This is a guest blog post by the Westbrook-Walnut Grove (WWG) YES! Team
Recently, the WWG Earth YES! Class has been working on one of their recent winter projects, the Trombe Wall Project. To start off the project, they needed to experiment the effectiveness of the Trombe walls.
At the start, they constructed two miniature boxes for the experiment. The WWG students built the testable miniature Trombe Walls by cutting out plastic bottles and taping them together to make water tubes, and then building a rectangular box-like frame from old, reused blocks of wood. They would then install the back with a thick piece of plywood and the front with plexiglass. Finally, they insulated the inside and outside and attached a thermometer inside to read the temperature. They tested out the miniature Trombe Wall boxes by shining light through the front to heat up the space (air) and the tubes of water inside, and then left them outside to see how long it would take it to cool off.
The WWG Earth YES! Class thought of a great ways to use these Trombe walls. With the installation of these Trombe walls inside the ticket booth houses outside the football field, we could keep the ticket booth people warm inside these buildings on cold football nights. Another idea was placing these Trombe walls inside the WWG bus garage.
After the experiment on the testable boxes, the WWG students took their next step in their project. They measured the windows of the two outside ticket booth buildings, ordered the wood and plexiglass, stained the wood, and finished building both wooden frames. Soon, the WWG Earth YES! Class will have finished making the Trombe wall boxes and place the water tubes inside.
