THE HELIO THERMICS SOLAR-HEATED AND -COOLED HOUSE

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The exterior walls of the prototype Helio house—which has been in operation since February of 1976—are all framed with 2 X 6's instead of the customary 2 X 4's. This makes it possible for those walls to contain batts of fiberglass insulation that are a full five and one-half inches thick, rather than the "standard" three and a half inches used in most contemporary structures. And the ceiling of the building is insulated with a thick 12 inches of the fiberglass . . . which is twice the six inches recommended as "heavy" insulation for the Greenville, South Carolina area by many authorities on the subject.

This "extra" insulation, plus the fact that every window in the Helio Thermics house is glazed with thermopanes (double layers of glass), makes the building extremely easy to heat in the winter and to cool during the summer. Or—to put it another way—by spending a little more to insulate their structure in the beginning (by putting "first things first"), the Granger brothers were able to drastically reduce the size, complexity, and cost of everything that followed.

THE COLLECTOR

The economies of Randy, Mike, and Larry's approach to the construction of a sun-warmed and -cooled house are perhaps most obvious when you inspect what is usually one of the most expensive of all the components that go into such a system: the collector. The Grangers' building—in the strictest sense—doesn't even have one!

What the boys did was take something (the attic) that virtually all houses have anyway and, at very little additional qxpense, modified it into a "hot air solar absorber". This modification was actually quite simple.

Since the optimum angle for the placement of a solar collector is generally considered to be latitude plus 15 degrees, and since Greenville, South Carolina is located approximately 35 degrees north of the equator, the south-facing slope of the attic's roof was set at 50 degrees to the horizon. Translucent, reinforced, tedlar-coated, corrugated fiberglass sheeting ("Filon", the brand named panels used on some greenhouses) was then attached with weatherproof screws directly to the rafters on that side of the attic in place of standard roofing material.

This created 400 square feet of "collector" . . . at the rockbottom cost of only about $2.50 per square foot! That's an exceptionally low figure, as anyone experienced in the construction of solar collectors will tell you. Especially low, in fact, since two layers of the Filon were fastened to the whole 400 square feet of collector surface.

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