Bangs McCoy

Our sun-jars need work

April 28th, 2007

Bryan took Rees to Little Gym this morning, which gave me a chance to get an early start. I cleaned up and then spent time outside working in our yard. The temperature was just perfect. Rees and Bryan brought back a Jamba Juice for me. In the early afternoon, I went with Maryanne to Piper’s in Sugarhouse for their biannual open house. I got some great deals on some nice retro-modern fabrics, and brought an eclair back for Bryan.

I recently spotted a solar-powered “sun jar” online and showed it to my friend Liz. She was really interested in making one. Bryan did some investigating and found an instructable to make one yourself. So we settled on today to give it a try. Camillia wanted to join but she was busy making fruit salad for her Grandma’s 80th birthday party. We went out in search of lights, jars, and frosting spray. We only found lights. So we used some mason jars I had (at least I had cool antique zinc lids for them) and matte-finish sealer. The sealer actually worked pretty well to frost the jars. Bryan helped us deconstruct the lights. However, they didn’t turn out so great. Liz wanted her jar to be completely autonomous - she didn’t want to ever have to move it. She also wanted it to be water-tight so she could leave it outdoors. These requirements presented some aesthetic problems - the assembly for our particular lights, combined with our chosen jars, made it difficult to place the solar panel in such a way that it would collect light but not look ugly inside the jar. She ended up with a “ghetto” (her words) sun-jar with a standard brass-tone canning ring (which she tried to spray-paint black) with the solar panel balanced on top. The rest of the assembly hung precariously down from the lid inside the jar. I opted for a jar that needed to be turned on its side to charge, then turned on automatically when the jar was turned right-side up. I put my solar panel face down on the bottom the jar and secured it with Blu-Tac. I also lined the inside of the jar with white vellum, and used one of the cool zinc lids. However, the Blu-Tac gets too soft when heated, and doesn’t hold. But my jar still works anyway. It is not super-bright, but definitely has a cool effect to it. I think with a different type of jar, they could be great.

The temperature here has been in the 80’s, so our house is getting pretty warm. Rees is pretty stuck in his ways, and it has been a little tough to convince him that he can’t wear fleece jammies to bed right now (especially his dinosaur jammies from cousin Berkeley). In fact, we have no warm-weather jammies in his size, so he has been forced to sleep in a t-shirt and his Pull-ups.

Entry Filed under: I do stuff, I garden, I make things