HOW TO MAKE SOLAR FURNACEA solar furnace would be the perfect addition to our home. I have been checking out the internet. There are hundreds out there from cardboard to professional looking made. All of these are wonderful and all claim to work. I am leaning toward a sheet of corrigated galvinized roofing material, painted black with flat black grill paint. I may be able to scrouge a sheet from somewhere. I checked out the pop can type. Although, I am sure that it works beautifully, and it is making good use of aluminum cans, without a drill press cutting the tops and bottoms off of 240 cans is more than I am able to do by hand. I have several months before winter sets in and should be able to collect what I need to make one. The most expensive thing on the materials list is the Lexan for the glazing. The .125 thickness recommended in most of what I have read costs a couple hundred dollars. The next big issue for our home is where and how to install the solar furnace. We have no south facing wall that is not covered by our porch overhang. We have a shed roof facing downward toward north. Our walls are block. We need to mount on the roof at a 15 degree angle for the winter sun. I know this from the angle of our solar panels in winter. This poses an issue for the hot air and cold air return. We will have to do vents that will need to be insulated. We will also have to mount on corrigated angle iron so that the wind doesn't rip it off the roof. Here lies Ron and my differences and why not as much gets done as it should. We don't usually agree on "how to" do these things so there is usually months of discussion before we begin and our planning stage takes way too long. The design was made to go vertically as hot air rises and cold air sinks. We will need to mount horizontally and I am not sure if this will affect how the hot air coming into the house. We will use a fan to pull the hot air from the solar furnace into the house. The problem also being that the cold air return will have to be vented with a vent tube to get it further away from the incoming hot air. We may end up mounting on the south porch. Hopefully in the near future pictures will be posted.
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