Staying Warm with Solar Panels . .

An LATOCer writes:


My husband's latest thingy is a passive solar heater for the house.
Or one room actually. He's build a thin wooden panel that connects
to the bottom of one of the living room windows. He painted the
inside black, and topped it with an old double paned insulated window
he got for free from a friend who was remodeling an enclosed porch. I
crack the bottom of the window, on a cold sunny day and the heat
simply rises into the room.

On average it raises the room temp a good 10 degrees without and
forced air circulation. This morning, for example, the outside air
termperature is currently 41 degrees, the temperature inside the
solar heater at 7:30 AM was already 95. By noon it could be well
over 140. By then I'll be closing the window because the room will
be too warm. We're hoping this will drop the electric bill a few
bucks this winter.

Another comments on her design:

I just finished a solar heater for my south window yesterday. Mine is
like a box lid, made of 1" x2"s for the frame and a piece of
fiberboard for the top of the "lid" (calk it to make the inside
airtight along the joints). It has three 1" holes along the bottom of
the face (to pull in cold air from the floor) and a 1" x 4" slot at
the top of the face for the warm air to come out. And a flip down
cover over the air intake so I can close it at night. I may put a
piece of window screening on the backside of the intake holes so it
doesn't just suck dust off the floor and blow it out into the room
(yes, I'm not the worlds best housekeeper). It fits right up against
the lower half of the window frame and covers the glass. The inside
of the lid is painted black and the outside white (to match the window
frame). The paint is drying today, so I'm going put it up tomorrow.
I'm going to velcro it to the frame of the window so I can take it
down and store it during the summer.

If it works well, I want to make two more for my west windows to
capture the afternoon sun on that side of the apt. I want to see how
much it will lower my gas bill in the winter (before TSHTF and nat.
gas prices skyrocket).

Hope it works as well as they say it does. At least I'll stay war on
cold sunny days without running the gas heater all the time.

I'll let everyone know how it works.

And then she adds:

For those who are interested in utizing quick and dirty solar heaters
to augment your other heating:

It was 27 and cloudy when I woke up this morning so I turned on the
gas heat for an hour or so. When the sun came out full tilt, the
outside temp climbed to 35. I turned off the gas, opened the intake
holes on my solar heater and also opened the door to the greenhouse
(my little porch that I enclosed last month) and set a fan in the
hallway. I put a thermometer in my bedroom where the solar heater is
(I can't "hear" it working, so I needed to know if the warmth in the
room was wishful thinking or real). By noon, even though the outside
temp had only climbed to about 38, it was 70 degrees in the bedroom
and about 65 in the rest of the house. With the sun shining most of
the afternoon and the temp still about 38, the apartment has stayed
between 68-70 degrees and is quite comfortable for me with a
sweatshirt and sweat jacket on. So I'm going to go ahead and add the
other two heaters and see how it goes.

If anyone is interested, I'll be glad to post occasionally on this as
the weather gets colder.


Linda

THANKS Linda and others who helped with this post.

Here are a few links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design

Neat design with lots of pics:

http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2007/04/26/almost-free-garage-heat-just-drink-a-lot-of-soda/