Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer
(Page 8 of 17)
September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors
PLOWBOY: And that's how your principle of movable insulation was born.
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 ...
HAY: That's right. I called it my "dry-therm" principle because I was moving dry panels of insulation back and forth to control the heat—the thermal quality—of a given living space.
For example. A person lying on a bed under a metal or an asbestos roof can be very comfortable if he has just a simple movable panel of insulation between himself and that roof. If the radiation from his body goes up and hits the insulation and is reflected back down to his body ... he'll be warm. If the radiation goes up and the insulation isn't there, his body heat will travel on to the roof where it will be absorbed and re-radiated off to the night sky ... and he'll be cool.
It was just a question, then, of using that piece of movable insulation very much as you'd use a blanket. You could change the positions of the panels with your fingertips. It was a very simple arrangement ... too simple, in fact.
PLOWBOY: Why do you say that?
HAY: Because, as I quickly learned, the people in under-developed countries don't want to use a simple idea if they feel you've developed it just for them. That hurts their pride and their sensitivity about living in an underdeveloped nation. They can only afford the very simplest of technology, of course, and they know that so they want it ... but only after it's been accepted and used in the United States, or Britain, or France.
So, over the next 15 years or so—while I kept trying to get through to the Agency for International Development and to the United Nations, and while I worked on research projects in Venezuela and Colombia for private firms—I continued to develop my ideas into something that would be acceptable by American standards of comfort.
During the course of this work, we actually evolved six different thermal conditioning systems ... all based on this principle of movable insulation.
PLOWBOY: Such as?
HAY: Well the first was the "solar collection" principle . . . the idea of moving insulation back and forth, in our experiments over two containers of water so that one container is exposed at night and covered during the day while just the reverse is title for the other. This, of course keeps the water in the first bucket cold and that in the second warm ... 24 hours a day.
Then there's the principle of mass or thermal lag ... the flywheel effect. You can demonstrate this by simply covering a container of water with insulation and leaving it there day and night. The temperature of the mass of water will hardly change at all during a 24-hour cycle if the insulation is thick enough. The pyramids—with their tremendously thick walls surrounding very small burial chambers—are probably the best examples of structures which use this principle of thermal lag to maintain a constant temperature in their work areas At certain times of the year, however, this very simple phenomenon of thermal lag can be used to make even ordinary house more comfortable than almost any combination of furnaces and air conditioners or other "conventional" methods of comfort control.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 | 8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
Next >>
