DAVID KRUSCHKES'S LIVE-IN SOLAR GREENHOUSE

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Don't believe anyone who tells you differently: Solar energy can be used-right now, today-in place of other fuels. I know, because for more than a year and a half my family has been living in an owner-built, 1,000-square-foot solar greenhouse/home.

That's right, we live in a greenhouse . . . of sorts. Under one roof we have [1] a 170-square-foot vegetable garden, [2] 660 square feet of comfortable living space, and [3] a row of water-filled drums which store the heat generated by our huge solar collector-window (and which take up the remaining 170 square feet of our residence).

An unusual setup? We like to think so! Of course, the greenhouse isn't 100% energy self-sufficient—and it doesn't provide us with all the vegetables we eat—but it is nice inside, and we've managed to cut our home's heating bill by one-third to one-half of what it ordinarily would be.

Let me say that this is not the first such abode that we've lived in. Our first experiment in cohabitating with plants began three years ago when John Baldus and I built a greenhouse addition to a little 16' X 20' cottage. As you can see in Photo 1, this structure amounted to nothing more than a wooden frame covered on all sides with 4-mil (.004") polyethylene. We spent a total of $200 to complete the project.

Our initial tiny, add-on greenhouse came with a couple of features not usually designed into such units (see MOTHER NO. 36 for other examples of solar greenhouses). For instance, we insulated the plot of earth where plants would be grown with four inches of styrofoam on all sides, and two inches on the bottom. Also, we rigged portable panels of insulation so that they could be used to cover the greenhouse at night and thereby reduce radiant cooling.

That first small "nursery cottage" was quite a big success. Not only did the solar greenhouse allow tomatoes to be grown throughout our Wisconsin winter, but the sunlight filtering through the polyethylene provided just about all the Btu's we needed to heat the structure . . . even with snow on the ground.

We constructed our present dwelling in the fall of 1974. This time, we designed everything from the ground up, and—as you can see in the accompanying photographs—the building's main noticeable feature is the 300-square-foot "collector panel" that runs along its south wall.

The large collector consists of twin sheets of 4-mil polyethylene stapled to opposite sides of wood struts . . . nothing an enterprising third-grader couldn't put together. (Yes, a single sheet of plastic would let in more sunlight. However, it would also let out a lot of heat . . . which is why we used the two thicknesses of poly.) The whole assembly juts out from the wall at a 60° angle from the horizontal, which means that here in Wild Rose, Wisconsin-at 44° north latitude-the panels face almost squarely into Ole Sol's radiance at high noon in January.

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