Field Update — October 11, 2026
Field Update — October 11, 2026
Six releases are live on the KB this week — the Melton package is complete, the archive's own 2006 cooling calculator runs again, and every claim still traces to a source you can open.
CoolSky FAQ (Oct 10)
Eighteen questions and answers for people meeting the system for the first time — eleven for newcomers, seven technical. Every measured figure keeps its installation and test conditions; community numbers are labeled as community-reported; where the archive is silent, the FAQ says so instead of guessing.
Melton slideshow (Oct 11)
The 21-slide deck of built CoolSky structures for Melton Design/Build in Longmont — by building, in order, with an installation-type key (water on top, water on the side, with louvers). Fourteen KB sources, eighteen credited photographs and drawings, and a 21-page PDF for email.
CoolSky Iterations building guide (Oct 11)
The companion document the slideshow pointed toward: six chapters covering every built iteration the archive documents — Baer House (1971, the thermal-storage ancestor), Cool Cell, Andy Shack, the Bruce Davis studio, Sol-Mod, and the New Mexico container — with photos, patent drawings, and the documented performance for each. Twenty-nine near-miss candidates are recorded with reasons, and a 47-page PDF is ready to send to Melton.
Each chapter ends with a "Gaps & questions for Jose/Bruce" block: what the archive does not establish, and the exact question that would settle it. The document doubles as our group-review worksheet.
6 chapters · 19 cited articles · 27 tracked images · 1971–2026
NSRC cooling calculator (Oct 11)
Bristol Stickney's 2006 night-sky cooling spreadsheet (Cedar Mountain Solar, for the Governor's Water Innovation Fund) runs again as an interactive page. Model a house against all eleven New Mexico climate zones, adjust the 2006 assumptions, and see cooling energy, water, and dollar savings for both the air-conditioner and evaporative-cooler paths. It is a faithful port: every formula was extracted mechanically from the archived workbook and is documented cell by cell, source errors included.
→ Try the calculator → How the model works — every formula, cited → The archived 2006 spreadsheet
Sample house, 2006 defaults: Red River gets 100% of its cooling from the night sky · Albuquerque 1,275 of 1,573 kWh (81%) · Carlsbad 58%
Site repairs (Oct 11)
Three fixes worth knowing about: the output pages that 404'd are fixed; photographs now render on every project page (the Baer House preservation brief, the Los Ranchos container deck, and the Melton deck were all shipping broken images); and the source lists on output pages now read as proper article links instead of internal file paths — on the website and in the PDFs.
→ Browse everything published → Baer House preservation brief, photos restored
Where the group comes in
- Jose and Bruce: the building guide's gap blocks are written for you. Among them — does the south-side photo in the Baer House chapter show the house or a Zomeworks outbuilding? When was the container actually built (the archive says circa 2025; the photo files say March 2026)? And no materials list survives for any building — anything you remember counts.
- Melton handoff: the 47-page building-guide PDF is ready to email (about 40 MB — a file link may travel better than an attachment). The slideshow PDF is ready too.
- Everyone: read the FAQ as a newcomer would and flag anything that reads wrong, and try breaking the calculator — it should never show a number the 2006 workbook wouldn't.
- Open question: Wikipedia's Steve Baer article now credits a Sky Katona with "considerable contributions" at Zomeworks. The name appears nowhere in our archive. Does anyone know who this is — or can someone ask Jose?
Solar Fool KB · every claim links to its source · kb.solarfool.org