Students in Kathleen Abraham’s freshman Earth Environmental Science class each had methods they believed would make their passive solar model homes absorb and retain the most heat.
One West Henderson High student covered the outside of his model in aluminum foil, another painted the inside walls, and one used black fabric for imitation blackout curtains. Several used aluminum foil wads on the inside of their homes as insulation, while others used chunks of a yoga mat for the same purpose.
Since the heating and cooling processes remained uniform for each house, Abraham said the experiment challenged her students to hypothesize about and discover what variables of their house designs captured and retained heat.
“Some of it’s the material, some of it’s the angle,” she said.
Landon Coley’s group built a pyramid-shape structure out of the black foam board, and found that the heat from the heat lamp melted their clear plastic window.
“I have burgundy walls,” said Dakota Records. “Dark colors attract heat.”
Parker Gillespie’s group opted to use wood and nails for the structure, instead of foam board and hot glue or masking tape, and thought the airtight model would retain heat the best.
Kara Bonello made a blackout window out of black fabric to cover the skylight in her model’s roof, hoping it’d help keep heat from escaping.
Regardless of how the structure was built, each student’s model house was placed under a heat lamp to imitate daytime, and nighttime’s cooler temperatures were simulated by fans blowing cool air over ice cubes and onto the houses.
The students checked the houses’ temperatures every 30 seconds during the “daytime” to see how quickly their passive solar model heated up, and every 30 seconds during “nighttime” to gauge how well the models retained heat in cooler temperatures.
