mount best SOLAR.KnowledgePublications.com

mount best
21 jul 2005
there's a lot more than the lovely chest fridge at 
http://tinyurl.com/cay4t.

the 80% wood stove might be more efficient with a concentric pipe chimney
with flue gas traveling up the inner pipe and room air traveling back
towards the stove in the space between the inner and outer pipes to make
a counterflow air-air heat exchanger with condensation, which might add
about 15% to woodstove efficiency and reduce air pollution and allow
burning wood with a higher moisture content with no efficiency penalty
(or maybe a gain :-) we might pressurize the stove air inlet slightly with
a small fan to assure adequate draft (given the cooler chimney) and to
regulate the heat output, and use a co detector in case the inner pipe
develops a leak and the room air fan fails. 

a heat pump with a 4-6 cop is nice, but a good solar heating system might
have a cop of 50 or more. john christopher's csi building in cold, cloudy
new hampshire is heated with "98% solar power and 2% fan power." pe norman
saunders calculates that some of his solar houses will only need "purchased
heat" for a few hours every 35 years. no wood. no heat pumps.

the reflective solar heating system might lose lots of heat through windows
at night and on cloudy days. a low-thermal mass sunspace with an insulated
wall between the sunspace and the living space and warm air circulating
between the two and no airflow at night might be a lot more efficient. the
barra system stores heat from sunspace hot air in ceiling thermal mass,
with little heat loss at night. a slow ceiling fan and thermostat might
bring warm air down from a low-e ceiling when a room is occupied.

as an alternative to a massy ceiling. fin-tube pipes near the ceiling
could both collect and distribute heat from a stratified storage tank,
with the help of a ceiling fan. the tank might also have a $60 1"x300'
pressurized pe pipe spiral near the top to make hot water for showers.

nick