Posts from — October 2005

Boondock fun

Second-growth forests in east and north Washington State are sprouting a new crop: residential real estate.

The metal roofs of several luxury recreational homes punctuate the forest canopy tents on the bluff above Swift Reservoir’s turquoise waters. View lots at Swift Cove, Marble Creek Estates and Swift View are going for up to $169,000. Swift Cove’s 14 lots sold in three years, and buyers quickly snapped up the four lots at Marble Creek.

Signs for Pine Creek East, along Forest Service Road 25, advertise “a new recreational community” with lots from $59,900 to $129,000. The subdivision, carved into second-growth forest stands 22 miles east of Cougar, is the first stage of a planned 200-house community that will include property within the Muddy River and Pine Creek watersheds. (more…)

Shagnasty’s Rex Ewing – NOT the green guru

Reading an interesting and informative article by Rex Ewing titled Piecing together a spanking-new $600 solar-electric system, we were appalled that this pioneer of grid life could be the same Rex Ewing who played guitar in the naughtily brilliant SHAGNASTY band.

Fortunately its a different Mr. Ewing — a knowledgeable practitioner on the maturing frontier of solar applications…..and this is what he had to say:

Got 600 bucks hiding in an old book somewhere? Maybe it’s time to bring electricity into that little homestead you’ve got tucked away in the woods. But wait a minute, you say, with justifiable hesitancy. Solar-electric systems all cost thousands, don’t they? No, just the expensive ones. (more…)

Lucy Neville-Rolfe

Owning a biofuel car will be easier in future now that Britain’s top grocery market group Tesco Plc is set to expand its sales of biofuels over the next few months with UK duty incentives helping make them competitively priced, said company executive Lucy Neville-Rolfe.

But maybe the best answer is to make your own biofuel, and cut Tesco out of the loop.

How to Make Biodiesel – buy it from Amazon UK for 5.99 and 4% goes to Off-Grid

How to Make Biodiesel – Amazon US (more…)

Cool! Solar cooled in Southern China

Some of us use the sun’s energy which helps to heating home. But many months of the year (or all year round, in some places), heating the house is the last thing we want. There are ways to keep the sun’s heat away from our home and keep down those expensive air conditioner bills.

What do you do on a hot summer vacation days when you want a moment’s respite? Find some shade, stoopid. (more…)

Helen and her crazy meerkat – Sexy

Remoteness, like many things in life, is perhaps only a relative measure, writes Zoologist Helen Johnson who has just returned from a year in Africa.

Imagine a small reserve in the dry dunes and scrubland of the southern Kalahari Desert. There is no radio or television reception. No newspaper deliveries. During a year’s stay at the reserve one can expect about four excursions away from the site, most of which will be no further than the 3 hour drive to the nearest town. Relative to the daily bustle of city life this is way, way off the grid.

My time in the Kalahari was spent on a research project studying the behaviour of meerkats, a small mongoose, as portrayed by Timonin the Lion King.

(Discovery Channel – Wild Discovery: Meerkats – A Kalahari Saga – buy it from Amazon UK

Meerkats,Cohorts of the Kalahari – VHS – buy it from Amazon US) (more…)

Chiras: Eco-Kidult

Saving our environmentally abused planet is never for ourselves but for the NextGen.

As Dan Chiras points out in his much-needed book “EcoKids: Raising Children Who Care For the Earth” (New Society Publishers, $17.95), the key to a sustainable future lies with today’s youth, the ones who are going to be stuck with the mess we’ve created.

Chiras, who lives off the grid and hasn’t had to pay an electric bill since 1996, provides the ideas; parents must be the ones to introduce the rapidly disappearing natural world to their children. Each chapter offers a primer on environmental issues and short case studies.

EcoKids : Raising Children Who Care for the Earth – buy it from Amazon US

Ecokids – Buy it from Amazon UK
Ecokids – Buy it from Amazon Canada (more…)

Steve Moore, solar farmer

One of the easiest ways to start getting off grid is to build your home, or a home extension, using passive solar design. This kind of structure uses the way the sun interacts with the building itself to capture the sun’s energy and use it for heating system, cooling, or lighting. All that’s needed is a careful attention to building site, architectural design, and building materials. Not only is passive solar energy use affordable and efficient, but can result in beautiful living spaces full of natural light and pleasant landscaping.

Pennsylvania cultivator Steve Moore and his wife Carol have been farming organically for 26 years, using horses for the farm work up until last year. They also had dairy heifers and were raising pigs for market. The farming operation included a greenhouse. Twelve years ago, needing more income, they were considering expanding the greenhouse. (more…)

Everyone loves Biodiesel

So what’s going to replace fossil based fuels and when? Chuck Steiner of WaterSmart reviews the existing options and weighs up the science and the cost. He concludes biofuel i.e., Biodiesel is the answer.

Here is a potential virtuous circle of future energy production

1. Energy collection using parabolic solar collectors that focus and concentrate the light energy of the Sun.
2. Applying the collected energy to a Stirling-cycle heat engine which, in turn, drives an electricity-producing power generator to power an electrolysis system.
3. Electrolysis systems use electricity to chemically decompose water h2o into its component elements of hydrogen and oxygen. Free hydrogen doesn’t exist in sufficient quantities to support a hydrogen based transportation fuel.
4. The solar hydrogen is then used as an environmentally clean fuel to power transportation equipment. (more…)

Dropping out – Stephenson and Connolly

The wife of comedian Billy Connolly has revealed the couple might stay off-grid forever after she achieved her dream of sailing the world for a year.

Pamela Stephenson, 55-year-old psychologist and former comedienne, who has three children with the Big Yin, said she was sick of being the “responsible one” and was desperate to escape her humdrum existence.

So she embarked on a mid-life adventure which saw her sail 19,000 nautical miles in ten months, visit uncharted islands and resist a hunky fisherman. But this was no primitive idyll. She travelled in a 112ft super-yacht with a crew of seven.

She has written a book on her travels, Treasure Islands, which she says has helped put her life in order: “I’ve survived. And I’ve never been so terrified.” You can buy the book on the next page. (more…)