THE SUNDWELLINGS PROJECT

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This meant two things: First, the design team would have to work in the classically beautiful Southwestern architectural motif (which uses adobe brick walls, flagstone floors, peeled pine roof beams, and so on) . . no far-out domes, zomes, or plastic bubbles. Second, all the pumps, fans, and other high-technology geeble-fetzers usually found in solar heating setups would have to go. Whatever kind(s) of solar heating equipment the design team decided on would have to be—above all—simple and reliable.

THE FOUR TEST UNITS

Ultimately, it became apparent to the Sundwellings designers that they could get the most information per dollar spent if they were to build—and carefully monitor the performance of— four separate dwellings: one featuring a lean-to greenhouse, a second utilizing a Trombe wall collector, a third unit employing the "direct gain" concept, and a fourth structure (similar in construction to the other three, but having no special "solar" features) to serve as a control. (See the accompanying illustrations for details.)

Construction of the four 20' X 40' test units began early in 1976. Mark Chalom, Aubrey Owen, and Quentin Wilson—three highly creative (and enthusiastic) solar energy experimenters from the northern New Mexico area—served as on-site construction foremen for the project. (As part of their duties, these three men provided workers with two hours of instruction each day on solar energy fundamentals and basic building techniques.)

The 16 trainee-workers who participated in the project—all men from the surrounding pueblos and villages—did their own millwork, quarried flagstones, cut timber, and made all the adobe bricks for each "Sundwelling". (Virtually all the materials used in the four buildings came from the immediate area.)

The Sundwellings test units are essentially identical in size, construction, and compass orientation . . only the solar heating features differ from one building to the next. This makes it possible to compare the performance of the three different modes of heat collection on a direct basis.

To get the hard facts on how well each dwelling performs relative to the others, the Sundwellings engineers placed 50 separate thermocouples in strategic locations inside each of the four buildings. (In addition, the butane-fired backup heaters installed in the four test units are equipped with individual metering devices.) Periodically, the information provided by these probes—as well as that taken from meteorological monitoring equipment set up outside the dwellings—can (and will) be fed into a computer for detailed analysis.

AN ONGOING EXPERIMENT

Whether the new passively solar-heated Ghost Ranch guest cottages will indeed obtain 70 to 80% of their midwinter heating requirements from the sun (as the designers have projected) is anyone's guess at this point. Although the Sundwellings test modules are now complete, the first results from this ongoing study of passive solar heating won't be in until the spring of 1978 (since it'll take a full year to gather a meaningful amount of data).

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