ecoexist.net

The family and I went to the Los Angeles Worldfest today in Van Nuys. There was a lot of vegan food, animal rescues, clothing, music, and spiritual enlightenment information available. I’m not hardcore into all of that stuff but it was good to get some information on it. I’ve been preparing myself to go vegetarian for some time now but haven’t quite been able to make a full transition yet. I’ve been eating more and more meat free meals, but there are just some things I’m not quite mentally ready to let go. I would consider myself to be spiritual in a nature sense, but not in an organized-go-somewhere-to-practice-and-learn sense. There was a huge solar array there that was powering the stage and bands that were playing.

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.

Bottom line – it no workie. The blades are way too small, so I tried adding “extensions” to them, like so:

Admittedly it does work better, although not by much. it seems I’m running into a common problem with the design, going by other tutorial sites I’ve read through. I’m going to continue working on it though and hopefully I will have an easy solution. I’m trying to make it as easy to assemble as possible.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about building some type of a wind turbine solution in hopes of eventually taking my detached garage off of the grid. Being in the San Fernando Valley we get a fair amount of afternoon wind that can be utilized by such a device. I did some testing with a traditional turbine, which showed some potential, but I eventually decided that a VAWT (Vertical Access Wind Turbine) would be the best option. The reason I came to this decision is because of how the wind swirls in from so many directions around my backyard, as is seen by little makeshift cardboard wind direction pointer.

I had mentioned before that I was working with pvc tubing and 5 gallon bucket lids as the materials of choice for my contraption – well forget all of that. It wasn’t turning out to be as practical as I had hoped. I was trying to use easy to find and cheap materials for the project but I just couldn’t seem to find a good solution for attaching the blades to the lids. I ended up going to my local electronics junkyard (Apex Electronics – amazing place) where I found literally hundreds of wheels from electric scooters that would be perfect for the blade mounts. Unfortunately the wheels are only about 9″ in diameter, but they are good enough to use for my prototype VAWT. I bought four of them at $5 each, which was a little more than I wanted to pay but still within budget and they would end up making the assembly process much easier (even more than I had imagined – as you will see later). I only needed two, but as they say in the movie Contact – why build one when you can build two for twice the price.

Today I started the assembly process. A month or two back I bought 2 – 10 foot long 2 inch diameter pvc tubing. I cut the pvc tubes into thirds (i.e. 3 feet 4 inch long each) and then cut them in half, which left me with 12 – 3 foot 4 inch long “blades”. As luck would have it, the blades fit very snugly between the spokes of the wheels, which meant that I didn’t have to use any fasteners at all. Here’s a grainy phone picture of the blades set in the spokes:

VAWT blades wedged snugly in the wheel spokes. Click image for a larger view

The hardest part to this whole process was attaching the blades to the second wheel. Once I got that accomplished though then all I needed to do was build a quick frame to mount it in, which was made from scrap wood I had laying around:

Completed prototype, with my dog Loki running by trying to generate a breeze to start it moving.

So it’s completed and ready to go… but there’s no wind. There’s a storm heading in to SoCal tomorrow that’s supposed to bring lots of wind with it so hopefully I’ll get some decent feedback on its performance. I already have some doubts about how efficient it currently is, but I also have some improvements I’m thinking about as well. No matter how good or poor it performs, I’ve only used about $15 in parts on the project so far – 2 x wheels @ $5 each and 1 x 10′ @ 2″ diameter pvc at about $3.50 each. I’m going to use the rest of the parts for a second VAWT eventually.

UPDATE: I cleaned up my math a little – I was a bit off on the tube sizing and the amounts.

I just received an email today from my server hosting provider that they are in the process of opening a new data center in Boston Massachusetts that will be fed 100% by wind power. Unfortunately it’s *just* the Boston colo (my server is in Seattle, they will have three total), but I think it’s awesome that they are doing anything at all. Data centers use HUGE amounts of resources so this will have a big impact on their overall footprint. I looked all over their site and blog for info about it but, alas, couldn’t find anything there. All I have as proof is the email…. This does bring to mind that I’d like to research more “green power” colocations (i.e. colos, i.e. data centers).


I’ve started on a VAWT (Vertical Access Wind Turbine) this past weekend which is made out of 2.5″ pvc tubing and 5 gallon bucket lids. We’ll see how it goes, but so far I’m having issues connecting the tubing to the lid very securely. I have the rest of the week to think it over though as I won’t have time to work on it until the weekend. I’ll update with pictures, details, and other info when it’s done. I built a rough turbine style prototype as a test last weekend, but my back yard seems to have swirling winds so the VAWT seems to make the most sense.

Lately I’ve been itching to retry my solar oven experiment. For one, it seems to be one of the projects that gets the most interest on this blog, and secondly I want to see how far I can take it. Someone left me a comment asking if I thought it possible to boil water, which I do – and then some. But what are the upper limits of a home made solar oven? Well, I want to bake something – how’s that for a goal?

While researching different plans for building an oven I came across this site. My favorites are the tire cooker and the Fresnel parabolic cooker. Seems that a lot of the plans on the first page are of an open air funnel design using things like a reflective car windshield shade. I’m not sure how well that might work….

I’m going to find one that I think is practical, easy to make, and has the potential of baking something and start working on it this weekend. I’m expecting to be able to cook at least part of a meal by Sunday afternoon.

Even though I haven’t posted anything in a really, REALLY long time, it doesn’t mean that my eco-projects haven’t been poking me in the brain to give them some attention. Things that I have on my list: solar oven, micro turbines, a second effort towards my insulation project, and building my own solar panels.

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.

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.