On Apr 8, 2:13 am, Nomen Nescio wrote:
[...]

What a great idea.
I'll bet Jay has never even thought of that or done any type of a cost/benefit
analysis.

Interesting cost/benefit for one case. ~7 year to pay for it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/solar/house.html

Obviously it's a stretch to apply it to all houses. Interesting show,
nonetheless.

Entire show is he http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/solar/program.html

Thinking of checking out one of the houses that's featured in the show
(Somerville is one town over from where I work).
===============

I remember playing around Freshman year in college ('80). I was a tech
theatre major and 'borrowed' one of the Fresnel lenses. Found a beat
up old car radiator in the garage. Cut a 55 gal. drum in half, painted
the inside black, filled up the radiator with water, and proceeded to
set the el-cheapo experiment into motion.

Took about a minute, and the pressure built up enough that you could
hear the metal stressing out. The tranny lines, which were cut and
bent, began to straighten out. We took a few steps back. 30 seconds
or so later, and what little tranny juice had remained, shot out
fairly rapidly. We took a few more steps back.

Finally, the radiator just failed completely, as steam shot at high
pressure from whatever new orifices were being created.

We concluded: Stupid solar, might as well abandon this. Damn old
rusted cheap, sitting in the garage for 10+ years, radiator. Waste of
time... let's go do something constructive, like take the dirt bikes
out again...

Yeah, we were down a few quarts, so had to be properly oiled (heh)
beforehand, to ensure an nice uncontrolled experiment :P


Regards,
Jon