DeSoto Solar
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| 1970's |
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I built my first two solar panels while living in Poughkeepsie, New York back in 1973. The first was an air heater intended for dehydrating fruits and vegetables for storage, and the second was a water heater. Both of the panels were completely passive (meaning that they did not require any energy other than solar radiation) and worked very much better than expected, but it would be quite a while before I needed to build another. In 1975 IBM moved me to Minnesota, and in 1976 I bought a farmstead (just the five acres of a farm that contained the house and outbuildings). Our well was situated in an unheated, uninsulated 16' x 16' milk house - and nearly every winter the water supply pipe would freeze. I built a small 3' x 4' passive solar heating panel and mounted it in a window opening. Problem solved - the building wasn't toasty warm in the winter, but it was kept warm enough that the water supply line didn't freeze.
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| 1980's |
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In 1982 I put up a 24' x 32' shop building - into which I incorporated passive solar heating. That building had uninsulated concrete block walls and 6" of fiberglass insulation on top of a drywall ceiling. On a typical winter day (-30°F with 10-30 mph wind) the indoor temperature would reach 90°F by 1:00 pm. About noon, the door would be propped open with a scrap of 2x4 to let some of the heat escape. |
| 1990's |
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Early in the 1990's I went through a divorce, gave up the Minnesota farmstead to my ex-wife, and moved to Iowa. I kept fairly busy as a computer systems consultant, and first as an apartment-dweller and later as a condo-dweller, I didn't have much time or motivation to continue exploration of solar technologies. My interest didn't lessen, but there were too many other things that I needed to do with my time and energy. |
| 2001 |
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By 2001, the combination of the Republican-dominated Congress' making available over a hundred thousand new H-1B visas annually to lower large corporations' cost of systems expertise, together with Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's actions to "cool" the US technology sector resulted in the widespread unemployment of the best and brightest of American technology workers. It seemed like an excellent time to consider another line of work. The economic outlook was not good. America's largest businesses valued cost-trimming MBAs more highly than the ability to produce leading-edge products of higher and higher quality. An argument was presented that services would replace manufacturing as a source of national wealth, but that was simply an effort to justify what I saw as a "rush to the bottom". At a national level, real wealth can only come from production - a fact that politicians and business leaders seemed unable (or unwilling) to recognize. September 11, 2001 was a key date - less because fewer than two dozen fanatics managed to hijack four airplanes and crash them into three large office buildings than because the American President ran and hid for seven hours, then turned his fear into national policy. When he and his administration made clear that they intended to create a war in the Middle-East, it was clear that there would be hard times ahead for America. The one bright spot, if it can be so called, was that the pasengers of the fourth aircraft summoned the courage that their political leaders could not, and said "You will not rule me!" to their fear. At that time oil had already risen to near $35/barrel. It was pretty clear that unless significant changes were made, that price would rise rapidly to over $100/barrel - and I had serious concerns about the effect of that magnitude of price increase on the lives of ordinary Americans.
I thought long and hard about what might be done to diminish the coming hardships, and the only contribution I could think to make was to continue to improve my already fairly efficient passive solar design and to produce cost-effective panels so that people could at least stay warm through the winter. |
| 2002 - 2010 |
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By early spring of 2002 I'd rented shop space in an aircraft hangar at the small airfield in DeSoto, Iowa and purchased a first CNC router to mass produce consistantly high-quality inexpensive high-efficiency solar air-heating panels. In the six years since then, I've worked to improve the already good efficiency of my original passive solar heating panel design, and have worked my way through over a dozen design generations - with significant improvements at each generation. The current panel design is "mature" - there will probably be more improvements made, but those improvements will be ever smaller than those that came before. Over the past couple of years I've been working with fluidyne engines (a fluidyne engine is a Stirling cycle engine whose only moving parts are a gas and a liquid) that can be powered by heat from solar collectors. Initially, my interest was centered about using the output from the existing line of flat panel products - but that idea has been abandoned in favor of using concentrating collectors that produce temperatures in the 725°F range. The initial applications for both types of fluidynes are directly solar-powered pumping and cooling (refrigeration/air-conditioning).
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