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By Eminem692007
#2456
Solar blankets would be a great invention in places like New York. First of all, a homeless person could easily save for one and still sleep outdoors without losing heat. They would also come in handy on long trips. Simply lay it out in the sun before the night and use it to feel at home on the road. And camping trips! You would lay it out during a time you are hiking or doing some other activity and then have a toasty night. Simply made, almost microscopic solar panels would be stitched into the blanket and absorb solar enerygy.

Is this to complicated and not worth the trouble? And I am just gessing when i say, they would cost quite a bit.
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By Michael D. Grissom
#2491
You're absolutely right Eminem -- solar panels would be incredibly expensive for the amount you would need to heat up enough mass (probably a thermal gel) to stay warm all night. Also, I estimate that you would probably need around 30 ~ 40 gallons of gel to store enough heat for 8 ~ 10 hours and that would be far too heavy for anyone to carry.

I would think a top quality sleeping bag would be more than adequate. Your body is perfectly capable of generating enough heat to keep you "toasty warm" all night long if you have a good thermal barrier between you and the outside world.

Look at it this way -- if someone were to invent a perfect thermal barrier coating for your street clothes then you could sleep directly on the snow without a blanket and remain toasty warm all night without melting any of the snow under you. If you put that same coating on an egg, you could boil the egg for months and it would still be raw when cracked open.

Hope this helped a little.
By sneezyalex
#7220
The already have things like this in your local camp store. They are very light and is the size of your fist. I tried it once. it is super thin but very warm. It takes the heat that comes out of your body and keeps it in. I once made the mistake of puting it with the rest of my blankets and I woke up half a hour later sweating really bad and boy was I hot. Hope this helps. ;-D
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By Michael D. Grissom
#7239
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!... "boy was I hot"

we only wanted to know if ya got cold sneezyalex :-P
By sneezyalex
#7259
Ahhhhhhhhhhh
Shut up! :-P :-P
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By Michael D. Grissom
#7271
O K . . . Y O U R S E C R E T T Y P E D A B O V E I S S A F E W I T H M E ! !!

IG
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By Michael D. Grissom
#7272
oops... sorry sneezyalex.. misread "Ahhhhhhhhh" as "Shhhhhhhhh" and responded accordingly.

I was only kidding you about the "Shhhhhhhh" and didn't mean to offend you. My mistake ok?
By sneezyalex
#7300
sure no offence taken. ;-D
By Rishi
#7314
MDG,
If we put together all the ideas maybe a better thermal blanket may result. A long time back (Early '70s?) MIT reported some work on a solar collector that uses the latent heat of melting to store a large amount of heat with a smaller mass. There are microcrystalline waxes which melt at 90 deg.F or so. The wax itself is a thermal insulator. If we can impregnate the wax into the synthetic fibre insulation of the sleeping bag it can absorb a lot of solar heat when it melts.

Secondly, there was a report from a neonate speciality hospital in the US of how premature infants were protected from loss of body heat (They have a larger surface area/size than normal babies and lose heat faster) by being covered with an IR reflecting fabric used by astronauts. This reflects more than 90% of the body heat back to the person. The inner surface of the sleeping bag can consist of this layer.

Costs will not be much higher than normal sleeping bags because the materials are everyday ones. Of course, the bags may not be useful at normal temperatures.

Suffering 100 deg in the shade for the past two months in Bangalore, I certainly would not mind a bit of cold.

Rishi
By sneezyalex
#7354
All you need is a few blankets. Don't worry about a blanket that is 20 times more costly. ;-)
By Robertking
#23431
Seems to me that this freedom camping bill has created more prolems than it has solved
i was under the impression that the intension of the act was to have one set of rules that
could be applied from tip to tip in our fine country so that everyone new what the rules were :roll:

instead we are heading for the same system as we had before with each area having different bylaws
there being no winners and a waste of time and money being spent on something that has put us right back were we started
By Robertking
#23432
sneezyalex wrote:All you need is a few blankets. Don't worry about a blanket that is 20 times more costly. ;-)
:[ waiting for replys guys where are you???
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