David Wright: Passive Solar Design
(Page 6 of 16)
September/October 1977
By Travis Brock
It was kinda nice, too, the way you could use the traditional Southwest floor-which is just brick on sand or concrete-as the heat sink of an air system. We built some ducting so that we could take hot air off our collectors and then blow it down under one of those traditional floors. We got some nice heat retention that way on a very cost-effective basis. Our first couple of air systems were marginal but, eventually, we put two or three together that cost a lot less than hydronic systems and which worked pretty well.
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PLOWBOY: So you made your fortune and lived happily ever after. This is kind of a revolutionary idea to most modern designers . . . but it wasn't revolutionary to the primitive cultures of this planet at all.
WRIGHT: No. It was just about then that Sun Mountain Designs began to have a really hard time of it. We didn't have enough clients to keep all seven of us working and we were beginning to realize that a bunch of guys can't forge themselves into a design team by just getting together one day and saying, "Hey, we're gonna be a team." You have to have the right balance of talent and attitude and we didn't quite have the whole thing. The chemistry just wasn't quite right.
So we split up at the end of two years and we went our separate ways. Bill Lumpkins is still doing solar adobes on his own in Sante Fe and Herman Barkman is very much involved with active solar systems, heat pumps, and commercial jobs. Wayne Nichols is a self-employed developer building solar homes in the Sante Fe area. Keith Haggard, practically singlehandedly, put together the New Mexico Solar Energy Association . . . which has really been a prime mover in getting the word about solar usage out to people all over the nation. Peter Goodwin is also involved with the NMSEA and other projects of his own. Travis Price went to New York and has made some headlines by helping to put rundown and abandoned tenements into the hands of neighborhood selfhelp groups who then completely revitalize the old buildings and sometimes install solar water heaters and wind-powered electrical generators on their roofs. And I'm out here in California still doing the same thing I started in New Mexico.
PLOWBOY: But that's good. Sun Mountain Designs may no longer be together as a group . . . but now that you've spread out you're probably reaching more people than ever with your solar energy ideas.
WRIGHT: Oh sure. I think it was very important that we got together just when we did and that we shared the experiences we shared. But it was probably even more important that we broke up when we did and all moved on in our own individual ways to have the impact we now have on people in different regions of the country. There's an awful lot of work with passive solar systems going on right now in a lot of places that springs directly from the experiments done by Sun Mountain Designs back in '73 or '74.
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