It’s not often that you see coverage of a failed solar heating system in the newspaper. Usually they just die quietly, but in today’s Register Guard was a story about the 18-month-old Lane Community College solar water heater that was damaged when the temperatures got down to 23 degrees F.

I loved the quote from the facilities manager, David Willis,  “Especially with new technologies, there’s always going to be some things that didn’t get worked out,”

Sorry Dave, but solar water heating is not new, and Eugene, Oregon freezes every year.

If you create a system with the potential to fail, it will. I guess the good news is that they think only 18 of the 36 panels were broken.

In my view this was not a catastrophic failure. This failure only killed the collector panels. A catastrophic failure would have burst pressurized water lines in the attic space and flooded the wood floors in the new gymnasium for 4 days.

Too bad they didn’t have access to the Copper Dragon.