The Midcoast Green Collaborative is a Maine-based public nonprofit with the wide mission of socially responsible economic growth for their region. There's also an associated good blog with a high percentage of building-based posts — lots of nice, accessible, generally bite-sized, hands-on observational science. One swell example begins, "Do you leave the screens in your windows and storm windows during the winter? We have been telling clients to remove them, but didn't have a number for amount of energy saved. Searching the web, I found nothing, so I decided to do a little testing..." Excerpt:
Next, I placed three pieces of dark soapstone (12 x 12 x
1/2 tiles) near a window facing south, on a sunny March day around noon. One piece was placed in the shade, one in direct sunlight (through the window), and one with the screen in the window. I came back and measured the temperatures of the three stones with an infrared thermometer from a distance of about 1 foot. The shaded stone meas
ured 76.7ºF, the one in the screened window 88.7ºF, and the one in the unscreened window 96.7ºF.
