Solair

Solair

Project 2014-04-01 18:21:21 +1300

Collab Project with Smart Energy Challenge

Wellington City Council is teaming up with some of Wellington's brightest social entrepreneurs from Enspiral, Generation Zero and PledgeMe, to bring local Smart Energy projects to life. They've joined forces to find and support community-led projects designed to reduce energy use and increase clean energy in Wellington. Wellington City Council will match dollar for dollar the target amount of each successful project. This means that every dollar you pledge towards these projects will turn into two dollars! Let's get smart energy humming in Wellington.

In your city, in your suburb, people are struggling. This could be your elderly neighbour, the young family across the street, the guy in your sports team, your colleague at work, or the person you sit next to at church.

New Zealand’s poor housing stock causes significant challenges for thousands of people, with issues such as high electricity bills, high medical bills, lost days at work or school, and serious illnesses.

Many of our cities' most vulnerable people go to bed at night too cold to get any sleep in their own home. This is not a new problem. In 2004 it was estimated that 375,000 children lived in dwellings that were cold, damp and expensive to heat. Imagine having to choose between providing food for your children or heating their bedroom at night.

Our Solair space heater is a simple, affordable solution to help solve this complicated problem.

Six reasons why the Solair space heater is so impressive:

- Once installed it has no ongoing running costs! This provides the dwelling with warm, dry air for no cost.

- Insulating cold, damp homes only traps in this unhealthy air. The Solair unit adds an injection of warm, dry air to displace this.

- It’s simple! The Solair can be installed in around two hours and is fully self-contained. With only one moving part, it doesn’t take an engineer to understand how it works or how to install it

- It is also great peace of mind for landlords knowing that their building will be ventilated; even if their tenants do not actively do this.

- It boosts renewable energy! Each unit installed means less reliance on centralised electricity generation, which corresponds to less stress on our rivers and natural environments.

- Who wouldn’t want to come home from work to a cosy warm house this winter?! The Solair unit can produce heat over 40C on a typical cold but sunny 10C Wellington day!

Our goal is simple.  We need to raise $6000 in the next 6 weeks. At the end of this challenge, each dollar we raise will be matched by the Wellington City Council, so for every dollar you donate you are effectively donating two. We only get this money if we reach our $6000 target. We want to use this money install our Solair space heaters into low income households, schools, student flats, or community buildings in Wellington this winter – benefiting those who need it most.  At the same time we’re helping them get through a cold winter, we’ll have the product tested for New Zealand conditions and conduct R&D on the product to make it even smarter and more efficient.

Get your friends, whanau or community group together and nominate a building to take part in the challenge. Email us with the name of the household or organisation you want to nominate, plus a quick description of why you think they would be perfect candidates to receive a crowdfunded Solair heater.

Share this video. To create positive change in our community we need as many people as possible to view this video- email it to your friends and family, or your community leaders. Share it with your social media connections. Like our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter @solairNZ.

Please Pledge! The only way we are going to get these initial units installed is with the kind support from you, our crowd. We have some fantastic rewards and you can even buy a Solair unit for your home at a 20% reduced rate.

Whether you can pledge a little, or a lot, you can help to make real change for real people today. 

 Pictured here is an installed, wall-mounted Solair unit. It can also be mounted on rooftops.

The system works by attracting solar radiation to the black panel in the box. There is a strip of photovoltaic cells at the top of the unit that powers a fan, which blows the hot air created in the box into the building.

There is a thermostat for temperature control that is part of the system. Therefore, the entire system is completely separate from the home's grid and able to operate even in the absence of centralised power generation.

The graph below details typical heat output of the system shown above, related to air temperature.

 For further technical details, please email questions to:

[email protected]

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