DAVID KRUSCHKES'S LIVE-IN SOLAR GREENHOUSE

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Inside the house, running parallel to the collector "window", is a 3' X 56' dirt-filled growing pit in which we raise vegetables year round. Like the rest of the house, this bed of earth is insulated—as with our previous greenhouse-with four inches of foam to a depth of 16 inches, and with two inches of foam underneath as well. (We decided not to use stone for heat storage, because foam retains warmth 24 times better.)

The building's heat storage system-the twenty-eight water-filled 55-gallon drums shown in Photo 5—is located between the vegetable plot and our living space. These barrels absorb some of the day's total influx of energy and help to moderate both daytime and nighttime temperatures within the house. In the evening-as the drums radiate warmth throughout our home—we keep those Btu's indoors by putting portable insulation panels over the outside of the collector (as we learned to do with our first greenhouse).

That, in essence, is the whole shebang in a nutshell.

Now, what kind of heating performance do we get? To give you just a single example: One wintry February day when the sun was shining-but the temperature outside was a goose-pimpling 26° F—the house warmed up inside to 88° F . . . a temperature difference of 62°, brought about entirely by solar heat. Believe me, standing in this house on a sunny day can be an exciting and dramatic experience!

At night, the readings in the building may fall down into the sixties, but usually no lower (thanks to six inches of fiberglass in the main walls).

Yes, on certain nights and cloudy days, we do have to heat the place with wood. Whenever the sun is out, though, the house will more than likely stay warm all day and right through the following night. In the summer, in fact, our "greenhome" gets so outright torrid so often, we have to replace some of the plastic on the collector with mosquito netting.

I've tried to calculate our dwelling's total heat gain for the months of January, February, and March in order to get an idea of what our savings are, measured in fuels of various kinds. Using the solar data given for Madison, Wisconsin in the Climatic Atlas of the United States (U.S. Dept. of Commerce), and allowing for a 5% heat exchange loss due to the slightly translucent nature of my polyethylene "window", I arrived at a gross energy accumulation of close to 21.5 million Btu's for the three winter months. This is roughly the equivalent of:

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print