bill-- do you have pictures you'd be willing to post?
-a --- On Thu, 9/17/09, Bill Wiltschko <[email protected]> wrote: From: Bill Wiltschko <[email protected]> Subject: [hexayurt] Playa stories - year two To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Date: Thursday, September 17, 2009, 8:18 PM My playa story concerns two elements I did not have last year. Cleaning up the panels from last year's burn, and cooling the interior more. I have a 6' wall HY, with a foyer at one corner for a door. I was going to make the foyer an airlock, but a low-speed gust of wind the night we got in last year took one of two doors off the van rack and broke it into five pieces on the playa. Only one door means a foyer instead of an airlock. More on the remaining door later. Getting the panels ready for another week on the playa involved three steps. Bi-filament tape removal, cleaning, and patching. 1) The hard part was getting off the bi-filament tape. First, I made the mistake of removing all of it. I should have thought of it like painting a house; you scrape off the paint that will scrape off and leave the rest intact. Nevertheless, the majority of tape came off easily. The ten months that had elapsed between BM and my maintenance weekend let the Davis, CA heat bake off more of the tape. Bi-filament tape does deteriorate in direct sun on the playa, although not as much as duct tape. More heat over more time will degrade it further. This is a good thing. It deteriorates, but not quickly. Removing some of the tape did some damage to the panels - that is, the tape peeled off some of the Aluminum facing. I did not try to remove the glue that was left from the tape. I'm going to try acetone and other nasty stuff this year. 2) Cleaning was simple once I worked out a system. I sprayed water on a panel, scrubbed with the mesh side of a windshield squeegee, rinsed with water, then squeegee'd the remaining water off. This produced a fast, thorough cleaning. No more playa dust. The roofs were worst, since the slightest rain made the panels dust magnets. So, cleaning the roof panels was the most satisfying. 3) I patched up the torn and cut places with all-weather Aluminum tape. I used over a roll ($20/roll) on this patching. Most was used to re-seal the edges. If you bevel the edges, you will have a tight seal and cutting the bi-filament tape to break apart the panels will almost always result in cutting the edge tape. Even so, patching is kind of fun to do. I also had foam core sealant to build up sections that were crushed when I dropped a panel. This year I wanted it cooler inside, so I vowed to put in a swamp cooler. Since I stay in the Alternative Energy Zone (AEZ), no generators are allowed, so that ruled out going with an air conditioner. Everything had to work on 12 volts (driven by batteries and PV panel). I purchased a 12v swamp cooler called TurboKOOL, a product from a small Nevada company (www.turbokoo.com). I also purchased a 12v exhaust fan from an RV supply company that shall remain nameless due to its awful delivery time. I built a plenum from plywood and 2x4s, and used left-over pieces of Thermax to insulate it. The TurboKOOL is designed to sit on an RV roof and blow air down, but I needed air to go in horizontally near the bottom of the HY. So, the TurboKOOL sat on the plenum and the plenum butted against a HY wall to get the air in sideways. The louvers on the inside of the HY were far enough away that I needed to construct an extension cord using unusual Molex connectors (the TurboKOOL guy sent me the part numbers and Digikey had them in stock). I also needed to insert an Anderson Power Pole connector (www.powerwerx.com) into the louver so I could get power to the cooler. I use Power Poles for all my 12v connections, so this was straight-forward. You could put a terminal block on the louver or any other connector you might wish. For a water source, I built an elaborate pumping system, then asked myself why I was doing all this. I found two 4-gal plastic buckets at the dump and put one bucket on a saw horse and gravity fed it into the TurboKOOL. Worked great. It used about a gallon an hour. I bring in about 70 gallons of water, so I had plenty of slack. I then had to figure out where to put the exhaust fan. I put this off to the playa. Why an exhaust fan, you may ask? Because a swamp cooler needs a flow of air. If air doesn't leave the structure, it just gets really humid. Just try spraying water in a stock HY and see what happens. Helly in the AEZ gave me the answer. She had a mini-HY in which she put a low inlet and a high outlet for air. I was really reluctant to put the exhaust fan in the roof panels, but her example convinced me it had to be done that way. On the playa, I cut a 13.75 x 13.75 square hole in the roof (crossing two roof panels), and the exhaust fan could be dropped in easily from the inside. The results were fantastic. I got 10 degree minimum and 15 degree typical temperature differentials, and a maximum of 35% humidity inside. The only drawback was that I had to run the exhaust fan harder than the swamp cooler fan, with the result that there was negative pressure inside. This did not present a dust problem, since I had sealed the ground cloth under the HY against the outside of the walls. But it did keep pulling the door inward. Now, the door also gets most of the abuse during the week. So next year I want to make a new door out of plywood to get a great seal. And I want to put Aluminet over the HY to reduce the heat load and make 20 degree differentials possible (theoretical maximum is about 30 degrees). It was fun. Hope this helps someone. Bill --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "hexayurt" group. 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