redneck skylight (Filipino style)

That is ingenious!

Pete

Yabbut, now they can see what they have in their ratty little shacks. Weren't they better off in the dark?

I had no idea the Filipinos lived in such squalor. It looks like the outskirts of Rio, or anywhere in Haiti. Eye opener.

-- A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one's life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. -- Louis L'Amour

Job security! The GM model.

Hardly an expensive or difficult repair...even there.

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They should commission Holophane to form prismatic cylinders out of borosilicate glass.

Let me guess: You're a "Glass half empty" kind of guy, aren't you?

In a sense it is the same. That was not the high-rent district you were seeing.

The whole thing looked more like a "truly great innovation" conceived by the peace corps, the world bank or some NGO. Firstly, these places are in the tropics! Can you imagine what a tin box with no windows is like in the tropics? The residents certainly can and that is why they all have windows; big windows.

The corrugated roofs are a very flimsy construction and stomping around on them will usually either break a few roof beams or at least bust a few sheets of well rusted tin roofing.

And lastly, those plastic bottles can be sold. The people in those tin huts are poor and some of them make a part of their living harvesting plastic bottles from garbage cans and selling them. Do you sell off parts of your income?

-- John B.

jsw

I roofed my storage shed with corrugated clear PVC on the north side. It's stiff enough to hold snow but too brittle to withstand acorns and developed leaks. Floppier clear Suntuf polycarbonate panels with trapezoidal corrugations fitted right over the PVC ones and stand up to falling debris better. Together they are a good combination of stiffness and toughness.

The colored PVC panels are tougher initially than the clear ones though the green panels I installed a decade ago have become brittle.

jsw

On 11/9/2011 11:31 AM, Jim Wilkins wrote: ...

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Side walls, maybe; nothing I've seen that's even remotely affordable is close to being tough enough to stand up to hail we routinely get in SW KS for overhead and sides are still iffy because when it hails it normally also blows (a lot).

But, even if it were tough enough, it would suffer from the faults in this instance of a) I'd have to buy whatever whereas I have a zillion of the old insulators and b) it doesn't have the "kewl use!" factor... :)

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