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17 articles, most recently updated first
Can a Double Play-style passive water thermosiphon be shrunk to a 2.5 cubic-foot outdoor cat shelter in South Texas? Scaling physics says use a small pump, not passive circulation.…
The archive now spans from 400 BC to 2025 — from ancient Persian ice houses through a Japanese engineer's proposal to combine nocturnal radiation cooling with radiant panels, throu…
The archive is, among other things, a collection of teaching methods. Baer spent five decades explaining radiant energy to non-specialists — newsletter readers, architects, shareho…
Demonstration buildings do measurably drive adoption — but only through local peer-network learning, not press reach, and only when the underlying engineering holds up once the cam…
The archive's adoption gap has a structural cause: passive thermal systems eliminate ongoing energy purchases, removing the incentive for utilities, HVAC manufacturers, and large b…
The archive's passive thermal systems have been independently validated by government engineers, practicing architects, and academic historians. The physics works. The buildings la…
This bundle groups the earliest archive material: Antarctic heat-collector notes, the Solar Energy newsletter pages, and the long run of Tribal Messenger / Tribal Notes scans. Take…
This bundle collects the late-1990s and 2000 sources that set up the later archive: natural cooling, roof-integrated solar, radiant cooling, persuasive essays, correspondence, and …
This bundle is the densest part of the archive. It contains the development notes for Cool Cell, Di-thermal roofs, storage, pool-heater cooling, plate testing, double play, and rel…
This bundle is smaller but thematically tight: unglazed solar collectors, geographical variation, and perihelion. It reads like a geometric and seasonal refinement of the earlier c…
This bundle covers the decade between the 2002 engineering peak and the 2025 retrospective — a period of independent validation, public presentation, and continued practice. The fi…
This bundle gathers the 2025 recap material: modern Cool Cell writeups, a pool-heater cooling note, shareholder commentary, Di-thermal roof updates, and a double-play thermosiphon …
Across the archive, the same conclusion keeps reappearing: effective passive climate control is not one trick but a coupled system. Water stores heat, surfaces exchange heat with t…
Most of the archive is written by Steve Baer or the Zomeworks staff. But a recurring pattern emerges when the wiki pages are read together: people outside Zomeworks keep arriving a…
The archive keeps finding the same deployment strategy: attach passive thermal systems to things that already exist. Existing pool heaters, existing roofs, existing building shells…
Four wiki pages, written between 1999 and 2004, form a single argument: removing the glass cover from a solar collector is not a compromise — it is a design choice that unlocks coo…
Across the archive, one material appears in every thermal system: water. It stores heat, moves heat, bridges heating and cooling loops, and defines the time constants of the buildi…