KeepIS said  

Seriously bloody impressive    

Haha, thanks Mike. I think I'm still a little shellshocked over the whole thing, though it was really nice to see it pumping out the heat this arvo.

  Revlac said  

Looks good,  You should have no problems with wind or light rain (when sunny) affecting heat output.
I still collect the heat from under the tin roof on the house using a pipe and fan, the  roof has a lot of surface area, the air gets very hot, but output is drastically cut down with wind and rain.

Thanks Aaron. Yes, that's the beauty of the prototype too. I couldn't get over how it could be cold, rainy, windy and blustery  ...  but if there was any sun  ...  the thing was producing heat.

Something else that always impressed me was that the tubes act like a battery and slowly charge up. It may not be very bright or sunny  ...  but if it's off for a while (the fan), the temperature slowly rises  ...  and when you do turn it on it can be quite high  ...  and take quite some time to go low enough that it needs to be turned off again. Might start off at 50 degrees but take 20 mins to get down to 25 or so.

If you leave it off for a couple hours while the sun is out, it may start off at 100C  ...  seriously hot.

My first experiments were with collecting the hot air under the tin roof of my shed too  ...  and feeding it down one of the c-section posts into my workshop. Is still connected too, though was pretty underwhelming in my case. Good to hear yours gets nice and hot.