degrees (E/W) due to a hill and trees. I was wondering what the Maximum degrees the tracker can turn (E/W) Knowing this will help with my placement of a new array or maybe modifying a current one.
OK, after going over some design ideas I see the travel distance is based on the mounts. Since Windy Nation doesn't yet have a mount ready for these I've decided to give a go at making a set to work for my application. I now have a kit ordered. If anyone has successfully created a durable mount for these I'd be interested in your plans. I'm sure I'll need to modify for my location any ways but it may save me some time fabricating.
My kit arrived very quickly (faster then I'd expected at least). My intention was to add this to a new mount however being as I don't have everything ready to got for it I attempted to add one of the actuators to my existing pole mount. My plan was to just add the actuator for east west movement as I already do this manually so I figured it would be a easy mod. I used the LIN-ACHD-24 actuator as it had the longest stroke length. It took most of the day playing with measurements but I got it to move my panels. The mount would be fine for winter sun maybe even 1/2 of spring & 1/2 of fall. The issue is summer I'd lose 4 to 5 hours of sun hitting the panels at 90 degrees. I noticed in the manual a 36" actuator however I can't locate it on the sales site. I figured this may give me enough extra movement to gain some of this added summer sun time. I most likely will have to adjust the limit switches if this version is indeed available. If it's not available this array mount will need a total redesign to enable the use of a Sun Tura sun tracker kit. Something I'm not prepared to do anytime soon.
Well it seems Windynation no longer carries the 36" actuator. I have however been able to locate one that is HD however the price is crazy ( more then the whole kit from Windynation)
