Kees Kolff is experimenting on a new project in Port Townsend’s EcoVillage this year, building two Trombe walls to help heat his already eco-friendly house.
“We encourage all kinds of …
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Kees Kolff holds one of 48 gallon jugs of water that he’s using to make a Trombe wall at his home at the EcoVillage in Port Townsend. The wall is a passive-solar building technique, and Kolff is experimenting with it this year. Photo by Allison Arthur
Kees Kolff is experimenting on a new project in Port Townsend’s EcoVillage this year, building two Trombe walls to help heat his already eco-friendly house.
“We encourage all kinds of innovations to try different ways of living more gently on the earth,” Kolff said.
American Edward Morse patented the idea of trapping heat behind a glass wall in 1881, but French engineer Felix Trombe is the first who developed the idea in architectural designs in the 1960s, which is why the concept is named after him.
“Sunlight easily travels through glass and heats objects behind the glass. Objects slowly radiate it back to the environment at a longer, infrared wave length that is partially trapped behind the glass,” explained Kolff via email. “Rocks or concrete walls are often used, but I use bottles of water, which can hold much more heat than the same volume of concrete and releases it more slowly.”
The Trombe walls are in his new sunroom on the winter-sun side of the house. Fresh air intake for the house-heating system. includes a heat-recovery ventilator, first gets warmed up in the sunroom. Then the air is forced to travel around 48 1-gallon jugs of solar-heated water behind a glass door. The bottles are painted a dull black on the back side to trap the light, and so is the cavity in the wall that holds the bottles.
“Voila! The theory is great and is only one of the many experiments here at the EcoVillage,” he wrote, adding that the only cost is for the glass doors and the bottles, which cost about $4 each.
As for results, the weather hasn't allowed Kolff to test it throughly.
“The sunroom alone has been so hot since January that we haven't even tried to use the Trombe wall,” he said Monday.
Even before this experiment with the Trombe wall, Kolff and his wife, Helen, were using less than 4,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year – and 50 gallons of propane – to heat their 1,200-square-foot home. Their home also has a washer and a dryer, which are shared by others in the community.
And they frequently host grandchildren and family and other guests.
By comparison, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average electricity consumer used 10,908 kilowatt hours of energy in 2013, more than twice what the Kolffs use.
