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This supplemental heater has some nice "fad-safe" features that keep it from sucking warmth out of your house if you forget to close its window on heavily overcast days or in the evening: [1] even on gray days, the sky itself delivers some radiation to the unit, [2] the collector is insulated on all sides so that it retains best, and [3] if the air in the collector in cooled, it merely becomes more dense and sinks to the unit's bottom . . . instead of flowing back into the house.

Of course this supplemental heater is just that—supplemental-and, on an average winter day, will supply only about 15% of a residence's heating needs. But that's not bad for a $70.00 unit that you can haul home on top of your car and assemble with simple hand tools.

What with the new latex paints and all these days, hardly anyone uses—or even remembers how to make-white-wash. Which is kind of foolish. Because, when it comes to sheer ease of application and extreme economy, I don't believe there's a paint on the modem market that can compete with whitewash. If you'd like to test that theory, here's a formula recommended by the United States Department of Agriculture: Soak 50 pounds of hydrated (slaked) lime in 6 gallons of water until you have a paste. If you can't get slaked lime, put 25 pounds of quicklime into 10 gallons of boiling water, cover the mixture and let it set for four days or longer. Either method will yield about eight gallons of lime paste.

Next dissolve 6 pounds of salt in 3 gallons of boiling water, let the solution cool and add it to the 8 gallon batch of paste. Then stir in 3 pounds of white portland cement. That's it. You're ready to paint!

Whitewash applies most smoothly to a slightly damp wall . . . and if you want to do a really good job on a surface that's been coated before, wash off the old layer with hot water and vinegar or a weak solution of hydrochloric acid. You can then spray on your low-cost paint substitute with a gun (after straining the mixture through three thicknesses of cheesecloth) . . . or, in the spirit of Tom Sawyer, just slap it right on with a brush. I prefer the second form of application.

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