Dan’s Papers July 1, 2011 danshamptons.com Page 50
Solar
(continued from page 43)
last summer, was a gazing pool. You could sit around it and stare at it. That was it. This spring, I went for the solar heater. As I said, it was a no-brainer, financially. This is not meant as a plug for the people who put this in—there are lots of people who do this work and most are good—but who I called was Go Solar in Riverhead and they sent somebody down with a clipboard to go over the matter. The long and short of this story is that Go Solar put in a solar heater, did a good job and it works just fine. The 8 year olds jump into the pool and stay in. I jump in and stay in. Other adults jump in and stay in. They’re a whole lot of beach toys and Styrofoam things and inflatable balls and splashing and so forth going on, and the pool is again a big success.
But the real story is what this has all done to my mind. I am now looking at this thing in a whole different way. Before this new heater, what I had was a big spherical water pump that sucked the water out of one end of the pool, through some underground pipes and into one end of the water pump and then out the other end of the water pump to a big propane water heater just adjacent to where gas flames heated it, then out the other end of the water heater and back down some underground pipes and out through some nozzles at the other end of the pool to send the water circulating back in. It was an understandable contraption to me. An electric line extended out to a exterior wall outlet where the pump and heater got plugged
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in. Another line brought in propane from a big tank behind my garage and that tank got filled by a man driving a truck from a propane company who’d come up our driveway with a hose and nozzle to do the deed. Thus, with the turn of a temperature control knob did our pool get heated. I know this is boring to describe, you already know this, and this is the way things work. There had been two sources of power at work. The electricity from the Lighting Company. And the propane from a gas company that buys it from an outfit that gets it out of the ground. As a matter of fact, the Lighting Company makes the electricity from coal and oil and other stuff that comes out of the ground too. All contribute to global warming to make the 8 year olds happy. So I’m standing there with the guy with the clipboard and we are looking at the defunct propane heater and I’m saying—do we take this out and replace it with a solar heater, which has its panels up on the roof? And he looks at me like I’m crazy. “No, you just take that away. There’s NOTHING that replaces it.� I find this hard to process. So here is how I now see this thing. I have a swimming pool that is on the small size. It’s 16 feet by 32. It averages five feet deep. And though I still have to use a water pump to circulate the water around as before, that’s it! The heating is happening. And there’s nothing to plug in at all. Instead, there is this big black blanket on the top of my roof facing the southern sky and there is one pipe that leads cold water up to it from the water pump and another pipe that leads what is now hot water down from it back to the pipes that go to the nozzles of the swimming pool. In the first two days, the temperature of my pool went up from 67 degrees to 77 degrees. It is now as warm as a bath. That happened because the two days were mostly sunny. So the blanket up there heated up – or actually it did NOT heat up—it simply passed through the heat of the sun to these small water lines that pass through it zigzag fashion like an electric blanket on your bed. Though of course, unlike an electric blanket, you don’t plug it in. I cannot tell you how unique this concept is to me. Until now, it’s been dig the earth and consume. Now, suddenly it is just gather up the (continued on page 60)
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