The one thing I was surprised about though, is that we left with a bunch of pamphlets, stickers, and general paper stuff. Makes me wonder if there’s a better way to give out take-home information. One place I ate at – A Taste Of Life – had coupons available but they made them about twice the size of a fortune cookie fortune. At least they were trying to be conscious of waste.

I wish there was a Worldfest every weekend – I’d love to go more often. It was a lot of fun and pretty educational.

For now, here are a couple of links to some cool products that go hand-in-hand. The first is called T.E.D. – a.k.a The Energy Detective. It’s a device that you can hook up to your breaker box and it reports on the whole house energy consumption. If you get the upgrade from the base package, you can use Google’s PowerMeter software with it. Being a techno-geek, I want this really bad.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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?

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