My Mother's House Part VI
(Page 4 of 5)
July/August 1982
By the Mother Earth News editors
We mounted the 5-mil vinyl on a frame of 1" clear pine by gluing and stapling panels of it to each side of the wood. In working with the material, we've learned that it's important to mount it when the temperature is roughly halfway between the expected extremes. Heat causes the vinyl to sag, you see, and cold can shrink it so much that it will split. At this point, we can only guess what the life expectancy of the material will be (it has lasted several years on storm windows), but we can say that it's easily survived three months of stagnation temperatures on the collector.
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When we're ready to put our new batch heater to work, it'll be plumbed in before the building's standard water-warmer to serve as a preheater. (Depending on the amount of hot liquid needed in the structure, the solar unit might even totally replace the more conventional one.)
THE SUN AS EXHAUST FAN
In "My MOTHER's House: Part IV" (see issue 73, page 134) we explained the natural air conditioning arrangement we installed in our earth shelter. As you may recall, the system is based on a pair of 15"diameter plastic pipes buried roughly 10 feet deep in the ground. Air is drawn through the tubes and cooled by its contact with the earthtempered plastic walls.
Of course, in order to have flow through the pipes, air must exit from the building at some other location . . . and we planned to use a natural phenomenon to encourage that movement. In that article, we explained how hot air would collect at the building's highest point and be exhausted through a vent located at the roof peak. We've had enough warm weather now to know that the system works, too . . . the cool pipes do draw, and hot air does exit at the ceiling. But—reasoning that if a little is good, more would be better —we've gone on to work up our own rendition of a solar chimney to boost the flow rate.
The dwelling's primary thermal tower is connected to the roofpeak vent in the center of the second story and is fabricated from sheet metal, insulation, and fiberglass-reinforced glazing. The 48"high, 72 "long box has one 10 "-wide passage through which house air moves (it has just about twice the cross-sectional area of the cool tubes, to avoid impeding flow) and a sealed 1-1/2"-deep solar collection chamber. The back of the latter cavity consists of black-painted sheet metal, which is heated by the, sun and thus causes the air behind it to rise. A ridge cap prevents rain from falling into the solar chimney, and a hinged flap shuts off flow on demand.
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