Radiant Wall Heaters

Solar-heated kitchen latest addition to middle school gardens

Count these among the accomplishments of seventh and eighth graders from the Troy Howard Middle School's Ecology Academy, who celebrated the completion of the new building, and a busy school year June 16.

On that summer-like Thursday, students from the program spent the afternoon in the open air, celebrating their work with an awards ceremony, homemade pizza from a brick oven located next to the new outdoor kitchen — an earlier addition to the gardens — and generally taking in the sunshine.

The kitchen and solar panels are the latest addition to the school's established Garden Project, in which students grow, harvest and sell vegetables from plots, raised beds and a greenhouse located next to the school.

The simple, shed-roof structure of the kitchen features exposed woodwork, large windows and two arrays of solar hot air collectors made from aluminum cans painted black and enclosed between panes of glass. The floor of the building is also outfitted for radiant heat and will eventually be hooked up to a trio of solar hot water heater panels that students made from old windows removed from the school.

"A bunch of seventh and eighth graders, it's impressive that they did all this," said seventh grader Hal Leathers, who worked on some of the walls, roof and cabinetry of the outdoor kitchen.

Eighth grader Brandon Waterman said he took away some practical lessons from the construction work he did on the building.

"I really want to build my own house, so this helps me," he said.

In past years, the Garden Project was open to half of all seventh graders. The format changed slightly when THMS adopted a new curriculum two years ago that created three "academies," or concentrations, for seventh and eighth graders: International, Innovation and Ecology. Students in the Ecology Academy now have access to the gardens in both seventh and eighth grades.

Seventh grader Rebecca Leeman recalled visiting the Garden Project while in fifth grade and helping to build tomato cages. During the following year, she would drop by the gardens when she could, even though, as a sixth grader, she didn't yet qualify to be in the program.

"When I had free time, I would come down," she said. "I've always been an outsider; I love to be outside, and helping the community by raising crops is just something I love doing.

Radiant wall heaters - EcoRenovator

With all that in mind, and with the fact that floor heating raises the height of the floor for a reno, I wondered about wall heating/cooling. I happened to see some commercially available unit available on the net but that is not what I was thinking of. Basically what I had in mind was to run tubing along a wall (long side of the room) as one would for a floor. This array would be spaced out from the original inside wall for air flow, and have a water collector on the bottom (A/C use). The tubing would run horizontally, the array on a slight tilt, and each tube run would have a slight "cap" along it to increase in efficiency by transferring more heat. The room would be narrowed by up to 6 inches, and heated by convection flow. Radiant heat is an odd but cool thing. Think of it this way. Where ever you are, everything that is in line of sight to you is either radiating heat toward you, or sucking it away from you. The thing that determines which of those it is is temperature. If the object is hotter than your skin temperature, your skin absorbs the radiant heat. If the object is colder than your skin temperature, you radiate heat toward it. Your body is comfortable when your incoming heat is close to or equals the heat you're giving off. So, that being said, what you want with radiant heating is large surface areas to be heated/cooled so more of that line of sight to your body is getting heat vs loosing heat. So, only using wall heating/cooling will definitely work, and might work great for certain places, but is not a great idea to do a whole building in IMO. Normally, a floor gives a great, flat area to heat up and gives great line of sight to your body. I would think you would need to do more wall heating than floor heating to achieve the same effect. Also, you'd probably have to heat exterior walls which would tend to loose heat to the outside faster than a heated floor.

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