Subject: Re: 80% SOLAR MATERIAL efficiency

From: [email-masked] (Nick Pine)
Date: 4 May 1995 07:05:26 -0400

<[email-masked]> fuzzed:

>... all info is appropriate in any newsgroup that caters to people
>trying to advance benign energy production.  So Pv is appropriate in thermal
>and thermal is appropriate in renewables.

Sure, and if you wrap up a chair in enough gauze, it's a beachball :-)

Nick

---

From: [email-masked] (Nick Pine)
Date: 5 May 1995 02:51:53 -0400

R. Wesley Foster <[email-masked]> wrote:

>Surely, N. isn't concerned about the current state of world affairs but
>rather more into the greed driven side of energy.

Au contraire, mon ami. I've been interested in solar heating for the last 20
years. I added Trombe walls to my old house in 1980, and I'm still improving
it (see below.) This started out being fun for me because I liked the idea
of getting something for nothing, but now it's a fairly expensive hobby.

Since our big oil war, I'm quite conscious of the connection between oil
and the loss of 500,000 human lives in Iraq, by one estimate, most of them
children, who died from starvation, poor sanitation and no medical treatment
after we killed 100,000 of their parents directly, for cheap oil...

Amory Lovins said in his 12/94 Atlantic article that we probably would not
have invaded Iraq had they only grown broccoli. For years, we shamelessly
funded both Iran and Iraq in their war with each other, supplying weapons
and money to both, in an attempt to create a "balance" that would ensure
cheap oil for our wasteful energy habits and make Exxon rich. Kuwait was
more or less created entirely by Standard Oil, setting up some rich sheiks
to sell us oil cheap in the 50s. WE are the international terrorists now,
not the arabs... We walk up to the arabs and point a gun at their heads
and say "You don't REALLY want to raise the price of your oil, do you?"

In private life this would be called extortion or robbery. Imagine going down
to the supermarket with a gun and telling the checkout clerk that the oranges
are too expensive. You would like to pay a bit less... Imagine walking into
the bursar's office with a gun, and saying you don't want to pay more than
$500 for the linear systems course, because the professor is so dull. Even
before George Bush, the five previous presidents, including gentle, Christian,
blessed, peacemaking Jimmy Carter, had publicly threatened war in the middle
east if they "cut off our vital supply of oil," and I believe that included
raising the price significantly... We are addicted to oil in this country,
as well as cocaine.

It's  their  oil, not ours, and they have a basic right to sell it for any
price that they want to sell it for. We have been bullying them into selling
it to us cheaply for years. And killing them, lately, en masse. This is not
a good thing. Killing people is bad, and it cannot go on. For one thing,
there is only a finite amount of oil in the world. It WILL run out...

>...a chair wrapped in gauze couldn't be a beachball but rather a gauzeball!!!

You may be one of the great fuzzy thinkers of our time :-)

Article: 3458 of alt.architecture.alternative
From: [email-masked] (Nick Pine)
Newsgroups: alt.architecture.alternative
Subject: radiant floor heating, sort of...
Date: 4 May 1995 06:48:43 -0400
Organization: Villanova University

My 1820 stone farmhouse now has a transparent steep south-facing attic
roof, which makes a very nice space upstairs, as well as a 600 ft^2
solar air heater, with a roof made from 4' wide x 12' long sheets of
clear corrugated polycarbonate plastic greenhouse roofing that costs
about a dollar a square foot. The south roof still looks a lot like
the north roof now, which is still covered with corrugated metal...
Except that when the sun is shining, and you look at it dead on, you
can still make out the cedar shingle purlins under the Dynaglas. I think
they would disappear if I put some shadecloth underneath, on the inside.

And we are starting to renovate the bathroom. The first step has been to
take all the plaster off one wall and rough-point the stone on the inside.
The wall was very dry, since it has polyurethane foam on the outside.

When we got down to the floor, there was this ugly new baseboard radiator
there, near the gap where the wood floor met the stone wall, getting in
the way of some cabinets-to-be, so we took off its metal skin and soldered
the fin tube into the loop downstairs, near the basement ceiling, just under
where it used to run on the floor above. It should collect less dust there.
I haven't used the oil burner in a year.

I wonder why more people don't put fin tubes under uninsulated first floors
of houses, near basement ceilings. Heat rises, and a wood floor has a low
R-value, and if the heat spreads out under the first floor, the heat transfer
area is increased, so the R-value of the floor is a lot less important...
I think I could make the floor disappear, mathematically. Perhaps the basement
ceiling should have a radiant barrier, some builder's foil stapled to the
ceiling, under the fin tubes... 

When I first moved into this house, the old radiators had frozen (in fact,
all the plumbing had frozen--ick) and when I got new baseboard radiators
put in, I noticed that some of the few electrical outlets in the rooms
disappeared, and the rooms got a bit smaller, since in many cases, furniture
had to be farther out from the walls... I'm thinking now of moving all the
fin tubes under the floors, so that all that will show above will be the
holes where the pipes used to come up from the basement.

Nick