I've got this crazy dog that loves to bark at the kids in the neighborhood. That in itself doesn't bother me , but her claw marks on the walls do. Not to mention I'm afraid of her breaking the single pane of glass. So up went the board.

This worked out pretty good , the dog still barks , and tears up my walls a little less. It started to get cold , and me a little bored . So I decided to paint this black in order to collect some free sun energy. It worked , the sun would heat the flat black paint slightly. I figured I could increase the efficiency with some old black ceramic tiles I tore out of a job awhile back.. I didn't want to just stick them on with mastic , they needed to be removable in order to move the board around in the summer. So I ripped some wood.

Here's how bad my carpentry skills are. Ugly but it still works.

I made 8 of these runners , with 2 rips in order to have double layers of tiles. A quick dry fit.

And on the wall they went.

I turned the board over and inserted 14 tiles. On a 65 degree F sunny day , the temp actually got close to 160 ! I never took a reading on the flat black paint to make comparisons. I also added the second layer of tiles without taking readings , but I doubt it got any hotter.

I total of 28 tiles were added on the 2 foot by 8 foot board. I added a second board with nothing but black paint. I cut 2 holes and added 2 172mm computer fans. The fans are powered by a spare 350 watt power supply. The power supply is fed by a thermostat that turns it on at 80 degrees.

This seems to work out good if the sun is shinning. This window is facing south, as any solar collector would need to be. I tries to take a picture of the outside. It doesn't look like much but a darkened window .

Try searching Google for solar collectors and you'll find plenty of variations. I'm trying to take some readings of temperature output , but the sun never shines on the weekends here in Ohio!

Thanks to my nutty dog , Duchess , who gave me a reason to board up a window.