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re: heating oil and gas costs
13 aug 2005
snow wrote:
>...to my shock i was about to order the prebuy yesterday and the price
>soared from $2.19 gal to $2.39 gal in one day... i use 1100 gallons
>annually in a large house. so the price jumps are major for me. anyways,
>i guess there is no frugal way out of this...
you might airseal and blower-door test the house, and add an inexpensive
lean-to sunspace over the south wall. each square foot of south sunspace
glazing can provide the heat equivalent of 1 gallon of oil per year. i'll
be talking about how to heat houses with sunspaces on friday 9/23/05 at
the first pa renewable energy festival near allentown...
http://www.paenergyfest.com
houses need several times more heat energy than electrical energy, and
solar heat can be a hundred times cheaper than solar electricity, not
counting valuable floorspace. ohm's law applies to both.
sunspaces with lots of thermal mass cost a lot and collect solar heat
inefficiently. low-mass sunspaces get cold and lose little heat to the
outdoors at night. windows to living spaces lose heat all night and on
cloudy days. how often do we need to look out windows at night?
a sunspace can be a simple air heater, eg polycarbonate "solar siding."
people can use deeper sunspaces, with shading and venting for comfort.
a lean-to greenhouse made with double-curved 1x3s can cost less than
a dollar per square foot.
a small sunspace that collects little heat compared to what a house needs
doesn't need thermal storage. a larger one might store heat in a ceiling,
as in the excellent barra system, virtually unknown in the us...
nick
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