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Our front door has a storm door which is mostly glass. It faces south, and when the low, winter sun is coming in it actually gives us a little more heat than we lose by having the main door closed.
Is there such a thing that could be rolled in front of the door that would absorb and store more of the heat? We have a couple oil radiators, but they are white and are designed to plug into the grid for heating. If they were black they might be a good solution. Does anyone know what I should be looking for?
If I were building a house that would make sense, but I am looking for something I can roll up to the front door on sunny days, and easily roll it away when the sun no longer shines in, or we leave the house and lock the front door.
The only way I could see it working is to have dampered slots at the top and bottom of the inner door that are opened when the temperature between both doors reaches a minimum temperature somewhat higher than the temperature inside the house. From a technology standpoint it is doable, but from a cost/benefit standpoint I would be better off installing a wind turbine in my back yard.
If I were building a house that would make sense, but I am looking for something I can roll up to the front door on sunny days, and easily roll it away when the sun no longer shines in, or we leave the house and lock the front door.
It doesn't seem to me that a single doorway has enough exposure, in a winter-sun situation, to be able to heat a radiator enough to make much of a difference.
But if one wanted to try... the two off the shelf solutions I can think of that could be experimented with:
1. A portable oil filled radiator. Roll it over to the doorway, let the sun warm it, then roll it back into the room you want the heat to be released in. Then if you wanted more heat, just plug it in and turn it on.
2. A water filled solar water-heating panel plus some kind of rig to hold it up in the doorway, and then move it inside. These are already optimized for solar gain and are not expensive, although they'd need some work to modify to this specific application.
I am going to think out loud and this may be a flop, but wouldn't it be better to just take advantage of the solar heating on that side of the house and use a bigger solar collector. Have it plumbed into the house? Sorta an above ground geothermal heat transfer type situation? Seems to be a lot of trouble for not much of a heat gain to me.
Unless there was an easy way to focus the heat generated directly into the house, I don't see the point. If someone can make that clearer to me I'd appreciate it.
I am going to think out loud and this may be a flop, but wouldn't it be better to just take advantage of the solar heating on that side of the house and use a bigger solar collector.
Flop, he lives in MD so any thermal solar collector outside is only going to be usable for a few moths of the year. A lot of people in my area use them to heat their pools, we used to have a poor poor mans version at a cabin we had that had no electric hot water heater made up of a 55 gallon drum and some PVC. Was better than taking a shower with 50ish degree water but that was only good for June through August.
If you put collector inside the room any heat in the room that would go into a collector is already in the room. You can rob some BTU's from that room by say storing it in a radiator but it's so little it's hardly worth the effort.
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