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.

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.

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

I came across this video today of what someone did with an old incandescent light bulb and was intrigued. I just had to share it. It may not always be much more enviro-friendly, depending on the fuel used, than using the bulb to light your home, but it is a pretty neat trick – and it looks like a fun way to recycle them.

Looking for some good food alternatives to feed your offspring? Here’s a site that has some quick, easy, and healthy vegetarian alternatives to hamburgers or canned soup.

I suppose I should divulge it was written by my wife back when she went vegetarian for a while. She still keeps her pledge to keep “pork off your fork”, but she just couldn’t give up chicken.

I started cutting out the frame of the new solar oven from scrap plywood laying around in the garage this past weekend. I have all of the sides cut out and ready for assembly, I just need to find my wood dowel pins to put the pieces together and I need to find a scrap piece of wood big enough for the bottom. I had to make the sides in two pieces because I didn’t have anything left that was big enough to make it solid. Here’s what I have so far:

The top of the sides are set at a 30 degree angle – I had read that is the optimal angle for solar panels somewhere. Once I locate my dowel pins and find a piece for the bottom then it should go together fairly quickly.

Here’s a picture of the one I built last summer. It’s got an old window I found in our garage from some previous owner, and it works pretty well. It’s lined with foil and the bricks in the bottom are to help keep the temperature a little more even. The test I did with it yesterday got it up to over 170 degrees. If it was built a little better and all the gaps and holes sealed up then I might be able to get it hot enough to boil water. I’ll be adding reflector flaps to the new one to ensure it will get more than hot enough for that. It currently sits on an old skateboard for portability, because with the bricks it’s quite heavy:

About two weeks ago I wrote that I was going to try to make our single paned windows in our home more energy efficient by using a window film that claims to block around 70% of the suns radiant heat. This weekend I finally completed enough of the project to get an idea on if I’m heading in the right direction. It seems that I might just have wasted my time and money on this.

Of the 12 “panes” on the window, I put the film on 11 of them. I left the top middle pane untouched so I could test the difference in temperature between the filmed and non-filmed sections. I went to Harbor Freight to pick up a cheap infra-red thermometer ($10 – and I plan to use it around the house to find hot and cold spots). Since it was doing the testing on glass, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t skewing the test results when I checked the window temperature so I first put a large washer on the two test panes (the top left pane and the top middle pane) and checked the temp. Hmm – 106 degrees for the non-filmed pane, and 104 degrees for the filmed pane. Whoa.

Okay, maybe the metal washer is making a difference. I decided to put a paper mailing label on each window – that way I would have a surface to test that wouldn’t potentially accumulate heat due to the material it is made from. It did make a difference, the temperatures dropped about 5 degrees for each pane, but they were still 2 degrees apart. The filmed pane was 99.3 degrees and the non-filmed was 101.3.

That’s very disappointing. I’m going to double check the directions, and look for some tips online from others who may have tried the film and see if they have any suggestions on what the problem might be. If I can’t find that I’ve done something wrong then I’ll start looking for alternate ideas to make the windows more efficient.