Posts from — June 2007

HMG adopts water harvesting

Flash floods, tropical intensity downpours and impending drought. No- one can deny, our climate is changing. Now the UK Ministry of Defence has ordered 150 Eco-Vat rainwater harvesting tanks costing half a million pounds each in the largest rainwater harvesting contract ever agreed in the UK.

Even the most conservative estimates anticipate that the temperature changes in the UK in the next decade will be dramatic. (more…)

PR snow job

Its called the Solar Taxi, but that is just its name. Its not a taxi and it does not run exclusively on solar power.

Louis Palmer wants to be the first man to drive around the world in a solar-powered car. He started the SolarTaxi project, which aims to circumvent the globe, meeting politicians and policy makers as they go. “With the power of the sun around the world – stop global warming! 40.000 km… 40 countries… 14 months…” (more…)

Snooty hotels hate new law.

Thousands of property owners in England and Wales will be contacted by UK Government officials from Natural England over the next few weeks to negotiate details of a 10 metre wide public corridor around the entire UK coastline. This includes the Royal family whose Sandringham estate in Norfolk still bars walkers from several miles of picturesque seashore.

Off-Grid welcomes this move to free the historic 9040 miles of coastline which, in the words of Environment Secretary David Miliband yesterday, “tackles the unfinished business of opening Britain’s land to the people” (more…)

role models

Jonathan and Roseann Hanson, like all the residents in their neighborhood near Tucson have no power lines, no water lines, no gas lines and no phone lines. They are part of the fastest-growing social trend in America.

Sharing a 300-square-foot home — until their 1,000-square-foot home is built — keeps their needs minimal. Solar cells and a wind generator supply their electrical needs. They have water on the property, pumped to a holding tank via a solar-powered pump. Netflix and satellite Internet complete the mix. (more…)

DAVID DE ROTHSCHILD FIGHTS GLOBAL WARMING

AGE 28

OCCUPATION Author of The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook, out this month

LIVES IN Leighton Buzzard, England

HOW HE’S GREEN “I grow my own vegetables,” says de Rothschild, heir to a banking fortune. He also bikes to get around his rural town (he doesn’t own a car) and in 2009 plans to sail across the Pacific on a boat made from recycled plastic bottles. “The message is about the amount of trash in our oceans,” he says. (more…)

Orange view of our IQ

Phone company Orange is to unveil a mobile phone charger “prototype” powered by wind energy at the Glastonbury Festival. But experts are already saying the new charger is nothing but a cynical PR stunt, since it is far more efficient to use another sort of “wind” power as in “wind-up. ” Hand cranked phone chargers are highly efficient and use less embodied energy to achieve the same effect AND they work on windless days, indoors, etc.

The mobile firm says the new charger is the result of months of research into a viable alternate energy source to power handsets during summer music festivals. Do they think we are that stupid? (more…)

The Lenin of renewables.

Mike Reynolds is a contradictory fellow. He’s so accustomed to being the rebel architect that he can’t quite come to terms with the fact that the world has now caught up with him. Thirty years ago he invented houses built out of scrap – mainly old tyres, rammed with earth, that form the basic building blocks of his now-famous earthships. A new film tells us all we want to know about his travelling caravanserai of builders and bodgers that sally forth from his native Taos, New Mexico, to build earthships around the world .
“Garbage Warrior, by British Director Oliver Hodge, is the story of Mike’s single-minded campaign to have his building techniques taken up across the world. When I met him a few years ago near Valencia, he had just arrived on an expenses only trip to mastermind the building of one of his Earthships on an unpromising hilltop for an impecunious couple.

We can’t bring you the new film, but here is a cheap video download of an old one about Earthships, , from Amazon.Mike’s dream homes are literally built with beer cans, tires and bottles- the by-products of modern consumption. He believes that a house is a self-sustaining natural machine that can be one with the earth.
Having first built homes out of beer cans alone, he believes that progress evolves through mistakes—if the government could allow atomic bomb testing in his state, he claims, accommodations should be made for experimental housing. However, the state government did not share his vision until he donned a tie and learned to function within the system.
He believes that life as we know it will disappear within decades as cities (“dangerous areas of chaos that can’t support themselves any longer”) (more…)

A hydraulic ram pump, sometimes called a hydram, is relatively easy to build, and can drive water up to 100 metres high. Essentially, it’s an automatic pumping device which uses a small fall of water to lift a fraction of the water available to a much greater height using only the power of gravity. Its only moving parts are two valves, and this gives it high reliability, minimal maintenance requirements and a long operational life. Its an ‘old-tech’ device that is as useful today as ever. Invented before electric water pumps, this rugged, simple and reliable device is typically installed at remote home sites for domestic water supply, watering livestock, gardens, decorative lily and fish ponds, water wheels and fountains. Because it uses no power, a ram pump can be used where water would normally not be used and would flow on downstream. (more…)

Small but powerful.

Living in a shed may not sound like the most glamorous thing in the world – unless you’ve seen the Power POD from Powerhouse Enterprises. It’s a gorgeous little house from the Massachusetts-based company which focuses on sustainable modular building systems. (more…)