“My dad built that house when I was 2 years old,” he said as we wound up North Virginia past old Comstock Drive in Reno.  “That was 60 years ago.”  We were on our way to see his latest solar thermal installation at an R.V. park laundry.  This is a guy who has been building solar hot water systems in the Truckee Meadows since the early ‘70s.
   

  We arrived at about 2:00 in the afternoon on a sunny, 80-degree day—a perfect early summer outing in Reno.  The stainless steel trim on the six panels newly mounted on the roof gleamed in the bright sunshine, but that wasn’t where he was headed.  “Let’s check the tank!” he said.  Hidden behind the quarter laundry machines in a dark closet among insulated copper lines, expansion tanks, flow meters and a small D.C. pump was what he was after—the temperature gauges.  One look and he turned to me with the sparkling eyes of a child at Christmas.  “163.8 degrees!”  Wow.  That’s hot.  You can wash a lot of clothes with 120 gallons of that.  “That’s the top of the tank…the bottom is 122.4!” enthused my companion that day.
   I’m peeking into the world of Auguste Lemaire, owner of Sunvelope Solar and Reno’s longest-lasting thermal enthusiast.  This is a guy who grew up tinkering.  Most kitchen tables hold cereal and the occasional roasted chicken.  The Lemaire’s table saw the invention of the first commercial mercury detector and the birth of Lemaire Instruments.  “My dad used to go hang out with his grandfather—also named Auguste—and some of the old miners in the Battle Mountain area.  Apparently this one old coot told him that you could detect mercury with U.V. light and ground wilamite.  Well, that notion baked in the back of his mind for 30-odd years, and eventually my brother and I help Dad build the first portable mercury detector.” reminisced Auguste.
   So I asked Augie, as his shop guys call him, how he came to solar hot water.  “I did a flat plate collector as a science project while at Wooster High and took second place at the State Science Fair.  I also burned my hand when I boiled the water coming out of that first collector.  That was when it struck me—this solar stuff really works!”
   That effort led the young man into a company he would call Sundog Solar in 1974.  Like the rest of the solar thermal industry, great enthusiasm and dumb luck found him stumbling into the 1980’s with many custom installations here in Reno.  And also like the industry, Sundog crashed and burned when the Reagan Administration cut off the 40% tax credit initiated by Jimmy Carter.  Apparently, solar thermal is still trying to get over that hangover.
   Fast forward to 2007 and the start of Sunvelope Solar.  As Augie says, “I’ve always had this idea that an envelope based collector, where the fluid flows in a thin sheet across the entire face of the collector, would be a more effective way of collecting solar heat.”  Finally giving in to his lifelong fascination with solar hot water, he closed his contracting business and began tinkering again, this time in a Sparks warehouse that has become the home of the envelope based Sunvelope flat plate collector.  With patents pending on the system and even the tooling he invented to create it, Augie sets forth to change the world, one gallon of hot water at a time.  “We are nearly finished with SRCC certification which will give our system the government stamp of approval it needs to go up against the big boys.”
   While Sunvelope is already installing solar thermal systems in northern Nevada and beyond, Augie has bigger plans.  “The whole business paradigm has changed.  Doing things the way we used to is a sure way to crash again.  We want to make not just our product available, but the tooling and technology as well,” he stated.  “We are gearing up to ship Sunvelope micro-factories anywhere in the world and create an interactive team of independent manufacturers.  The biggest markets for solar thermal are not in the U.S.  They’re in Mexico, Asia, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, Europe, and South America.  We’re not going to keep all of our eggs in one basket—we’re going to sell baskets!”
   Riding with Auguste Lemaire through the streets of Reno is a fascinating tour of the history of the Truckee Meadows, and the history of solar thermal systems as well.  Seeing his enthusiasm for the technology tells me that his glass isn’t half full—it’s overflowing!

August Lemaire