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Thoughts on Climate Change

  Thoughts Concerning Climate Change    Background For several years, I’ve read news articles and watched videos by credible people that seem to know quite a lot about the topic of climate change. As I listened to the rhetoric, it seems we have the technology to solve our energy problems without causing self-induced pain and suffering. Note that I am not a scholar in any of these disciplines, I’m merely restating what I’ve read and researched on the internet, but if those sources are actually credible, the solutions are there. Based on the available evidence, it doesn’t look like we will be getting back the way we came. If, as many would assert, the weather is getting worse because the global temperature is increasing because the CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. And if, humans are adding more CO2 than the earth can absorb because we have been using energy sources that is releasing CO2 that has been held captive for long periods of time, then, the simple solution...
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Photos

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Concrete floor over the "Sand Mass" Field Built Trusses Eight 4' by 10' solar panels
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Barn Design

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It very quickly became obvious that the design of the Barn and the solar heating design are joined at the hip. I wanted to have solar heating so I needed to have curtain features in the design. The 60 degree south facing roof was the one of those features. As I looked on the internet for gambrel roof designs, I came across a beautiful set of barn plans from a company called BarnPlans.com (good name). They provided the plans for the whole barn and if I hadn’t already designed the rest of the barn, I probably would have used them. As it was, I only needed the plans to field-build 32’ trusses and the dormers. The trusses were built right on the second level floor and lifted into place with a winch.   Another feature that had to be built into the Barn construction was the under the floor heated sand mass. I picked the flattest piece of south facing ground that I could find on my property. When I surveyed it, even though it looked pretty flat, it was actually a 6 foot drop from t...
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Overview

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  I began building my solar heated barn (workshop/garage) in 2012. Much of what I knew at the time was based on a book entitled "Solar Water Heating" by Bob Ramlow. I also used “Modern Hydronic Heating” by John Siegenthaler and a number of other reference books and papers. I calculated that it would be practical to heat my shop with solar energy using an array of eight flat-panel collectors that would heat a liquid solar solution. The solution is circulated through a sand mass under the floor of the shop. This is covered in Ramlow’s book and is referred to as a High Mass System. I heat the sand mass every day that the sun shines and it simply radiates up through the floor to heat the shop. The system has been working for several years now and I think I should share some of the things I learned as I was building it. I began by designing the workshop/garage in 2011. I didn’t know at the time that it would be a barn, that is, it would have a gambrel roof. That was dictated by ...
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