David Wright: Passive Solar Design
(Page 5 of 16)
September/October 1977
By Travis Brock
PLOWBOY: OK. You began to learn about adobe once you'd moved to New Mexico. What else happened to you there?
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WRIGHT: Well, back in '71 or '72 Travis Price-a young student at St. Johns College in Santa Fe-and Keith Haggard, who was sort of a Northwest dropout who'd come to the Southwest looking for something, and I got together and attended a solar energy course that Bob Reines was teaching at the University of New Mexico.
Bob's course was enlightening . . . but his whole approach was flatplate collectors and domes and wind power, and we felt that it was a little too complicated and a little too costly for the common people. So we went out and looked around and decided that we'd try to take this beautiful old indigenous adobe architecture and fit it out with solar collectors.
We played around with that idea awhile-this was before the "energy crisis", you know-and it looked as if it might work. So we asked Bill Lumpkins, the architectural guru I was working with, and Peter Goodwin--a young man with money and an interest in such things who happened to be in the area-to join us. We also brought a local engineer by the name of Herman Barkman and Wayne Nichols--a young Harvard graduate who was very much interested in the commercial grassroots application of solar energy-into the group. That made seven of us and we called ourselves "Sun Mountain Design" and we were pledged to the development of low-cost, decentralized architecture that-we hopedwould use the so-called "alternative sources of energy" and bring a new kind of reasonably priced housing and other kinds of shelter to the masses.
Like everybody else, we started off our solar experiments with active fluid systems in which water or some other liquid was pumped through flat-plate collectors to pick up heat and then stored in big tanks somewhere until you wanted to extract the Btu's from the fluid. And then it was pumped around again through heat exchangers and so on.
This is an awfully complicated way to use solar energy and, after some study, we found that fluid systems were just too costly and too much trouble for most people to consider. We couldn't even afford to build and test a prototype active hydronic system of our own and we couldn't find any clients who were willing to put up $10,000 to find out if our ideas would work.
Well, we knew that George Lof had used air collectors fairly effectivelyhe'd gotten something like 20 percent efficiencyin his system up in Denver. So we began playing around with air collectors and found that, sure enough, air was a good transfer medium. It'd pick up heat in a collector panel and then carry those Btu's somewhere else if you wanted it to, and it would do it a lot less expensively than a hydronic system could. It just wasn't nearly as costly to build and seal a system that pumped air around as it was to build and seal a system that pumped water or some other fluid around.
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