ASU's Solar Workshop

ASU's Popular Solar Workshop Making It With Sunshine

by Gene K. Garrison It's seven o'clock on a Friday evening. Slim, dark-haired, mustachioed Mike Marinello looks up from the assortment of solar hot water heater components which he has arranged for his lecture and smiles as students begin to file into the Solar Energy Workshop at Arizona State University's College of Architecture.

Soon there will be about twenty people of varying backgrounds and ages intently listening to him. After all, they have each paid $452.77 ($57.00 for tuition and $395.77 for hardware) to learn how to build a solar hot water heater. And they will have an additional expenditure of $40.00 to $75.00 for extra parts not included in the kit. They're not there to goof off. They absorb the information which Marinello is dispensing, just as the black aluminum absorber plates in the collector panels absorb the heat of the sun's rays and raise the temperature of the water in the copper coils.

Some expressions of intense concentration ease up a little as the instructor shows them the pump, collectors, valves, and fittings and explains how they work. It's really not so difficult to understand the principle, the installation, and how to orient the collectors in terms of solar geometry - or how to mount them, where to put the piping, the fittings, and the control mechanism. Oh yes, and there are a few facts to learn about freeze protection and preventive maintenance.

At about 10:30 the class is over, and that's it for the lecture just one Friday night class.

People talk among themselves as they pack up their papers and head for the parking lot. Tomorrow they will meet to assemble their domestic hot water heater units.

"The students are confronted with all the hardware that they had seen and heard about the night before," Marinello explains. "This is the test. The class assembles the units as a community project: They put the absorber plates, boxes, and glass covers of one unit together and set the panel aside.

Then they start on another and proceed until they have stacks of solar collectors at the end of the day - enough for each of the students."

The class, which is an adult education non-credit course sponsored by the Research and Service Foundation of the College of Architecture at Arizona State University, is intended for the do-it-yourself-type homeowner who has basic handyman skills. This does not eliminate women, and there are usually several in every class. It is estimated that 1200 people have taken this course.

Incentives are obvious. The purpose of solar hot water systems is to generate savings of energy and money! Marinello has his figures: "The average family of four, with average consumption rates, would expect to spend as much as $22.00 a month to heat water. With this particular system you can save 85 percent to 95 percent of the cost. If you have an electric water heater, based on the figures I just gave you, you can pay off the cost of the system in a year and a half, or less. Literally, after that point, you save 90 percent of the cost of heating water."

Dwayne Awerkamp, an electronics engineer at Motorola, knows about savings. There are nine people in his family, so he has a 120-gallon water tank. Last October, instead of installing the usual two solar panels, he installed four. "We figure we're getting considerable savings on our electric bills."

What happens on a cloudy day?

"It's surprising how little it takes to heat that thing up. Yesterday was pretty cloudy, but we had enough hot water for the day. Some of the rays come through the clouds. What we've found out is that you need to turn that power off every day. In the morning after you take your showers your hot water probably is gone. Some people leave their electric auxiliary on to heat the water back up. You're not going to use any water now for a little bit, so leave it off and the sun will warm it up. You'll have enough for the evening and the next morning. If you have the auxiliary heat on all the time, you're not taking advantage of the solar heat."

Awerkamp didn't stop with that. "I have another heater I put into my duct work, and I run the hot water through that and blow the air over the coils, and it heats the house."

But don't get the impression that you must be an engineer to understand how solar energy works. Not so. The ones who involve themselves in such a project are people who feel that what they do to conserve energy does make a difference.

Dr. Lee Burkett, a physical education instructor at Arizona State University, was surprised about the amount of work involved in installing the unit after assembling it. "It's not a two-hour job," he said. "When I helped my neighbor put his up,it took a Saturday and half a Sunday. And that was after I had already put up three. When you get two collectors home and a bunch of miscellaneous equipment you realize you've got a lot to do."

text continued from page 11 To make this home highly energy indepen-dent. Hopefully, the house will get experimental "solar shingles" for its roof, which will provide the home with an actual power generating source. What makes this so exciting is that the home demonstrates solar abilities without adding special technology. The model makes it clear that we don't need inventions; we need dedication. We have to think before we build. Mrs. Ellen Budd, of John F. Long, added that the company will also retrofit an exist-ing home to show what can be done with older homes and present sunshine. Putting the sun into mass produced homes, such as Sun City West's 15,000 homes with solar hot water heaters, can help make solar systems more econom-ically respectable. Gary Driggs, presi-dent of Western Savings, commented, "We have financed a number of solar houses, but those have tended to be for innovative people the future oriented types." But he added, "We view the solar industry favorably and expect to do more with it."

Little by little, the state is going solar. Francine Hardaway, who teaches at Rio Salado College and lives in a 10-year-old solar geodesic dome house, com-mented, "This isn't any hippy haven. I have parquet floors and a dishwasher and a microwave oven." She also has two solar ovens her husband built and summer utility bills for the approxi-mately 2500-square-foot Phoenix house of $80 per month.

And in Sedona, Cynthia Bennett, an artist, observed, "In my house, a winter 70 degrees is chilly. But in my friend's passive solar home that's warm, since the entire house radiates heat."

Yes, passive design and solar hot water heaters and space heating are here and readily available to anyone who cares to make that extra effort. But even at its most convenient, solar equipment is still expensive. A solar hot water heater takes about a year and a half to three years to pay for itself, if replacing or supplementing an electric unit. But if the solar equipment phases out gas, make that a four-to-seven-year payback at current prices.

So, grander visions of a solar state focus on the future. But that's where the story gets fascinating. Two types of active solar technology, especially, hold great promise for a sun-powered Arizona. Both have been proven in test situations and both require break-throughs in engineering rather than basic technology. In other words, we know how to make them work... we just need to make them work cheaper.

Photovoltaic cells are a case in point. Dr. Charles Backus, assistant dean of engineering at ASU and a world author-ity on this process, pointed out that the entire space system is based on photovoltaics. "Anything you can use electricity for you can use photovol-taics," he said.

What is this magic? Dr. Backus explained that in traditional forms of solar energy, the entire surface gets excited because all the photons (packets of energy we see as sunshine) are absorbed. So the material gets hot and that heat is converted into energy. The photovoltaic process, on the other hand, involves only the individual photons directly, making them interact on a one-to-one basis with the individual elec-trons in the material. "The electron jumps away from its position and is given an elevated voltage," Dr. Backus said. The material can be kept cool while the individual electron becomes a direct energy converter.

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