alt.energy.renewable

bill wrote:

> > New information: the pair of panels shown at the link I posted
> > earlier were adequate to keep that building at a comfortable
> > temperature round the clock even through cloudy days and nights
> > with temperatures below 0F.

> There are 3 options here morris, you are A) lieing, B) dreaming,
> or c) REALLY cherrypicking your houses.
> My house takes 25-30 thousand BTUs/hour to heat full time on a 0
> degree day. That means that *in the full desert sun* I would need 24
> meters squared of 100% efficient energy collection *and* energy
> storage for 500,000 btus to be delivered over the course of the
> night. Now, I will grant you that my house isn't the best insulated,
> but that's keeping it 65 degrees. most people use at least that much
> energy to heat their homes. Lemme guess, the "example" home you are
> using is a earth sheltered greenroofed home. Say 800 square feet at a
> construction cost of $750k? One of those? I was wrong, installing
> those panels of yours on every home in america would save far less
> than .5% of our oil consumption. Assuming that they get 100%
> conversion of full desert sun, they will *still* only produce an
> absolute maximum of 42 thousand btus per day, or enough to keep the
> average house warm for 1.5 hours. But that's just reality here in the
> trenches, don't let it bother you.

Not cherry-picked, it's just the only installation close enough
that I could participate in the installation and shoot pictures.

It's not even a house. It's a 30 x 40 (boringly conventional)
outbuilding where the owner has a workshop and works on his
equipment. There's 6" of fiberglass insulation all around and a
6" concrete slab floor. To the north and west, there's a road and
open fields - no sheltering windbreak.

Here's the link from the earlier post to reality out here on the
prairie:

http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/SC_Madison/

By fall, I'm planning to have sensors in place with this tiny
system connected to the web so that we anyone can pull up a web
page showing up-to-the-minute performance graphs:

http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/Projects/Monitor/

I think construction costs were in the $20K ballpark. :-)

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/