GADGETS
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In a recent Scientific American there is a picture of a
Neanderthal man; huge head and features, very hairy and
pictured with a sea shell on a cord around his neck.
The article judges him to be one of the early humans
because he had the shell around his neck. So, how does
that make him human? Gaudy, useless jewelry? Is
nonsense all around us? Maybe this relates to another
problem I have. I think we live under a kind of spell.
People are somehow stricken. How can they not notice
most of the new shopping centers use no daylight, no
windows, no skylights, only electric lights, yet the public
believes they are entering a solar age? How can they
watch the collapse of Building #7 of the World Trade
Center on 9-11, obviously done with pre-set explosives,
and believe the story the administration tells of all this?
In the Solar business 30 or 35 years ago we solved
many of the problems of heating and cooling buildings by
just using mass walls, windows and orientation. Today
the DOE ignores the energy leaks in the house and
instead builds expensive power lines from even more
expensive solar power plants in the desert to heat and
cool faulty buildings.
Ray Bliss, one of our great solar pioneers, wrote an
article in the Journal of Atomic Scientists in 1976 titled
“Why Not Build the House Right to Begin With”. Bliss
outlined what attention to orientation and windows could
do. Cut energy use in half. It could be cut in half again
today, the same way.
Of course, this is what we should be doing; it is what
we were doing 30 years ago. New Mexico was
prominent in all this because of the precedent set by the
ancient Cliff Dwellers in our Land of Enchantment – the
Indian Cliff Dwellers and later those who built with
adobes. The passive solar adobe was our synthesis and
triumph and did it ever work! While we are in this
wonderful house let me go farther.
The Passive Solar Adobe can be vastly improved if
there is a layer of insulation on the outside of the adobe
walls – the north wall particularly for the shady winter
weather where it will lose so much heat. The foam can be
sprayed or nailed right on to the wall then plastered over
just the way those experts on fake adobes know so well.
But, I have forgotten something. I have assumed the
house will be laid out close to a north/south grid and
more that the long axis will be east and west so there can
be enough south windows, with no bushes or trees
shading them, to provide the vast majority of heat during
our cold winter. North and south are rarely mentioned
now – as if proper orientation were an unnecessary
quality, regarded as an uncalled for prejudice. The layout
of communities is now done more as if the earth did not
spin on an axis, rather merely tumbled in space, all
orientations equal as justice demands. As long as TV
and radio are on schedule, what does anyone care?
So, back to the old Solar Adobe dream; some liked
an add-on greenhouse along the south wall. Much of the
south wall can be masked with a greenhouse where
windows could be opened or closed to let the hot air pour
into the house or remain. At Zomeworks we liked such
houses because we once sold plastic double glazing with
which to make the green houses (today check out Plastic
Supply) and also we sold Big Fin™passive inside solar
water heaters. These were 8” wide aluminum extrusions
that clamped on ¾” copper pipe and circulated to a tank
above them where hot water was stored and where
supplemental heat could be supplied during cloudy
weather. We sold hundreds of these in the 1970s and
1980s and dozens are still at work around Albuquerque.
We plan to make Big Fin again. Only decades later did
Chuck Marken explain to me what was best about our
inside water heaters: the ¾” pipes were so large they did
not become clogged with deposits. Thirty years later they
still work.
A greenhouse floods your adobe with warm air on
sunny days, heat is stored in all the internal adobe walls,
or perhaps in a massive adobe wall clad in selective
black – a “Trombe” wall - or, as in our 1972 house, in
which Holly and I still live, a wall of water filled 55-
gallon drums. Take your pick.
What if the weather is gloomy, even cold and
gloomy, as can happen even here in sunny New Mexico?
You may need a fire. We hope you have a wood burning
stove. You see, as Ian Lloyd explained succinctly to me
as he fixed up our house, there is always scrap, “wood
happens”. Even in the yard, that limb that broke is not
trash – it is fire wood! In New Mexico it is a rare winter
day that a properly done Trombe wall, drum wall or south
window doesn’t gain a lot more heat than it loses. Of
course, your roof must be stuffed with so much insulation
you could use it above the Arctic Circle. R-50 roofs are
common today, a great improvement over 30 years ago.
Here is the problem. The public doesn’t want the
simple stuff that works; they are human beings and they
want gadgets. Remember that Neanderthal? Today our
guides don’t care how many bison he killed or children he
fathered, only we, his descendents. They want to see the
shell amulet around his neck, useless, gaudy stuff and
most Americans are the same way. They want heat
pumps with motors and copper coils, photovoltaic
systems with inverters and wires. They want the kind of
stuff for which they conned all of us to give solar tax
credits, stuff to make you human, something to keep you
from being a mere animal, like a toad hibernating in the
dirt. The gadgets are certainly expensive, and the right
ones do work and, of course, you have tax credits for
gadgets. Some are just trying to stay warm and cool –
other, evidently more important members of our tribe, are
attending to ceremony which means gadgets. If this is
difficult to grasp it is for me, too. Why gadgets?
Kevin, at our shop, was near mournfulness as he
repeated the facts revealed to himself and Josh, our
student solar whiz. People just like gadgets. And,
moreover, Kevin and Josh know how to keep these gadget
people happy with their new universal passive heliostat
that is in the works.
I am stuck in the past, a mere animal as dull as a
hibernating toad. How can people today not appreciate
what we did 30 years ago? Today we even have people
like Marjorie Mullany and her thermal shades, almost as
good as a Beadwall, which stop nighttime heat loss. What
else do you need for your house?
What about summer - no problem, it always cools
off at night in Albuquerque. Shut the sun out and let the
cool night air through. The adobe walls cool off. Then
close it up in the day. Finally people’s eyes light up – a
chance to be human, to put in electric motors , to have
computer controlled fans that turn on at night when the
temperature drops and drive cool air through the house.
Did Neanderthal man stare out of his cave as easy-
to-get game drifted off as he was reminded to put on his
damned trinket? Not and stay alive.
Maybe we could deliver junk AC units, gleaming broken
copper heat exchangers and purposeful, but shorted out,
electric motors. Duct work leading nowhere, hanging
somewhere noticeable in our passive solar house, useless
gadgets to make us human.
The Scientific American seemed particularly pleased
when they detected paint on the sea shell amulets.
Another distraction from the necessities of life, but who
is in a better, more disinterested position to judge you
than one of your kind who digs you up with your stuff
tens of thousands of years later? It is not what you did
that matters; it is your ornaments. How can such opinions
run our society?
If you want to also stay cool in summer that is easy –
at least in Albuquerque and points north above 5,000’.
Just do what the old timers did. Open the windows at
night. A cool breeze through the house will sweep heat
away. You do need mass walls like adobe or block. To
check your efficiency, take two jugs of water and place
one within your house and the other sheltered from the
cold sky somewhere outside. Equally warm in the
evening, they are anything but equal by dawn. The
average house can almost certainly benefit from better
ventilation. You need a high up exit for hot air, a second
story is perfect. A fan is not necessary. The vents and
windows should be large, a percent or two of the exposed
area of the wall and floor which are to be cooled.
The citizens and the market place know best
how to divvy up the energy resources. Use the market
place. We won’t need a Smart Grid and power plants in
the desert. We will settle for smart people who turn the
lights off. We can use simple passive solar at the site.
The market place, not the DOE, would leave us such
wealth we could later even pretend we never used it. We
could have ceremonial solar kings and lab directors if no
one allowed them to direct our economy. We could bury
them with elaborate puzzling machinery.
“I bet that old boy only wore those damned shells
when they buried him”
Just as I gather no one pays much attention to the Leeds
folks any more – “expensive and bureaucratic”. We will
let you have your trinkets and platinum awards if you
first let us run the energy economy by what works and
pays. What about the investment bankers? What about
the government loan guarantees and grants that make the
new businesses rich? How could anyone get as rich
making plain old windows and adobe bricks?
The self confessed solar visionaries are ruining our
economy. The only match for the splendors of their
dream is the vileness of their scheme to have you, the
taxpayer, not themselves, pay everything.
Steve Baer
June 2010