I've Got Solar Energy Working for me now!

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Third, we can pipe water into the bottom of the roofing panel's network of tubing ... pump that water up through the plumbing ... and allow the liquid to exit from the top of the tubes. Naturallysince the setup is designed to do exactly thatthe water is heated as it passes through this part of its circuit. (Depending on the seasonspring, summer, or fall35 to 50 gallons per hour of 54° water going INTO the panels comes OUT at a temperature of 130° to 160°F.) The heated water is next piped to a water heater in the cottage. When that tank is full, the excess goes to a solar heat storage tank built into the floor of the greenhouse. And when that reservoir can't take any more, the hot water is ducted as needed through the walls of a "double digester" methane production unit to maintain optimum digestion temperatures in the waste- into- fuel-and-fertilizer processor. The water can then be jettisoned back into the spring from which it originally came or pumped back up through the roofing panels for another circuit, depending on our needs or desires at the time. Any or all of this circulation, of course, can be controlled automatically by temperature sensors ... and a special sensor protects the system from freeze damages by automatically dumping all the water from the circuits whenever the temperature in the pipes drops to 36°F.

Fourth, air from the greenhouse can enter the roofing panels along the add-on room's south wall. The air is then heated as it rises through the cavities in the panels ... until it finally arrives in a 2 X 20-foot "collection chamber" along the roof's peak. At that point, the hot air is pulled down into the greenhouse again by a thermostatically controlled fan.

All the above possibilitiesand the manner in which we can manipulate some movable insulation panels in the greenhouse/spare room and/or shuffle heat from the add-on structure to the main part of the cottage and back againgive us a tremendous freedom of choice. The attached building can be a spare room. A hydroponic garden. A hothouse. A conservatory. We can keep the mass of water under the add-on room at a steady 54° year round, if we like, by running a constant 75 gallons per hour of spring water (fresh out of the ground) through it. Or we can circulate that water through the solar roof first in any one of several ways (closed circuit, one-time-through, 35 gallons per minute, 50 gallons per minute, etc.) to maintain the storage tank at any temperature from 54° up to the mid-70's.

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