Harold R. Hay: Solar Pioneer
(Page 9 of 17)
September/October 1976
By Mother Earth News Editors
There are also ways to increase the amount of the heat that a building's roof can radiate into the sky after you've pulled a panel of insulation back to expose that roof. You can, for example, simply flood the surface with water. This, of course, works even during the day. We tried it once on a house in Arizona and, even when the outside temperature was 95° F, the temperature inside the building was so low that I had to wear a sweater and coat to stay comfortable.
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Well. That led me to think about putting the sweater around the water up on the roof, instead of on myself. So we pill a plastic bag around the water to stop its evaporative cooling And we found that when we covered the bag of water during the day with a panel of insulation that the mass of the liquid would absorb heat from the living space that it covered. Then, when we slid our insulation back at night the container of water would radiate that heat off into the night sky. This kept the house comfortable up to a daytime outside temperature of about 106°.
Beyond that, for temperatures ranging up to 110 or 115 degrees you could flood some extra water right over the bags of the fluid. This you see, was another variation yet on our basic idea.
PLOWBOY: And what about temperatures even greater that 115°
HAY: Then, for the first time, you had to Use a little electricity to run a small fan-coil This stirred the air slightly in the living space, picked up some of the heat it contained, and dumped that heat on the roof And that's all you needed to maintain American standards of comfort in the Arizona house.
PLOWBOY: Would that system work anywhere?
HAY: We're talking now about my Sky-Therm system. When I added water to the "dry-therm" theory and began developing variations on the basic idea, the whole concept evolved into what I've now patented as the Sky-Therm method of heating and cooling a structure.
Yes, one variation or another of my system should work almost anywhere. A Sky-Therm incorporated into a house on, say, the Gulf Coast—where it's hot and humid in the summer—might differ markedly in both installation and operation, from one designed for a dwelling in New Mexico. And each one would probably differ considerably from the Sky-Therm system used to heat and cool a building in upper New York State. But one or another of my designs should work quite satisfactorily from the equator all the way up to the Arctic Circle.
They're designed to do that, you see. My system pur posely has a great deal of flexibility built into it so that, while a Sky-Therm house on the equator hardly resemble one constructed on the Arctic Circle each would have been carefully calculated to work with the climate in which it's located.
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