Gary Reysa is a DIY solar expert and regular contributor to MOTHER EARTH  NEWS. He’s been tinkering with solar projects for nine years, and he gathers  data for every project he builds. We thought you’d like to learn more about the  person MOTHER EARTH NEWS turns to when we have questions about home solar  projects.

How did you become interested in solar power projects?

I’ve been interested in solar heating projects for quite a while — a lot of  people were experimenting with solar in the ’80s, and I always found that  interesting but didn’t take on any projects at the time. When we retired to  Montana in 2000 — and faced the prospect of bills for 1,800 gallons of propane  for a heating season — I thought it was time to get busy on some solar  heating!

I’ve found solar thermal projects to be not only helpful on energy bills, but  also interesting from a technical and design point of view. There are lots of  opportunities for innovation in this field. It’s a great area for “garage  inventors,” and I encourage people with an interest to give it a go.

What was your first homemade solar project?

The first real solar project was the thermosyphon solar heating collector for  my barn. (Read about it in Build a Simple Solar Heater.) The simplicity, effectiveness  and short payback of this heater got me hooked on doing more.

Whenever you build a solar project, you record data and analyze  efficiency. How did you develop the knowledge required to do that?

I guess this comes out of a long career in engineering at Boeing. If you  can’t measure how well version A of a design does, you don’t know where to go  with version B — measuring results is the real key to improving a design. The  physics and measurements of solar thermal applications tend to be pretty simple  and easy to understand, which is nice.

You have tons of information about solar projects on your  website, Build It Solar. What’s your favorite  project?

I guess if I had to pick a single project, it would be the solar shop heater. It’s just a set of glazed doors outside  of my shop’s overhead door. To let solar heat and light in, you raise the  overhead door, and to keep this from being a huge night heat drain, you lower  the insulated overhead door — nothing could be simpler.

The combination of solar heating and outstanding lighting that you get from  this simple design transforms the shop into a great place to spend time. People  look at me strangely when I pick this project as my favorite, but I really  appreciate simple things that work well.

What do you think is the most important material on your  website?

I have a program called The Half Plan, which is an easy and cost effective way to  cut one’s energy consumption and carbon emissions in half (or more). When I read  about trillion dollar programs to implement carbon sequestration for coal-fired  power plants, I realized that simply not using the energy in the first place is  less costly, is less technically risky, and pays a big dividend in saved fuel  costs. And, it’s easy to do — we just all need to get busy and do it!

Have you ever built something that didn’t  work?

Oh, if I had a nickel for every failure!

Prototypes that don’t work are the way you get to designs that do work. But,  you have to set them up so that you learn from each try — this goes back to  measuring results.

Do you also experiment with photovoltaic (PV) or wind-generated  electricity?

I’m putting in a PV system right now. I’m doing all the work myself and  learning a lot — it’s a fascinating technology. From my perspective, the  negatives are that there is not much room for innovation and the payback is  still not very good.

Why do you prefer to work with solar-heated air and water  projects?