Free of the power grid, stick your tongue out at the power company. Wouldn’t it be great? Oh yeah! Except figuring the cost of materials and time invested building solar electric panels can make the head swim. Don’t get me wrong, it is possible but figuring in peripheral equipment, mounting arrays, wire, battery banks and personal time contribution the break even point for our household would be long after my ashes drift down river. For us it seems our greatest immediate benefit is solar heat not solar electric.
Poking around forums and DIY sites dedicated to solar energy brought me to conclude supplemental solar heat has low construction costs and a break even point little as one or two heating seasons. So take advantage of sunny days and give the furnace (and our budget) a break. That’s what I call the greatest immediate benefit. If all winter the furnace gets a couple afternoons off every week that’s money not needed to feed and maintain it.
Our family room addition is hard to heat ‘cuz the main heat duct is distant enough to limit how much gets to the room. It’s a perfect candidate for sunny day supplemental heat. So our first solar heat collector has an intended victim.
One of the easiest and least expensive DIY heat panels to build (called a screen collector panel) is one of the most efficient. QCAD and I have spent lots of quality time together. OK, QCAD may disagree. What we designed is a hybrid version. Twelve 80MM-12V computer case fans will draw cool room air into the panel bottom and circulate it up through the collector finally pushing heated air from the top into the room. A normally open disc snap switch will turn the fans on when air temperature at the panel top is high enough and off when temp drops enough. A solar electric charged battery bank will power the 12V fans. Good plan, huh?
This is an experimental collector designed with easily removed glazing for internal alterations. Each of the dozen fans will be individually switched on or off. It will be possible to go from a snap switch that closes at 40° C to a 45°C one. Of course that assumes computer fans will work. We will see. The plan is to fine tune the first so collector two and beyond evolve, go together faster, cost less and outperform the first. I’ll buy that.
Lumber cut, fitted, squared, glued and screwed together. To verify acceptable fit the 4 X 8 ft sheet of foil faced insulation got slid in place. A couple days ago Janice came to the shed. Her expression conveyed the exclamation she verbalized: wow, I didn’t know it would be that big! Seems she imagined it about the size of a 50 watt solar electric panel. Now she’s referring to it as the monstrosity in the back. Hope that sentiment is good.
The bad news, cost of materials and quantity of work remaining means we’ll get little from it this spring. The good news, fabrication is happening.
Cool! Actually I’m thinking hot on sunny days all fall, winter and spring!
Oh the sacrifices to satisfy my water fixation.
It was only a 14′ aluminum fishing boat with a 15hp outboard and a trailer that looked as though it had about 50 coats of paint, all of them peeling from age, but it was mine. Granted it saw little use last summer ‘cuz it was our first summer in this place and there was plenty to do. Still, I really didn’t want to sell it but someone made an offer and the truck was in need of ball joints so I bid the boat farewell. An old saying goes “the two happiest days of boat ownership is the day you buy it and the day you sell it” but that ain’t necessarily true.
Colder times when local bodies of water usually aren’t good for boating (that ice thing) also means time inside while thoughts wander. My thoughts wandered to when a hard drive met its great reward and among other lost data was plans to build a hydrofoil boat. I think the technical term is “crashed” not “met its great reward”. Of course everyone knows to backup that kinda stuff on a thumb drive and/or CD/DVD or one of the online backup services. Did I? Nope!
After all isn’t it common knowledge once it’s on the “net” whatever “it” is remains online forever? So if I found it online before it’s still available. Right? In this instance that was accurate. The big “G” search engine, the one with the new ‘you got no privacy’ policy found the PDF file in about a nanosecond. Yeah, you guessed it I have the file in half dozen places besides the hard drive.
We aren’t talking a fancy vessel but the hull went beyond curvature of the bow to a gracefully curved topside. The claim is the plywood is stressed in a manner that creates a light and sturdy “monocoque” (sounds naughty doesn’t it?) structure. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of curves since I developed facial hair, if you know what I mean. But when it comes to a box to fasten an outboard motor and experimental hydrofoil wing configurations to, fewer curves is OK by me.
To the drawing board, actually CAD program to tailor the original design (from somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 years past) to my liking. At this point enough foil configurations have been drawn to lend new meaning to the “life is short” saying ‘cuz there ain’t enough life left for me to build and take all of them for test flights.
When all is said and done, and the little 9.9hp outboard in the front shed (for now) raises the hull so the foils fly through the water I fear it won’t be enough oomph for the adrenalin rush desired. The quest for a more powerful outboard and the means of paying for it will begin.
Never mind the “honey do” list that grows ever longer and more urgent now that consistently above freezing temperatures have arrived. I wanna build a boat. “She who must be obeyed” will understand. Well she will right after the greenhouse is assembled and expanded veggie garden landscaping is done and family room roof is re-covered.
OK, there are a few teeny weenie things to deal with before boat construction begins. Stay tuned.
