[ExI] LA Times: His passion for solar still burns

[PJ Manney]

"Forty years ago, Harold Hay came up with a way to heat and cool homes
using water and the sun. At 98, he's still trying to get the world to
notice."

Turns out a user-friendly personality is more important than
user-friendly technology in getting it across the finish line.

I've seen a few water roofs over the years, most notably Barton Myer's
house in Montecito:
http://www.bartonmyers.com/toro_03.htm
but they're used as much for fire prevention as insulation.  [BTW,
given our regular fires out here, Myers' home is complete genius.  The
fire burns around it, but has nothing to catch on the house.  It's the
perfect lock-and-leave house for fire-prone SoCal canyons.]

I recommend linking to the newssite's webpage for picture and diagrams
of Hay's system:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/columnone/la-fi-haroldhay10nov10,1,716684.story?coll=la-headlines-columnone


>From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
His passion for solar still burns
Forty years ago, Harold Hay came up with a way to heat and cool homes
using water and the sun. At 98, he's still trying to get the world to
notice.
By Elizabeth Douglass
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 10, 2007

Harold Hay wants to help the world save itself, but he's running out of time.

Forty years ago, Hay invented a simple, inexpensive way to heat and
cool a home using the sun's rays, but without the panels and wiring
that come with conventional solar energy systems.

He's been pushing for its adoption ever since, trying to find footing
in each of the solar industry's last three boom-and-bust cycles.

Yet, despite the merits of his pioneering technology, the energy
establishment has shown only fleeting interest.

Now 98, Hay is making what he knows will be his final push.

The retired chemist promotes his cause by funding research. He vents
his frustration in letters, e-mails, phone messages to anyone who will
listen, and on his own website, www.2and50needles.com.

Hay is sanctimonious, unyielding and scathingly critical of other
people's efforts and the solar business as a whole. He dismisses the
Energy Department as being "in the research-forever stage" and the
solar trade as "a bunch of money grubbers."

Hay has no interest in softening his message. He doesn't have time for subtlety.

Hay quotes from an article he's earmarked in Natural History magazine:

"When scientists do science, when they play their game, they debate
passionately, and disagree openly, often with brutal honesty toward
party lines, sacred cows, or" -- Hay raises his voice for emphasis --
"other people's feelings."

He closes the magazine. "Now that defines me as close as you can get."
Hay adds, as if reminding himself, "That's why I'm a loner."

That tenacity has sometimes worked against him.

Over time, people lost patience with Hay and then lost interest in his
creation, says Ken Haggard, who designs buildings that use solar
energy. Hay's combative personality and reluctance to let others join
his mission scotched one potential deal and may have turned others
off, Haggard says.

"He's a caricature of the mad inventor," says Haggard, who met Hay in
1972 when the architect was a young professor at Cal Poly San Luis
Obispo. "He's a genius. But he's also impossible. And he has not
mellowed one iota."



It's tempting to write off Hay as a bitter solar has-been, hoping for
immortality at the end of his life. But, given today's energy and
climate challenges, ignoring his message and achievements could be a
mistake.

"His invention and what he's been saying for all these years is still
very, very relevant," says Becky Campbell-Howe, operations director at
the American Solar Energy Society, which gave Hay its Passive Solar
Pioneer award in 1986.

"The main point that he's trying to make now is that all of our hopes
are pinned on all of these complicated technologies, and it's not that
complicated. We could solve a lot of the problems by building our
buildings correctly."

Hay calls his invention the Skytherm system, and it was a wonder in
the 1960s because it used the sun to heat and cool a home. The
earliest version operated without any electricity, making it a purely
passive solar technology.

Skytherm was the first of what's known today as a roof-pond system. It
includes a large mass of water, contained water-bed style in plastic
bladders on top of a house. A steel liner subsitutes for regular
roofing. The flat roof also holds an insulation panel that moves on
rails to cover and uncover the water with the help of a motor, an
upgrade from the original rope pulley.

The concept relies on water's tremendous ability to absorb heat.
During hot summer days, the water bags are covered by the panel, which
deflects the heat of the sun while the bags draw warmth from the
house, keeping the interior cool. At night, the panel moves aside and
the bags release their heat into the night air. The process is
reversed in the winter.

Hay explains the basic theory by pointing out his bedroom window:
"Take the black pavement out on the street. It gets extremely hot
every day in the summertime -- much too hot to walk across barefooted.
The next morning it's cold."

Hay attempts what passes for a shout these days: "You don't need
electricity to cool! You don't need an air conditioner! You do it with
the sky."

In 1967, Hay scraped together the money to build a one-room test home
in Phoenix. The results were encouraging, but yielded no flood of
support or funding. It took him several more years, but Hay finally
got a full-scale model built in Atascadero, Calif., near the campus of
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

It was completed in 1973. The next year, Hay testified before
Congress, imploring lawmakers to fund research into solar heating and
cooling. Two years later, Hay's Skytherm house was recognized by the
American Revolution Bicentennial Commission as one of the country's
200 most promising inventions.

In his run-down apartment near downtown Los Angeles, crammed with a
lifetime of research, Hay holds up a brightly colored poster
celebrating the award; he points to the spot where the Skytherm house
is mentioned.

"That was an award from the president of the United States," he says.
"My house was one of the unique things, and it's gone nowhere."



Hay likes to say he was born to invent.

He grew up on a dairy farm in Spokane, Wash., the youngest of three
boys. His father held patents on pasteurizing machinery and young
Harold, the farm's bottle washer, got his start in chemistry by
studying butterfat content at the dairy.

Later, he earned a chemistry degree at the University of Wisconsin in
Madison. Hay's first job out of college was at Monsanto Chemical Co.'s
wood products division, where he concocted a preservative that was
used for years on telephone poles and railroad ties around the world.

In the library at Monsanto, he met Evelyn, the woman who became his
wife and stuck by him as he zigzagged through life, taking jobs in
government and industry that sent them to Sweden, Venezuela, Colombia,
Morocco and India, the place that inspired the Skytherm design.

Hay stops his story here because it's impossible for him to gloss over
Evelyn. For 48 years -- until her death from breast cancer in 1985 --
she was the chief believer in a temperamental scientist with big
ideas.

"Evelyn. Oh, God. She's such a treasure," Hay says, speaking of her in
the present tense. "Without a person like that, a scientist has a hard
time in life."

He grins while recalling an ill-conceived Christmas Eve journey to
northern Sweden. The young couple, intent on a romantic sleigh ride,
instead found themselves with a lone reindeer, freezing and sinking
into the snow because it was overwhelmed by the load.

And there was the time they couldn't pay the rent and thought they'd
have to sleep on benches in MacArthur Park. For those few minutes,
thinking of Evelyn, Hay seemed like a young and foolish husband again.

Hay says he spearheaded the creation of the St. Louis Progressive
Party, which helped get him labeled a communist. He came up with a
chemical to purify drinking water, and he found a way to chemically
toughen fiberboard to broaden its use. During World War II, the
self-proclaimed pacifist worked on the development of synthetic rubber
to avoid military service and jail. Along the way, almost as a hobby,
Hays did groundbreaking research in the origins of medicine.



Today, Hay's universe is considerably smaller. For more than two
decades he's been living in a tiny apartment, surrounded by dozens of
boxes full of magazine articles, scholarly treatises and government
reports. One entire wall of boxes is devoted to medical topics.
Asisclo "Butch" Carnaje, who takes care of Hay, says the clutter is
loosely organized by subject. Amid the mess, Hay keeps a magazine
display rack that holds copies of his congressional testimony as well
as conference papers with titles such as "Wet Steps to Solar Stills"
and "Roofponds En Route."

The most recent material is in the bedroom, where Hay spends most of
his time. There, magazines, annual reports, clippings and the like are
stacked on the floor and under the hospital-style bed.

Hay is strong for someone who has lived 98 years. But age and illness,
witnessed by the long rows of medications on his dresser, have left
their inevitable mark. His daily routine is dictated mostly by meals
and sleep, which leaves pockets of time for him to read, watch the BBC
and business news, check e-mail and track his stocks online.

Hay used to regularly board a crosstown bus to do research at
university libraries. Now his social schedule is composed mostly of
doctors' appointments. But not entirely.

In December, he spent nearly a month in a mountainside bamboo house in
Manila with Carnaje and his family. He then made a side trip to an
international meeting on the history of medicine, with a stop to
lecture a Habitat for Humanity group on the Skytherm design.

"I'm happy here," Hay says. "The thing I'm not happy about is that my
ideas aren't recognized."



Hay's prized Skytherm house is in disrepair these days. A family lived
in it for a while, but there were leaks. When fuel got cheap again in
the late 1970s, enthusiasm for the project petered out along with the
entire solar movement. The Skytherm house's benefits were never
documented beyond the prototype stage, and no one worked out how much
mass production would cost.

Over the years, Hay has given $500,000 to the University of Nevada Las
Vegas and $50,000 to Indiana's Ball State University to fund Skytherm
research. The studies confirmed the heating and cooling benefits of
Hay's design but didn't go further.

Encouraged by a $1-million research grant from Hay -- along with title
to the Atascadero house -- Cal Poly has periodically revived the
project. Mike Montoya, a professor of construction management,
recently secured permits to bring the house up to current building
codes. He hopes to reopen it and quantify its merits.

"The thing that sparked my interest is the fact that it is supposed to
be able to heat and cool the house with no power," Montoya says.
"There are a couple of problems, but it clearly works. It's a design
that's very, very simple and that can be applied pretty much
anywhere."

What has kept the idea from spreading?

"One of the reasons he hasn't had more success is that the entire
solar industry, with few exceptions, has been undercapitalized," says
David James, an associate vice provost at UNLV who worked with Hay for
three years and coauthored with him a 2006 paper on solar stills,
which purify water using sunlight. "Some of it is back-scratching, or
politics . . . and you have to be able to convince conventionally
minded bureaucrats that it can be done."

Steven Strong, who heads a solar design company that uses passive
solar techniques alongside solar panels and other methods, has doubts
about the applicability of Hay's roof ponds in today's housing market.

"The actual application that he had, very few will ever be done. But
the whole idea of a green roof, where you're intercepting the sunlight
and creating a thermal barrier so that the building is cooler below,
that has more appeal," he says. "He was just ahead of his time."

Steve Baer, another solar inventor and a Hay admirer since the 1960s,
says he built a business selling utility cooling systems that were
inspired by Hay's concepts. And over the summer, he tested a variation
of Hay's roof-pond system that he hopes will catch on in Southern
California and other sunny spots.

"I'm more and more sure that his ideas are going to find their way to
the public," says Baer, president of Zomeworks Corp.

If it happens, it won't be soon enough for Hay.

"All these developments are in the future," Hay says, "and I'm getting
older, and know it."

elizabeth.douglass

@latimes.com