I recently stumbled across an article that claimed heating bills could be cut in half by nothing more than black paint, duct tape and aluminum foil. With gloomy forecasts of skyrocketing heating fuel costs this winter, I was hooked from the get-go! The author of the article went on to tell how she made homemade “heat catchers” and put them in all south facing windows of her large, drafty Victorian house. She said that her heating bills (which were very high) were reduce to more than half last winter! I was intrigued and couldn’t pass up the opportunity have a science project on solar energy and possibly save lots of money at the same time!
We got our black paint and heavy duty aluminum foil and set out to see how we could harness the sun and turn it into free heat for our home. First, we had to decide which would be the best room to try out our experiment. It was a general consensus that the computer room was the perfect candidate! It had absolutely no heat and the windows were flimsy and single paned. This room could double as a meat locker in the morning hours, it was COLD!
We first took the average morning temperature of the room. With no heat source (outside lows ranging from 35-40 degrees) it was around 50 degrees in the morning, give or take a few degrees. We hung our heat catcher in the south window (there are 2 windows in the room but the other is on the west side) and watched the thermometer rise! It was truly amazing! After a couple hours of the aluminum foil being directly exposed to the sun, that room was warmer than the rest of the house. It took a little less than 2 hours to heat the room by 20 degrees. As I am sitting here writing in our computer room, the outside temperature is 54 degrees and the room is a toasty 75.8 degrees. In this experiment, our computer room really heated up since it is a smaller room, so you might not get as dramatic increase with a larger room.
There are a couple drawbacks to this form of supplemental heating. One, is that you lose light in your house which could be an issue in the winter time. The other is having large pieces of aluminum foil draped across your windows is not really a home décor enhancement. You can try hiding it by pinning the foil to the back of draperies. However, when you do this you get less heat produced as you are blocking the warming foil (with the drapery) and getting less of a current.
Try it out for yourself and let us know how much solar heat you captured! |
