Satelight - More Light in Your Home Is More Light in Your Heart

We bought an old house with an even older barn and we try to love them both. I am looking forward to have a lot of space in the barn for building, tinkering and work, but this building is also incredible huge and stands south of the house - it throws its big shadow into our courtyard most of the wintertime and also in the evenings during the rest of the year. We have some ideas to bring back the light into our lifes and the first idea we realized is this Satelight project: We glued 6000 small mirrors to the backside of a satelite dish. The we put it to a place that gets light until the late evening hours, so the mirrors reflect 6000 little light spots into our courtyard and also through the windows into the rooms.

What you need:

-satellite dish - as big as possible

-mirror tiles - I got these from Ebay in a size of 1cm x 1cm

-silicone

-four M6 screws with washers and nuts

Tools:

-Drillbit with metal drill

-silicone piston

-silicone kitchen brush

-cutter knife

Wear gloves when glueing the mirrors, they are sharp and the silicone is very sticky. We learned both the hard way...

For this you just need some math. The surface of a circle follows the formula:

A= Pi times r²

My satellite dish has a diameter of 90cm, so the radius is 45cm. 45cm squared times Pi is 6362cm². As the tiles I bought are 1cm x 1cm I knew I needed about 6400 of these. At the end I guess I got about 6000 onto the satellite dish as there were some gaps and there were some reasons why we did not fill all corners.

At first we removed the holder from the dish by drilling into the rivets until they fell apart. Then we unmounted the arm, that holds the satellite receiver antenna, from the holder. This one was mounted with two metal screws, so this was easy to remove. I saw another satellite dish that had just one metal part for the complete holder construction, in this case you would have to use an angle grinder.

The satellite dish as it is would make a concave mirror. The parallel sunbeams would be reflected to a center point that is very light and very hot. This can be used to make an ecofriendly boiler but we want small light dots in an area as big as possible, so we need a convex mirror. For this we have to turn the satellite dish, mount the holder to the front side and glue the mirrors to the back side.

At first we sanded the surface to make the silicone fit well, then cleaned and dried it.

The mirror tiles come in little sheets of 10 times 15 mirrors. They are even self-adhesive but I thought it is a better idea to glue them with silicone so they will not say goodbye in 5 months. We glued the complete sheets, this led to some gaps between the sheets at the second half of the work due to the round surface. But noone wanted to glue 6000 single mirrors, so we are fine with that.

We tried some different techniques and started by putting a layer of silicone to the dish. I tried to make a thin layer with a sawblade I held with pliers, then I tried a piece of wood, both did not work that good. Then we switched to a silicon kitchen brush and that worked best. We glued half the tiles this way and then we found out, it is much more easy and clean to apply the silicone just to the bottom side of the mirror sheets instead to the satellite dish. This way we safed many paper towels.

We first glued the complete sheets and then filled the corners with individually cut pieces. Here it also showed the prepared layer of silicone on the dish was not helpful. Without it it was possible to cut the mirror sheet, put it to its destination and remove more tiles if it was still too big. Then remove the protective paper, add silicone and put it into place.

To cut the sheets, just bend a complete row over with the protective paper still in place and cut it with a cutter knife.

Remember to leave the holes for the dish holder free.

I had bought only one package of silicone and this was enough for 90% of the tiles. Then it was empty and I glued the rest with self-adhesive power. So this works too, I just do not trust it. Let's see when the 10% fall off.

As the silicone was empty I did not fill all corners, perhaps later. At that time I had already lost my workmate, my daughter needed a long break and I was on my own, so my motivation to do it perfectly had decreased a little bit.

I had drilled off the rivets with a 6 mm drill and now used 6mm screws. It was necessary to use longer screws and add some washers between the dish and the holder, otherwise they had touched each other. I finished with 6mm self-locking nuts.

At that time it was already quite cold, on the picture you can see the last sunbeams at the wall. My mate had long gone and the sun was about to disappear. So I needed a fast success and literally threw the dish to its final spot and into the last sunbeams of the day. I mounted this to a metal rod. I forgot to take photos of that but it is done the way these dishes are always mounted.

I adjusted the direction, went in and was able to enjoy the last sun in my kitchen.

The next day I was able to take some pictures of the astounding result. The very many little light points make a wonderful athmosphere, in the kitchen as well as in the courtyard. My kids instantly ordered four more of these. But I already think of a set of four complete mirrors that reflect the light directly into the four rooms at this side of the house. These of course would have to move automatically with the wandering sun, so this will be a much more challenging project. Perhaps next year. If I do it, you will find it here.