D Strohl’s heater

Garage Almost Heated w. Homemade Solar Heater

While I have electricity out to the garage now, heat has been an issue all winter long. Mattar graciously lent me his kerosene heater, which did an okay job of taking the bite off the chill. Insulating the garage would go a long way to help keep the bitter Vermont cold out, but that’s a project for another day. I decided instead to take advantage of the south-facing side of the garage and build a solar furnace to collect some of that sunshine just bouncing straight off my garage. My dad built one years ago and said he recorded a 110-degree temperature differential between inlet and outlet. And I had enough scrap materials around the basement to do something similar to what my dad built.

I actually built the box to certain dimensions, based on what scrap materials I had and on the dimensions of my heat collection method - aluminum cans. That sure was a lot of Sprite. Fifty cans in five columns of 10 will funnel the air upward.

So you may have already thought, “How can air climb the columns of cans when there’s no hole at the bottom of the can?” Answer: drill press and 3/4-inch bit. Times 45.
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This works
103, 104, 105:

103

104

105

This doesn’t
106, 107, 108:

106 | 107 | 108

Does this?
106, 107, 108:

106

107

108

Image as link to image

*Bullet item on first line\
second line input.

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