A solar water heater, crushed glass and one reason never to throw away cardboard

Here's a solar water heater I built at my friend Carlos’s house. He has had some trouble hooking up his water pump to actually test it… but umm, it at least looks cool right? The top picture is on his roof and is connected to the bottom picture from inside his house. I took the general design from a website called Greenpowerscience.com. This guy, Dan Rojas, does great experiments of green energy. Thought his idea was spot on.

I'll get a schematic of how it is supposed to work up here shortly.









Here's a picture of my recently acquired classroom. Some students misused expensive drafting tables when the school first opened 8 years ago so they closed the drafting room. When I found this out a few months ago, my students and I went in and cleaned the place up. If you check out the photos, I’ve put some drawings on the walls for students to observe and made a model house to scale out of cardboard to give them a visual representation of the house we’re drawing in class. Next up in my new by-the-book desenho técnico class (technical drafting), observing modern architectural designs and drafting a model house of their own.

Finally, one day a few other teachers and I decided to see what would happen when we chucked about 50 empty beer and wine bottles (provided by myself and collegues after many long nights of intense research) and some fist-sized rocks in a concrete mixer and let it tumble for an hour. The results? Different sized piece of glass that are safe to touch (see pic below). The tumbling in the mixer dulled the edges of glass. Right now we’re running some experiments to test the strength of broken glass as an alternative for concrete aggregate.



If you have any criticism to help push any ideas further along, please don't hesitate to contact me, bri.newhouse@gmail.com. I think we’re onto some quite plausible clean energy ideas here. The more collaboration we can get, the faster we’ll get to a finished product ready for community distribution.

Although it’s been quiet on this end, I still feel I have the same energy as always. As many Peace Corps volunteers told me my first year, volunteers tend to slow down their second year after seeing how slow things move. Word, apathy spreads fast. I guess that’s all the more reason to go lift some mind weights so I can handle muscling ideas through the wonderful bliss we often call… civilization.