ecoexist.net

I have been an avid subscriber to the Instructables email list for a few years now and occasionally there is an instructable that catches my interest. This week’s edition had two such items – The Office Workers Portable Solar Oven and Non PV Solar Power. I’ve only read partially through the second one, but the first one, the solar oven, has re-kindled my intentions to rebuild my first attempt and second attempt (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) at a solar oven. I think this time I’ve got some pretty good ideas and, as usual, I’ll take some pictures and document my trials and tribulations in the endeavor. My goal this time is to pop popcorn!

The Office Workers Portable Solar Oven Instructable apparently wasn’t highly successful, but that may be due to the projects strict guidelines of using only what was readily available around the office that he worked at. I believe his biggest downfall was using a piece of a clear garbage bag as the cover for the top instead of being able to use glass or plexiglas. He did have an amazing amount of technical information provided on how he calculated the efficiency of the oven – which I’ll try to duplicate in my reporting of my third attempt.

We’ve all been told, for years now, that CFLs are the best way to start in out quest to save the environment. I’ve probably changed out about 50-60% of my bulbs at home, and that’s only because it doesn’t seem right to me to throw away a pe
rfectly good lightbulb to replace it with a CFL.


Apparently now we find out that CFLs are not quite as efficient as we once thought due to the load they put on the power grid. There’s a link on that page that gives a much more technical description to the issue.

I signed up a long while ago for my daily dose of Treehugger newsletter goodness. Most of the stories I find are interesting, informative and useful. Occasionally I find a story that is particularly well suited for the founding basis behind my enviroblog and I feel I need to share it with those who may be regular readers. This article highlights 22 ways for renters to reduce their overall consumption. This is especially important for renters since they don’t have many options to alter their residence to be more efficient, but it really applies to anyone – whether they own *or* rent.

Unfortunately I haven’t had much of a chance to keep up with my eco-updates lately. Things have been pretty crazy with the bathroom remodel, the job search, the weather (who says it never rains in Southern California!?!?), and guests. I start a new job next week so I don’t foresee much of a change in the frequency of updates but I will do my best. I still have a couple of projects that are still waiting in their final stages to be completed so I will hopefully be able to get them done soon.

It’s been nearly a month since I started the unavoidable demolition and remodeling of our guest bathroom, which had been brought on by a water leak in the wall. The plumbing has been fixed, the walls have been put back up, the new fixtures are mostly installed, and finally – last night – we put the new Toto Aquia II dual flush toilet in. In a house that currently has 5 people and only 1 toilet, this was a BIG deal. We were all fighting to be the first to use it.


It was surprisingly easy to install, considering there are lots of complaints in various forums about how hard it is to get it to seal properly to the flange which can cause it to leak. I even read replies from plumbers on some forums who say they charge double to install these toilets. We didn’t have any trouble at all.


My wife was the first to have the honor of using it, while we waited patiently outside the door with anticipation of her review of the experience. A resounding thumbs up from her.


I’ll update with pictures and a bit more of an in depth review after it’s been tested a little more thoroughtly. For now, though, we did notice that the dual flushing mechanism is going to be something we’ll need to get used to. For the light flush, if we just push and release the button then there isn’t much water released into the bowl. If we hold the button down then it will release all of the water into the bowl – all 1.6 litres of it. We must be doing something wrong, but again, I’ll give a better review after the break-in period is complete.

It seems that the projects I have planned always take a lot longer than I expect them to. It’s not that I’m not motivated to build these things, it’s more a matter of time and resources usually. For example, two weeks ago I heard water leaking in the wall of our guest bathroom. After opening the wall and finding/fixing the issue we needed to then replace the tiles that I had to take out in order to get to the leak. This turned into a demo of the shower area, which turned into a demo of the rest of the bathroom, which turned into rerouting some plumbing and vent tubes. Now, a little over two weeks later, we are finally starting to put everything back together again. Whew.


On a somewhat positive note, I accidentally broke the toilet when a huge chunk of concrete and tile fell from the ceiling (the ENTIRE bathroom was covered in tile and about 1.5 inches of this concrete type stuff). The positive part is that we replaced it with a new dual flush toilet from Toto. Once it’s installed and has been taken for a few “test drives” I’ll give my review. I’ve read installation is extremely difficult on tile – like what we are doing – and that the flush is powerful enough on the low setting for most of what needs to get flushed. So good and bad, we’ll see.


That is just one example of unexpected things coming up which prevent me from working on my eco projects, there have been quite a few lately. Fortunately I have been able to find some time to finally put together my generator bike that I mentioned here and here, currently dubbed the GB2000. I used an old bike I had laying around. I pulled off the back tire, had to do some magical alteration and rerouting of the the rear tension gear, got a lawn tractor v-belt, and attached it all to a 12v 4.5amp water pump motor. I still have to figure out what to use for a regulator (I can get over 24v of output pretty easily without a regulator) and also some kind of diode setup so the power flow is only out to the batteries and not in to the motor. I’m leaning towards using a controller for an electric scooter, which also has a battery charger hookup. Most of them are 24v or higher, which is fine since it would allow me to charge two batteries at a time in series.


Here are pictures of the bike. I used some scrap 2×4’s I had and bought some deck joist ties from the local hardware store to hold the back of the bike up. It’s because of the joist ties that I had to reroute the tension gear.

View of the deck joist and the chain tensioner

We live in a home built in 1952, which apparently is before the concept of insulation. Last spring we tackled insulating our attic. It was probably, at best, insulated to an r-value of 5 in a couple of areas and completely devoid of insulation in most places. Now it’s probably somewhere between an r-value of 30-35 with 8-10 inches of blown in cellulose insulation. It cost us about $350 for the materials ($325) and blower rental ($20) and about 3 hours of our time one afternoon. It was a step in the right direction, but it didn’t have much of an effect in the heat this summer since the walls aren’t insulated.

One of the big projects I have slated for this winter is to finally insulate our walls. I’ve been looking into all of the different insulation methods and narrowed it down to two in particular – denim cellulose and spray foam. Both of which are (or at least can be) green, and I can do them myself. Without going into too much detail, the decision was ultimately made based on ease of installation and overall r-value. Cost was also somewhat of a factor initially, but comfort won out over cost in the end and I decided on soy foam insulation. Here are the basic comparisons base on 1200 sq ft of wall space (@ 1 inch deep):

Cellulose

• rvalue = 3.7 @ 1 inch deep


• installation requires at least 2 people and a hopper that can be turned off/on by the person applying the insulation


• total cost for 1000 sq linear ft = $1050 (sorry, can’t find the link at the moment)

Spray foam (soy) Thanks for the correction Jamie!

• rvalue = approx 7-8 @ 1 inch deep


• single person insulation is feasible


• total cost for 1000 sq linear ft = $1370 link to site

So for about $300 more than cellulose insulation we’ll be getting twice the rvalue per square inch. The decision was pretty easy in the end. There is one other “honorable mention” that I should point out. It is still green in the long run and a little closer in price to the cellulose insulation at about $1050 as well, although you will need to keep in mind that the foam I listed above includes shipping and 17 installation tools, while this kit does not (at least not at the time of this writing). I’m hoping to complete this project by mid-January.

I’m sure many of you have seen this product before, but I recently came across it again and thought it was the perfect time of the year to mention it. It’s called Grow-a-note. It’s really a great idea – you send a Grow-a-note card to a friend or a loved one, and once they are done with it they can “plant” it in thier garden, wait a few weeks, and then get part two of the gift – a bouquet of wild flowers.

The Grow-a-note cards are made with 100% recycled “post consumer waste” and are embedded with the wildflower seeds. The site says the cards have clear instructions printed on the back of the card on what to do with it once it is ready to be planted.

That may be a bit of an overly optimistic question, but let me explain. I guess in a technical sense that a Blackberry can be considered a “computer”, but it’s hard to think of something that fits in the palm of my hand as such. I first started using a Blackberry at my last job – as the oncall company phone – but haven’t really explored its capabilities until recently. And there are plenty of capabilities it can provide – so much so that I could even forsee using it for as much as 75% of my non-work computing, and possibly even as much as 25% of my work computing. Therein lies the possibility of the Blackberry being green for me.

In my off hours I mostly use a laptop for email, web browsing, and blogging. For work I use a desktop for a lot more than that, of course. I have found that there are a lot of tools available for the Blackberry that can accommodate many of these tasks in at least a basic form. For example, I downloaded and installed the Google mobile tools, which will sync my Gmail and Google Calendar automatically, allows me to check news feeds, gives me easy access to my Google docs, and many other things. I also configured the built in Blackberry email client to check my work email automatically. I installed MidpSSH to use to connect to work and home servers – which is a bit tedious but very effective when I’m not around a computer and an emergency comes up. I’ve also used the IM client which works with Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, and a couple of others. Another great feature is the phone is WiFi enabled, which will help to speed up downloads and page loads when surfing the web when I connect to my access point at home or at a hotspot.

Our cell phones are so customizable these days. What all this means, for me, is that I could power off my computers a lot more and not be disconnected from many of the things I need or want to do. Here’s something to consider – when someone seems to be addicted to their “Crackberry” maybe they are actually helping the environment by cutting back on greenhouse emissions? Hmm.

There are a lot of tools out there for our phones, and not just Blackberrys, that can free us up from being stuck behind a desk. What tools/applications do you use on your phone?

A little over a week ago we had a few days of high winds, high temperatures, and lots of devastating fires. It seems that the people who live in the north and eastern hills of the valley are always being ravaged by wild fires. Being in the valley it is always a concern that we might be affected by the fires and have something happen to our home as well, but since our house has been standing since 1952 without (fire) incident then I feel relatively assured that we are safe. If we could only find a way to immune ourselves from earthquakes….

Unfortunately my solar oven suffered a bit of a set back due to the winds, but it should be fixable with some spare Plexi-Glass I have from a previous experiment. I should be able to use it as a replacement if I so choose to use the same window frame.

High winds and an unstable bike next to glass = not a good thing

So phase 2 of the idle power consumption testing is complete, and with some surprising results. It seems that the X10 appliance module didn’t consume hardly any electricity going by the Kill-a-watt numbers. Unfortunately the time measurements aren’t exactly the same, but they are close enough to get a fairly conclusive result.

phase 1 test results (XBox plugged into an outlet):
Test hours = 172
kW used = 0.30

phase 2 results (XBox plugged into an X10 module):
Test hours = 168
kW used = 0.30

If I had let the test run another 4.5 hours to mimic the phase 1 test then it *might* have added another 0.01 or 0.02 kW maximum. So the overall consumption of the X10 module is actually, and surprisingly, negligible.

Phase 3 will involve the XBox plugged into the X10 module, and the module will be turned off for several hours a day to see how much electricity is actually conserved. It is starting to look like it will be more than I initially expected, at least going by the phase 2 results.