Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer
(Page 7 of 17)
September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors
How could I use just what I had at hand—mud, cow dung, the sun, the simplest of tools, maybe a very few pieces of sheet metal or insulation—to construct a comfortable house? How could I heat the building with nothing when it was cold and cool it with nothing when it was hot?
RELATED CONTENT
A Plowboy Interview with Shuttleworth, who discusses everything from the business of the magazine i...
The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins, author of the 1976 essay, "Energy Strategy: The Road Not T...
The Plowboy Interview: Frank Herbert May/June 1981 SCIENCE FICTION'S "YELLOW JOURNALIST" IS A HOMES...
The PlowBoy Interview Rolling Thunder July/August 1981 A Native American Medicine Man To his neighb...
The Plowboy Interview Kent Whealy January/February 1982 Kent Whealy The Seed Savers Exchange As we ...
PLOWBOY: And?
HAY: Well I realized—as primitive man must have realized and as the animals realize but as modern man very seldom realizes—that the answer was actually quite simple. I'd just have to design with the climate. And what kind of climate did I have to work with in India'? One in which the days were generally too hot for comfort, but in which the nights could become quite cool.
The people in underdevelopedcountries don't want to use a simple idea if they feel you've developed it just for them.
Now the value of nocturnal radiation—the cooling effect we get at night, especially when the sky is clear—is often overlooked by modern man ... although it's been known by our species for thousands of years. Out in the desert, for instance, the effect of night sky radiation is actually strong enough to freeze water when the temperature of the air around that water is still as high as 50° F. They've been freezing ice in the deserts of Iran this way for centuries.
PLOWBOY: I hadn't thought about that.
HAY: Very few of us do these days. But I had to think about it, you see, because nocturnal radiation was one of the very few things I had to work with. That, and the hot sun during the day. And, as I began to consider these two forces, I realized that it was only a matter of balancing one against the other to get the round-the-clock comfort I wanted to build into my house.
PLOWBOY: And this was in ....
HAY: This was 1954. Others had been studying nocturnal radiation but I think I was one of the first to actually use the phenomenon this way ... as the other side of the solar radiation coin, so to speak. Once I had carefully analyzed the situation, though, it was a very obvious thing to do.
I've found, you see—whenever faced with a complex problem—that, almost always, the first and wisest step to take in solving that problem is to reduce it—confine it—to its simplest terms. In this case—when I was trying to design comfort into an extremely low-cost house for use in India—my most basic goals were to [1] protect the building's living area from outside heat during the day and [2] open it up so that it could radiate heat away during the night.
Viewed in those extremely simple terms, it became very obvious that, no matter how I placed the insulation in the dwelling, that insulation would be correctly positioned only about half the time. If I set it up to keep heat out during the day, it also kept cool air out at night ... and if I left it off entirely so that the cool of the night could come into the house, the day's heat would also flood in. What I needed to be able to do was move the insulation from one place to another and back again during every 24-hour period.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
Next >>
