Marc A! Hanna- Guest Blogger

I'd like to welcome Marc to my blog this evening, he is narrator of this post...

There’s a lot of talk these days about being green, and I’ve long had sympathies in this direction. I lean more towards the green tech side of things, and I’ve employed various strategies that have netted some noticeable savings in electricity and heat. I’ve tackled all the low hanging fruit so it’s time to move onto something bigger. I recently read an article about some dude who turned the entire south facing side of his workshop into a solar hot air collector and was able to avoid much of his heating costs during the winter. I thought that would be a great idea; but since we are thinking of selling our house, non-reversible construction is out. So instead I figured I could buy a second front door to our house and attach the collector to it. When winter was over, I’d swap back the original door. Now where can I find a free exterior door.......all hail Craigslist!

So here it is. It’s just a 2x4 frame bolted to the front of the door, covered with clear polycarbonate glazing, and the interior painted black to absorb the sunlight.

On the inside of the door you cut holes at the top and bottom of the door. As the hot air rises and escapes through the holes at the top of the door, it pulls in cooler air through the holes at the bottom of the door. This should work quite well during the day when the Sun is shining but could work in reverse and cool the house when the Sun goes down. One solution is to plug the holes at the end of each day.

So how is it doing? The air exiting the collector has been measured as high as 111 degrees and the front entryway gets noticeably warm if we leave the interior door closed. More importantly, the “ugly” door Deb was worried about has solicited zero queries from the neighbors. Is it possible nobody has noticed? Version 1.0 has been a success and I go to bed with a smile on my face knowing that Al Gore loves me. Hopefully the next house will allow for a more grand experiment.

Deb again.. um yeah can't wait for the more grand experiments.