Adventures in Passive Solar Heat Mitigation
The building Lab B occupies at 12-22 North Street was built in 1979/80 as a state-of-the-art passive solar demonstration project . With R-40+ wall insulation, a large brick thermal mass bisecting the building, and large arrays of south-facing windows on both the first and second floors, 12-22 gets and stays toasty in the winter. The seasonal logic of overhangs in passive solar design. While the front overhang helps a bit, it also gets toasty in the summer-time (particularly the southern offices), and we discovered just how toasty when the A/C unit died in the middle of July with no prospect of replacement until September. So, some hardcore kludging was in order… To start, we immediately aimed to deploy a few portable air conditioners , but ran into to the fact that virtually all the windows are casement windows . So, the only kind of A/C that could work would be a portable one with a hose rather than a window unit, and we needed to figure out how to get the hose out with the remainder of the window sealed. The best solution I found was a cloth adapter that attaches to either sid