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putting real glass on my homebrew solar panel
Tuesday, April 8 2008
It was a beautiful sunny day, and not especially windy, so it was perfect for finally installing the glass on my large homebrew solar panel. The glass consisted of four eighth-inch-thick sheets, each 36 by 60 inches. I carefully staged them out on the laboratory deck and then, even more carefully, carried them up the ladder to the solar deck, always one at a time. After the first one, I knew to wear gloves, as the sharp edges easily cut my hands as I maneuvered the panels around the various obstacles in my path.
Once I had all the panels on the solar deck, I cleaned the first pane's bottom surface and glurped a bead of clear silicone caulk around where the it was to go in the frame then set it gently in place. I continued doing this with the other three panels, leaving a quarter or eighth-inch gap between them to allow me to install fastening screws.
The panes seemed fairly strong, but when I was positioning the last one, supporting it only from the end and a place near that same end, it suddenly shattered in my hands. I was standing below the panel at the time, and lost my balance. Luckily, though, my vacuum-tube collector array was behind me and I fell harmlessly against its header manifold. More than half of the now-shattered pane was still in one piece, but there were a good number of long shards scattered across the place where the pane was supposed to have gone. More distressing were the drops of blood that seemed to be everywhere. I wasn't in pain and had somehow kept my cool and not uttered a single obscenity, but that blood had to be flowing from me.
Eventually I found the injury. It was a slice just to the right of the root of my left index finger's fingernail. Blood burbled out of the injury relentlessly. I went into the house and tried wrapping paper tightly around it, but the paper was soon soaked.
Well before the bleeding had stopped, I'd called Catskill Mountain Glass & Mirror and ordered a replacement pane. They said they'd have one ready for me in about an hour.
Once I had the replacement, I waited for Gretchen to get back from work before attempting to install it. Had I just been a little less boneheaded and enlisted her help to begin with, I would have avoided this disaster. But that's how I am; I always want to do things on my own. Somewhere in the stone tablets of my thinking is the following piece of flawed wisdom: "If two people can do something, then one person can do it better."
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