Solar Heat Collector Part Deux
Solar Heat Collector
It’s science fair week at my daughter’s school and when she came up empty in regards to what she wanted to try making back in December, I suggested something close to my heart – solar energy. Yes – I was being just a little bit selfish when I suggested making a solar heat collector, but given our new administration’s embrace of alternative energies and the timing of the project, I thought it would be a good project to explore.
Check out the National Renewable Energy website for more kid’s science projects.
I figured it it worked, it would give me incentive to make a large scale one for my garage studio. The original plans I found back in the fall that used mostly recycled materials which called for drilling holes on the top and bottom of empty aluminum cans sounded too dangerous for an 11 year old to attempt making, so she researched different projects and watched several videos (thanks YouTube) and finally decided to make a solar heat collector that incorporated design elements from a few of the projects. Instead of aluminum cans to collect the heat, she used aluminum foil which she painted black.
I knew she needed to be able to make it herself with minimal help from me – I tell her all the time that I’ve already graduated from 5th grade and I have done my share of homework in my life time. This was her project and I’m so proud of her, and I was equally excited to see her discoveries! I did act as the official photographer in order to document her temperature readings.
She used recycled materials and built two boxes for less than $3.00 apiece – though we did purchase a Ryobi IR 001 Infrared Thermometer for $29.95 at Home Depot in order for her to take her temperature readings. I can’t find the tool on the Home Depot Site – but it’s the coolest new gadget and has uses outside of her science project. It’s billed as a tool to perform energy audits of one’s home and is good for -4° F to 600° F.
Click on any image to scroll through her photo album how she built her solar heat collector.
26 Photos
My daughter made 2 different solar heat collectors that were constructed exactly alike – the only difference is that she painted one of them black and left the other one unpainted with aluminum foil exposed. The unpainted one did produce heat, but not like the one painted black.
9 am temperature reading
12pm temperature readings
Yep – you’re seeing this correctly – at 12pm, when the sun was highest in the sky, her black painted box was registering a temperature of 165° F!
5pm temperature readings
You can see that by 5pm, when the sun had nearly set and the air temperature was in the 30′s, there was barely any difference between each of the boxes. In fact, at this time of day the temperature difference was negligent.
Pretty amazing, don’t you think? Free heat! There is a real limitation. The practically free heat collector doesn’t store heat – so it’s only really good as a supplemental heat source when the sun is shining.
Meanwhile, I actually spent some time in my studio today.
It felt good,
~Cynthia
Walk Write Like An Egyptian Clay Lesson
- My Cartouche
Cartouche generated by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology website.
Now that school is back in session for my daughter and a routine [of sorts] has once again been established after winter break, I have started teaching another session of my after school clay class. I don’t repeat lessons often, except for a few overwhelming requests that the kids want to make again and again such as cups – they love making cups for some reason. Last week, I substitute taught on Friday and I had an hour of free time while the kids were in PE to think about what kinds of projects I wanted to teach this time around.
As I scanned the teacher’s book shelves, I picked up a book titled, Write Like an Ancient Egyptian by Beth Levine which I found fascinating. My brain started racing and I decided to have a theme this time around for my kid’s clay classes – “Around the World with Clay”. Our projects are going to focus on the ancient cultures of Egypt, the Mayans and Africa for the next 8 weeks. I think a cup will enter the picture for the Mayan period – maybe a stirrup cup.
On Tuesday afternoon we began our first project – and you may have surmised from my photograph at top and the title of this post, we made cartouches out of clay. I found the U of Penn website and typed in each kid’s name in order to give each student a print out of their name in hieroglyphics to use for the project. We are going to make canopic jars next week.
Here are a couple of the kid’s cartouches from Tuesday afternoon, still green and in various stages of drying (as usual, many kids break the template, which I kind of enjoy):
Meanwhile, my daughter auditioned for Denver School of the Arts yesterday afternoon. It was a tough day, and I don’t know about her, but I am glad it is over. Parents were not allowed in the room during auditions and were left to wring our hands, bite our nails in nervousness and otherwise kill time in the hallway. When my daughter exited the audition room, I could see by her face that it didn’t go well and she had all she could do to hold it together until we were safely in the car where the tears flowed freely. What a tough process for a 5th grader to experience, and an even tougher one for me. My girl is growing up and I realized that I can’t protect her from every disappointment in life. A kiss, hug and a band aid just don’t suffice in times like this. I did ask her whether she wishes I had discouraged her from applying to the school, and she replied, “No.” I guess all I can do sometimes is just to be there and to support her no matter the outcome. Sigh….
She has been offered an interview at the Denver Center for International Studies which takes place at the end of the month and there is a third school in the running - so not all is lost – it only feels that way to her right now. Some of you may remember that Denver offers school choice – gone are the days of going to the neighborhood school. Instead, kids apply to schools that they want to attend which has created keen competition for many of the more popular schools. Consequently, the schools make kids apply as if it was a college or a job they were going after (recommendations letters, essays, transcripts, resumes, head-shots, and interviews etc. are often required). Although some schools, like the School of Science and Technology, have instituted a lottery system instead which takes away the competitive aspect of applying and leaves fate up to the “luck of the draw”.
At any rate, I’ll be back sometime this weekend,
~Cynthia
WordPress Plug-ins I’m Currently Using
“Plug-ins extend what WordPress can do by adding new functionality and features with minimal effort on your part” writes Scott McNulty in Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read. If you’re new to WordPress, I highly recommend picking this book up! It’s short and and gets to the meat of using WordPress effectively.
Plug-ins are basically little bits of code that developers write and distribute for others to use on their WordPress sites. I’m using quite a few on this site to make it do stuff that I want it to without having extensive knowledge of programming. Some plug-ins work right out of the box once activated; others require a bit of input from me to work. Some are intuitive; others not so much. For the latter, I move on to a different one if I can find a suitable replacement, otherwise if the competition is lean, I hash it out.
So what am I using?
| Administrative | For Posts and Pages |
| Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu – moves the WP dashboard from the left to the top and has drop down navigation. | NextGen Gallery – NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slide show option. |
| pageMash – Customize the order your pages are listed and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. | Event Calendar - Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar. |
| WP Super Cache – This plug-in generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. | Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button – Helps readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and over 100 more. The button comes with Add to Any’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history. |
| HeadSpace2 – Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies. | Add to Any Subscribe Button – Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader, such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Netvibes, Windows Live, and all the rest. The button comes with Add to Any’s customizable Smart Menu, which places the services visitors use at the top of the menu, based on each visitor’s browsing history. |
| Robots Meta – This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused and nofollow unnecessary links. | Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. |
| TinyMCE Advanced – This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. (TinyMCE is a WYSIWYG editor that WP uses.) | WP-Print - Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page. |
| Theme Test Drive – Theme Test Drive WordPress plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. | WP Ajax Edit Comments – Allows users and admin to edit their comments inline. Admin and editors can edit all comments. Very cool feature so that users don’t have to delete their comment if that make typos or want to add anything. |
| Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. | WP-Gravatar – This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments. |
| WP-DB Manager – Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. | cformsII – cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page! |
Wow – that’s a lot of plug-ins! Sometimes when WordPress releases new versions, plug-ins become obsolete or aren’t compatible with the new version. How do I know when this happens? Simple, something stops working. I simple deactivate the affected plug-in in my dashboard or delete it all together from my server.
Here are some screen shots of a couple of the plug-ins in action:
Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu
The drop down menu moves the default WP dashboard to the top of the screen and has drop down menus to help one easily find the page, post or application one is looking for & ultimately saves time.
pashMash
pageMash adds drag and drop functionality to your administrative functions. Users can also hide pages so that they aren’t shown in your navigation menu.
Theme Test Drive
Pretty cool feature – lets users test out a different theme without it being live.
ccforms II in action on my "Contact" page
This is pretty cool, too bad I didn’t investigate forms earlier in my WP blogging adventure. This can also be used as a comment form on posts, but I really wanted to use it for people to email me privately or to sign up for my future email newsletters. The plugin also includes image “captcha” to keep spam under control. Unfortunately, my email address is already floating around in cyber space, but since implementing the form a coupl e of weeks ago it’s significantly less than it was a month ago.
WP Ajax Edit Comments Plugin
Allows users to edit their own comments. It also allows me to edit a users comment, which is something I don’t do. I don’t censor comments, although if it’s outright spam, it is deleted if Akismet doesn’t catch it.
Print Post
Once in awhile, I write a post that someone might like to refer back to – I made it easy and installed a print plug-in so readers can click on the post and print out a copy.
Add to Any Subscribe Button
Allows users to subscribe with their favorite feed reader.
Add to Any Share Button
Allows users to share a particular post on various sites like Stumbleupon or Digg, etc.
My avatar
One note about Avatars – the little picture of me that shows up when I or others post a comment. I’ve enabled gravatars, which are “globally recognized avatars” and are linked to a users email address. Visit Gravatar to register your avatar and the next time you visit, your avatar will show up when you post a comment on my blog. Other sites that have gravatars enabled will also display your avatar.
My apologies to those of you who land here looking for pottery related information today, I promise that studio time is in my forecast this week! Meanwhile it’s snowing today which is a good thing I suppose. I can use the day to finish up the Colorado Potters Guild Website guilt free since it’s probably colder than a witches…well you get the picture. 
Later,
~Cynthia
Website Structure
website page navigation diagram
Today’s post was supposed to be about my new shopping cart that I added to my site; however, I had to disable it because it broke the visual editor in my wordpress dashboard. It’s a shame because I spent a good 6 hours the other night configuring it and another 3 hours this morning trying to fix it. Since I’m only offering parent’s of the kids enrolled in my after school clay class the option of paying by credit card, and I am not currently selling anything on my website, I need to move on. I’ve already invested too much time on the shopping cart. Double dang.
My easy solution? I added PayPal and Google Checkout buttons on my “Teaching Schedule” page for the parents who choose to pay via CC. Google Checkout was easy to set up, and I’ve never used it before. Fees are lower than PayPal, however, making this an attractive option. The only drawback is that customers have to sign up for a Google account if they don’t already have one.
| PayPal Fees for “Premier” account holders | Google Checkout Fees for non Adwords users |
| 2.9% + $0.30 USD | 2% + $0.20 per transaction |
| Fees are lower depending volume and type of account. | Fees are free if you are an AdWords user and have high volume. |
Back to the title of the post…I decided to diagram pages I think would be good to include on my site using good old fashioned pen and paper . I know several of you are currently revamping your sites and I highly recommend diagramming it and also to be thinking about what kind of functionality you want to have both on the back end and also what is available for public consumption. I did this after I started adding pages – slaps self on head – but as soon as I drew the diagram, it was so much easier to move forward. To help me decide how I wanted to structure my site, I looked at several other people’s site – mostly other clay folk, but also other artists in other media.
Thanks for the great responses to the word of the year post! I have taken some of your advice and broken my website down into small chunks to make it a less daunting task. I am using the same strategy for the Potters Guild site as well. I still have some projects on my to-do list as it relates to my site but, I feel like I have a better handle now. In the meantime, I need to finish the Guild’s site.
My next post is going to highlight some of the WordPress Plugins that I am using that are proving invaluable!
Have a great weekend,
~Cynthia
