Page 2 RAIN February/March 1978 ( SOLAR ) The Solar Greenhouse Book, ed. by Jim McCullagh, 352 pp., 136 photos, 1978, $8.95 from: Rodale Press Emmaus, PA 18049 The first and only book on the subject, covering on a national scope all three aspects of design, construction and crop production. Especially useful are numerous case studies of the construction and management of different designs in various bio-climatic regions. Many special charts and appendices contain formulas and rules of thumb for evaluating materials, available solar radiation, heat losses, siting, insulation, night shutters and glazing. It does for solar greenhouses what Bruce Anderson's and Alex Wade's passive solar home books have done for solar heating and deserves a spot next to them in your solar energy library ... it's excellent in breadth and dept_h. - LJ Build a Solar Greenhouse-Workshop Style, 21 min., color, sound film, plus an educational curriculum package and • a workshop construction package, $320 from: Danamar Film Productions 275 Kilby Los Alamos, NM 89544 Excellent a.t. film with solar expert Bill Yanda in the starring role as hands-on workshop coordinator. On a snowy weekend, a group of volunteers wanting to learn an innovative approach to obtaining free heat from the sun and fresh food for the table built an attached solar greenhouse. T.he film documents this workshop, demonstrating step-bystep the principles and building techniques involved in a thermally efficient, easy-to-build structure. The fun-filled film demystifies solar technology by emphasizing a grass roots approach available today. -LJ California Educational Opportunities for Solar Energy and Energy Conservation at Institutions ofHigher Education, by John A. Kimball, 1978, 150 pp., a limited number of copies are available free from: Congressman George E. Brown, Jr. 2342 Rayburn House Ofc. Bldg. U.S. House of Representatives Washington, DC 20015 A directory describing educational curricula extracted from a survey sent to 250 schools and colleges in California, this should be a great help to those interested in a soft technology career. Cong. Brown, Mr. Kimball and their staffs are to be congratulated for a job well worth doing and well-done. - LJ Manual for the Solar Can-Type Hot Air Furnace, by Bruce Hilde, 16 pp., 1977, $2.00 from: Northern Solar Power Co. 311 S. Elm St. Moorhead, MN 56560 A step-by-step construction guide with understandable drawings for a system which is very low cost, yet performs as well as most commercial air units and is built from recycled aluminum beverage cans. Materials, including simple ULapproved automatic control and air circulation equipment, are listed along with buying hints. See also "Shoptalk" in Nov. '77 Popular Science. Ask Bruce for his price list on glazing materials for this design. If this isn't appropriate D+Y technology, I don't know what is. -LJ Pacific Northwest Solar Buildings, by Robert Lorenzen, 126 pp., Nov. '77, $5 from: Center for Environmental Research School of Architecture Univ. of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403 A regjonal guide, a la Shurcliff's earlier national directory, full of technical, bio-climatic and economic data on 65 solar buildings in Oregon, Idaho and Washington. Well-done, with clear drawings and photos. -LJ Pacific Northwest Solar Energy Assoc. steering committee met Jan. 3, 1978, at Rainhouse. Proposed by-laws, names of candidates for election to the board of directors and minutes of the meeting are now being distributed to all International Solar Energy Society-American Section members in Washington, Oregon and Idaho. The next official meeting will be that of a duly elected board on a date to be decided by that board. Results of the election will be mailed to members and published in RAIN. RAIN $10 RAIN SOLAR WATER HEATER REWARD We've been belly-aching because so many people seem ready to use solar water heaters and even to build their own-but can't find sensible, well thought-out plans for hooking a collector up to their home hot water system. Do you know a good way to do a hookup? We'll give a $10 reward for the best design we receive before March 10, 1978. We'll pass the best designs on in RAIN for everybody to use. We went through a stack of solar water heater designs last month and were amazed-incredible effort lavished on micro-refinements on collector design but almost no concern about how to make the collector usable. If a hookup was shown at all, it often just added another "solar" storage tank to the existing water heater, which means you have two tanks to lose heat. Or just hooked up to an existing water heaterwhich means as long as the tank is up to temperature you don't get any solar heat. Almost none show any way of dealing with freezing conditions-really, few people are fanatic enough to run out and drain their water system whenever it looks like a freeze! Rumors come in about some systems that sound better than our proposal to use a solar heated tank with a demand water heater on the outlet to boost the water to use temperature. One uses an existing electric heated tank but disconnects the lower element. The top element supposedly keeps a small amount of water at use temperature while the rest stays cool enough to pick up heat from the solar panel. Does it work? What about tanks with heat transfer coils or jackets for anti-freeze? 1 Are any reasonably priced yet? Let's 1 make decentralized solar happen! While we're at it, anybody got interesting results of any solar .collector races? -TB RAIN's office is at 2270 N.W. Irving, Portland, OR 97210. Ph: (503) 227-5110. RAIN STAFF: Tom Bender Lane deMoll Joan Meitl Lee Johnson Typesetting: Irish Setter Printing: Times Litho Linda Sawaya
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