I've Got Solar Energy Working for me now!

Image Gallery This view of the west side (if the remodeled Dycus cabin quite dramatically shows the exceptional use that the Dycus family has made, of the native stone in their corner of northern Georgia. The original cottage has been faced with the material... as were both the east and the west sides of the greenhouse/spare room the family added to the cabin. The stone walls on the original cottage and the sides of the greenhouse are all about 12 inches thick. The inside surfaces of the greenhouse walls are covered with three and one-half inches of insulation ... which has been covered, in turn, with recycled brick salvaged from some old burned-out buildings. Note that the south wall of the added-on greenhouse (the wall away from the main house) is not faced with stone. Instead, it's six inches thick ... filled with insulation ... and covered with wooden siding.

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Is it practical for the "average" family to use solar energy to heat its house here in the United States? My answer is an emphatic yes. And I base that answer on three verifiable facts: [1] a typical U.S. home for a family of four contains approximately 1,600 square feet of living space, [2] about one hundred and thirty million Btu's of heat energy are needed to keep that typical building warm for one year, yet [3], on the average, six times this amount of heat energyin the form of solar radiationfalls on the structure's roof annually.

Of course, if we follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, we find that folks living here in my home state of Georgiapart of the so-called "Sun Belt"are even more blessed than that. On the average, our homes receive ten times (not just six) as much solar radiation every year as we need to keep them warm. And that, at least in my opinion, makes this section of the U.S. what I call "maximum solar engineering feasibility country".

In other words, if any part of the nation should be able to heat its houses entirely or almost entirely with the sun, this is it. And solar heat will work here in Georgia ... even as far north in the state as you can go. I know, because I have a small cabin up in the tiny mountain town of Blue Ridge (just a few miles south of the Tennessee/Georgia line), and I've been successfully operating what I call a "solar roof" on that cabin ever since March of 1974.

MAN'S USE OF SOLAR HEAT IS NOTHING NEW

The capture and use of solar energy for space heating has been going on for a long, long time. As this magazine has frequently pointed out (see, for instance, the David Wright Interview in MOTHER NO. 47), many of the planet's earlier civilizations tempered and warmed their homes with the sun merely by the way in which the structures were positioned and the material in those buildings (often above or stone) was used.

I've even heard of ancient temples that were heated by small streams of water which had first been diverted through sunwarmed beds of rock. I like ideas like thatideas which are simple, yet effectiveand I've tried to incorporate such concepts into my own solar energy designs.

HOUSES CAN BE A LOT MORE COMFORTABLE, YET USE A LOT LESS ENERGY

I've worked in the construction industry for the past ten years and I began studying the way we build houses in this country ten years before that. After two decades of gathering information on the subject, I've come to the conclusion that the typical "modern" U.S. home could hardly be designed to waste more energy than it does. Nor to deliver less real living value than it does.

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