Plowboy Interview: Harold R. Hay Talks About Solar Energy

By The Mother Earth News Editors
Published on September 1, 1976
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The Hay Sky-Therm house in Atascadero, California. Its innovative solar design includes rooftop insulating panels and bags of water used for passive cooling.
The Hay Sky-Therm house in Atascadero, California. Its innovative solar design includes rooftop insulating panels and bags of water used for passive cooling.
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Harold R. Hay, solar energy pioneer.
Harold R. Hay, solar energy pioneer.

Steve Baer (developer of the drum wall, beadwall, skylid,and other solar hardware that works) often tells about someof the first meetings he attended of the International SolarEnergy Society and other “official “solar organizations.

“Everybody there would be talking about sophisticatedcollectors and tracking systems and very exotic and expensive surfaces that were marginally more efficient absorbers ofthe suns rays and multi-million-dollar research projects,”says Steve.And, usually, the guys doing all the talkingdidn’t have a working prototype of anything they werespouting off about.

“And then Harold Hay would get up and he’d have someactual test data taken from some incredibly simple and lowcost experiment he’d just ran. And everybody would say,‘You mean that’s all you’re doing? You’re just moving someinsulation back and fourth? And they’d all go back to theirdiscussion of some idiotic idea that would probably neverwork–but which was sure to cost the taxpayers of, thiscountry several million dollars. They just couldn’t appreciatethe genius of the man.”

Genius indeed. And in far more than the field of solar energy For during his life Harold R. Hay has been–at various times–a political reformer, the developer of what is probably, the world’s most widely used wood preservative, the originator ofan internationally recognized municipal water purification treatment, the head of several private research projects, a U.S. Government agency’s official International Building Materials Advisor, and many other things. And always–and above all–Hay has been His Own Manwhich is a rather forgotten skill in this age of conformity.

Still, it’s Mr. Hay’s work with solar energy for which he is currently best known. As well he should be. For the Hay Sky-Therm system of heating and cooling a house works the way a solar heating/cooling system should work: with no pumps, no fans, no circulating liquids, no freezeups, no boil-overs, no trouble, no noise, no dirt.

And this is no mere theory. Harold Hay built his first passive solar heating/cooling system into a house in India 20 years ago. Ten years later–on Arizona property owned by another solar pioneer (John Yellott)–he constructed and exhaustively tested a much improved version of the original idea. In 1973, yet another experimental Hay solar house was built and evaluated in Atascadero, California. And, at last count, at least 21 other Sky-Therm houses were under construction in various parts of the United States.

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