Mother's Newspaper Column
March 1976
By the Mother Earth News editors
Here are a few more of THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS ® syndicated features which have appeared in 100+ newspapers over the past three and a half years.
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Some working mothers in California have come up with an idea that [1] gives them extra leisure time, [2] saves money on their food bills, and [3] cuts the energy requirements of their households. They've organized a dinner-cooking co-op and it works like this: Once every week, each woman cooks enough dinner for all seven participating families. By purchasing in larger quantities for that one meal, she usually gets a pretty good buy on meat, vegetables, etc., on a per-serving basis. At a specified time, a member from each of the other six households stops by with a container and carries off the portion of the meal prepared for his or her family. That's it . . . except for the fact that the first lady doesn't have to worry about preparing dinner again for a whole week!
THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS ®
... it tells you how
Despite rosy projections by the "expects", leasure bet that heating oil, electricity, wood, and coal (all of which jumped sharply in price last winter) will cost more than ever this coming fall. Figure on spending more money to keep your house warm, then, unless you switch completely or in part-to a source of "alternative" energy . . . such as sunshine.
That's not as farfetched as it may sound. William A. Shurctiff—of Cambridge, Massachusetts—for example, says that the simple solar heater shown here can be built for about $70.00 and installed quite easily in any window on the south side of a building. Incredibly enough, Shurcliff claims the unit will deliver an average of 7,000 British thermal units of heat per hour (or 35,000 Btu pet day) in the month of January in Massachusetts.
To put the heater into operation, you simply open the lower sash of the window and puff the collector's septumtongue one foot into the room. Cold (60° F) air in the house then travels downward (south) along the lower plenum, around the foot of the black septum, back upward along the sunlit upper plenum, and (at a temperature of 85° F) reenters the room. The sash is closed at night.
