Solar Hot Water Party invades Mount Pleasant

If you are really bent on sticking out the coming environmental apocalypse, I strongly suggest doing one of two things: 1. Learn to build solar panels from everyday objects or 2. Find someone who has learned this and cling to said person.

On March 30th I attended a workshop in Mount Pleasant concerning the first suggestion. The hands-on class ran all day, and ended with our small group of amateurs surrounding two completed solar hot water panels. Similar workshops are planned as part of a "Free School" initiative led by Andrew Rushmere, an education student at SFU.

The Free School idea is simple and revolutionary: learning should be free, and workshops should be held within communities in order to share the knowledge of their members. The next workshop is scheduled for May, and will involve kelp harvesting from local beaches. This is not the bad kind of kelp harvesting, either. It's the good kind, where all the little kelp survive. The Free School will run workshops throughout the summer, with potential topics including: bee keeping, bike maintenance, trombone lessons, felting and, my favorite, learning to sing with your cat.

Below is a rough rehashing of our day, but is by no means a step-by-step guide.

Anyone intending to make and use a solar hot water panel should be aware that I have skipped over many details, such as the risk of Legionnaire's disease (bacteria) in warm water. You don't want this disease. It's gross and you could die. Also, there are many small errors that can occur, then throwing off the entire system and causing you to look like a fool. Please research the process in detail to avoid harm and potential embarrassment.

10am: Mike Anderson, our resident solar power expert, opens the workshop with a simple explanation.

"The sun is hot."

We are all relieved. This makes sense, and does not require complex equations. The basic idea is that dark things absorb heat, and metal pipes then conduct this heat into the water flowing through them. Therefore, if you run water pipes through a dark thermal mass heated by the sun, they will get hot, and you will bathe happily from this water. There are different ways to do this, depending on how much hot water you need, and how much you want to spend. For the panels we built, all materials were scavenged (i.e. old windows, wood, clay, sand, and insulation) except for the copper tubing, which cost thirty-five dollars.

11am: Work begins, and the sound of power tools fills the air. I stare vacantly at a circular saw, feeling lost, but then Roberto, a man from South America, patiently teaches me to cut copper tubing with a less intimidating tool, a funny little blade shaped in a circle. Roberto watches as I do this backwards. After mastering the pipecutter, I move on to caulking, then to screwing in nails along with a UBC student in rubber boots. We make cob with clay scavenged from a building site down the road, some sand we found down another road, and straw from someone's garden. This will be our thermal mass, as it is dark and retains heat well.

12pm: Over lunch, a kind woman named Marie-Sol explains to me that in Venezuela, streetlights are run on solar power that has been trapped throughout the day. We both decide that this is very smart.

3:30pm: Roberto holds up the completed copper tubing we soldered together over the course of the last seven hours. We are not sure it will hold, as many of us have never soldered anything before in our lives. As a test, we hook the hose to one end and Roberto's thumb to the other, to see if it leaks. This results in Roberto spraying water on everyone. We are ready.

4pm: We place the copper tubing on a thin layer of cob, with tube ends sticking out of drilled holes in the wooden boxes. Cob goes on top of this tubing and we all get our hands very dirty, which is fun. We write a note on an old receipt and bury it in the cob for anyone brave enough to dismantle the panels in the future. The contents of the note will remain secret.

Solar electricity is slightly different from hot water, involving more complicated installation and setup. These systems can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000, depending on how much power is needed. The average North American household with computers, lights, and other gadgets uses too much energy to make this feasible. The solution? "Use less stuff," says Mike. "It's a lifestyle change. You won't be able to charge your iPod on this system."

Simple things can be done to trim down. Dryers, for example, use thousands of kilowatt hours of energy, making the common clothesline one of the best pieces of alternative energy equipment on the market today.

Theoretically, by reducing energy consumption and using homemade parts, solar power would actually become affordable and sensible for the average low-impact luddite. Until winter comes, that is. The obvious drawback of solar power is its reliance on the sun, which we have very little of for about four months straight. To compensate, some systems incorporate larger storage tanks for hot water, using a balance of hydro and wind power for electricity. Of course, this all depends on what is available. A house out in the country with a pond or river could switch from solar to hydro during the winter (when there is more water anyway), while city residents could hook into the grid to top up their energy. When summer comes, it will be all the more exciting for everyone to haul out their panels, throw a grill on top, and have a solar barbeque party.

For more information about Free School in Vancouver, contact Andrew Rushmere: arushmere@hotmail.com. For solar power consulting, contact Mike Anderson: fikeal@gmail.com