Solar Heat Panel

Are you talking about one of these home made heater boxes?

http://www.homeconstructionimprovement.com/solar-box-window-heater/

I have been thinking about making one for years.

I have been contemplating adding some solar panels to the house - I'm interested to see where this post goes!

Michael

YEA! Solar power... one of my pet interests.

Recently saw yet another Science Channel show on the Sun.

As a basic "metric", solar output was stated to be approx 1KW per square meter. Which works out to about 3400 BTU.

Forced air of course takes power, albeit MUCH less than a space heater.

If the panels are on an outside wall, could you not have a vent near floor that would "feed" the bottom of the panel, then as the sun heats up the air inside the panel, have an upper vent to vent the heated air into the room? Then you wouldn't even need forced air. Of course this only works while Sun is up.

edit: I see a "box" window heater was previously posted. The one above would probably have a smaller depth footprint (mountable in limited space or at heights), and could be wider than a window, and it would not necessarily require a window (roof mountable, with fan), but a window unit does have it's own set of advantages.

I believe the ancient Roman's used a similar technique to provide "air conditioning". A "chimney" on south facing wall, air inside heated by sun, rises, and creates a "draft". Then pipes set 6 ft underground, and entering the house, pulled in air and cooled it, all without any machinery.

http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/surv/aircond.htm

An alternate approach might be to use a "coolant"/"liquid" based system where the heat can be concentrated and stored (like in a hot water heater) for use when the sun isn't up, like at night, when it is going to be colder, which is exactly when you'd want the room heated I would expect.

Of course there's always the Heliostat solution using liquid salt as the thermal storage medium. (Just kidding)

Average sunshine by city:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/online/ccd/pctposrank.txt

Yup, it would figure that the openings would have to be larger for natural draft. I suppose one solution (whole-out purist) would be a small PV solution to charge 12 V batteries and use them to run several
high-efficiency/high-volume 12 V fans in parallel with some kind of low-voltage thermostat. Of course all that depends on how much air volume (CFM) is needed.

Running it all at 12V (no inverter to 120VAC) I would think might make it simpler and more efficient (if you did PV for the fans).

My friend Michael had a wind turbine on his 43ft sailboat to help recharge the batteries. Noisy little sucker, but it did a good job, especially out in unobstructed water. Wind is VERY cool.

Hi st!ke,

I have very fond memories of working with DEC equipment back in the '80s. This write up on the PDP-8 might interest you....
http://www.grc.com/pdp-8/pdp-8.htm

Regards,
dbCooper

I learned to program on a PDP-8L in the early 70s. We had to punch paper tape with our programs written in a long obsolete language called FOCAL.
Paul

Michael,

Hydro will pay you $.80 per KW/h hour generated and put back in the grid. We are going to cover the roof with them at work and install 1000w metal halide fixtures over them. Powered by the $.08 KW/h we buy. Not a real efficient transfer of energy but we will still make money. :laugh:

Steve

Obviously I'm not familiar with your setup, is a "water wall" (or other thermal mass storage) worth considering?

I saw some stuff under the "Heat Storage" section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design