This channel is so valuable, it is practically a goldmine of information. Thank you Dr. Ruzic, and thanks Uni of Illinois.

I painted the inside of my hot-tub black so the sun warms it. Works a treat.

i discovered your channel and watched many videos... a lot of good information a lot of fun ...thank you

You can get floating pool covers that can add a lot of heat, and prevent heat loss in use. They definitely extend the swimming season.

I don't know why but you describing the passive solar cooker as "potentially useful device" I found to be quite funny. It's like a backhanded PC way to call something useless but from the "glass half full" perspective lol.

One thing that is not being considered is the cost of storage is orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries with solar thermal. It also has the potential to be much more efficient compared to PV. Will the economics work out to favor thermal over PV idk but it is very easy to see thermal winning.

My father built the first one in my country by himself (with some hired workers) for our home to heat our water. A few months later a new company patented the solar heater. Not so surprised that the business owner was one of those workers.

This is excellent! Too bad it did not have that many views! Those glass building are tremendously inefficient - in NY, the most efficient building is the Empire State and the first glass building (Frank Lloyd Write, Lipstick Building) could never be used for people since it was too hot. In Brazil people went from thick walls to use hollow masonry blocks - and that makes the houses hot during the day and cold before dawn. I'm for what we call "full length whole masonry bricks" - it would give an almost 8 inch wide wall that absorbs heat during the day and holds enough heat til the next morning. My house is build with hollow bricks and my room gets sun all afternoon - gets really hot but around 3:00am it gets as cold as the outside. I believe this kind of choice is responsible for a lot of pneumonia cases here in Brazil. An observation: in the Southern Hemisphere the sun also gets lower during the winter! Excellent video, Professor!

Interesting. I have actually seen one of Spains Solar Towers of Mordor while flying over the country. At 30.000 feet and from even way off to the side, the thing looked like a small, white sun on the ground off in the distance. I later asked the stewardess about this, she had no clue initially what I was on about. After I showed her a picture I had taken, she talked to the airplane's captain. I was later told he had radioed someone to find out, and they told me it's a solar power plant.

Solar tower is useful to store the heat to soften out the duck curve.

11:20 We actually built a solar water heater for our pool, made a frame out of wood and used PVC pipes with corrugated clear plastic for the cover. Worked well but only lasted a few hours before the PVC pipes deformed and sprung leaks. Supposedly this wouldn't happen if I used CPVC instead of PVC but that was too costly (CPVC is expensive) so we bought a commercially made solar pool heater, that lasted less than a season before it developed numerous leaks.

Restaurant idea: sunny latitudes, if not equatorial, close enough to it. Massive solar cookers that make barbecue or roasts or something. Have the cooking be a big deal gimmick. I can hear the money now

solar cooking is great, it’s just like sous vide

It was a serious error to not make an explicit distinction between solar thermal and passive solar (mainly by building design). Those are radically different things. Different enough, in fact, that it would be best to cover them in separate videos. There was also no mention of the fact that power towers require direct sunlight, unlike PV which does not. Third, no mention of the advantage of power towers in allowing thermal energy storage, to enable electric generation at night.

Actually, the DeltaT for pools makes passive solar an excellent source for pools , year round, to about 45ºN. Another excellent use not needing a large DeltaT is for heated floors, this has been tested to 55ºN. (Both of those using propylene glycol in the panels on dark panels that tend to self-melt snow. usually the hardest selling point for the money people are the storage facilities for the gained solar heat.

Thak you

Use a clothesline. You can omit using a 5.5 kw clothes dryer that way.

birds fly into that Spain solar thing and become fried chicken