In some parts of Canada, you’ll rarely hear someone use the phrase “whatever paddles your canoe” instead of the more usual “whatever floats your boat”– and apparently, at least for one Swede, that’s steam power. The video, linked and embedded below, is a detailed tour of a canoe equipped with a small boiler and an outboard motor that has been converted to run using steam pressure by [Kenneth Karlsson].

The canoe itself appears to be a Grumman of the “prospector” type, wide in body to hold all the gear you’d need for extended wilderness trips– or, in this case, a small boiler. Amidships is the ideal place, as it won’t affect the balance of the boat. Amidships is an odd place to put an outboard– in the North American homeland of the canoe, if you aren’t moving under your own power, it is more common to cut off the curved stern of the canoe and mount the outboard to the newly-made transom. [Karlsson]’s choice to put the outboard off one side will be less maneuverable than a stern mount, but saves the need to modify the canoe and makes for much shorter steam lines. Shorter steam lines means less hose to potentially leak and scald the occupants, as well as fewer losses, so we can’t really argue with the tradeoffs.

The engine is an old two-stroke outboard that has a single steam cylinder retrofitted to it, along with a heat exchanger to warm up lake water with exhaust steam before it heads the boiler. The water is filtered first, of course, but we do hope the new owner– who posts on YouTube with channel “Steam Canoe” is diligent about cleaning the boiler. It doesn’t look like super high pressure steam, but the vapour phase of water is always something to be respected.

If the potential of scalding steam leaks and boiler explosions put you off, but you still won’t pick up a paddle, canoes can be rigged with sails— or you can just hand the paddle to a robot arm. Though given this is Hackaday, maybe you’d rather skip the canoe and climb aboard the good ship Benchy instead.

For as good as solar panels are at converting sunlight directly into usable electricity, especially for how cheap they’re becoming, they can still only gather around 20-30% of the energy that hits them. That’s fine if you have a large roof or a huge tract of land, but if you have limited space and need to do something like heat a home, there are better options available to capture more of that energy. [Greenhill Forge] has built five solar air heating panels to test this concept, and do it much more inexpensively than commercial options.

These solar heaters use sunlight to heat a fluid, in this case air, and move that heated fluid to another space. Each panel is about two square meters, insulated on all sides except the top, and configured in a way that air can flow past something that the sun has heated. The first panel, a control, does not use a glazing to help trap this heat, but the rest all have a polycarbonate window to increase the greenhouse effect of the panels. The four remaining all experiment with the way air flows around a black corrugated steel sheet to gather more of the heat, with the fifth panel using a set of black screen instead.

With the panels all set out in the sun, [Greenhill Forge] is using a set of thermocouples from a previous project to measure the efficiency of each panel. Surprisingly, he found that the panel using the layers of screen was the best at gathering energy, although he notes several times that these types of panels are extremely sensitive to changes in physical configuration, so this is not the most definitive test possible. However, at only around $100 per panel it’s quite a deal if the goal is a usable space heater that doesn’t use any fuel or grid electricity.