Posts from — October 2007

Alaska calling….

Sean Penn’s new film Into the Wild, is catching on all over the country. Its about a young man (Emile Hirsch) who decides to step off the grid after graduating college — hitchhiking his way to Alaska to live, and die, in the wilderness. It went on limited release September 21st.

Based on the book of the same name, Into the Wild is the true story of Chris McCandless, a good kid from a prosperous but unhappy family, who left home, changed his name to Alexander Supertramp and in 1992 walked off into the Alaskan wilderness. He died there of starvation 16 weeks after he arrived. (more…)

Not an oil drum

DIY wood-burning stoves are usually based on an old 55-gallon drums. They more or less do the job, but they’re inefficient, difficult to regulate, and so ugly that most people will only tolerate them in the garage or workshop.

The best thing about them is the price. Or at least it was. Lately, though steel barrels have become increasingly difficult to find … and, when you do locate one, it frequently has a hundred dollar price tag at fixed to it.

There must be a better way to go about assembling a homemade wood-burning stove. Try a discarded electric water heater tank, for four good reasons:

1. The walls of a water tank are four times as thick as the metal in a 55-gallon barrel … which means that a water heater drum will make a much tougher stove and will last a lot longer.

2. when you build a firebox from a junked water heater tank, it’s very easy to make the stove as airtight and efficient as any $2500 woodburner on the market. And we can’t say that about a 55-gallon-drum stove. (more…)

Keep it small

There are twenty simple tips to green your home at the end of this story, but first, what is an eco home?

Strictly speaking its a house built to minimise negative impact on the plants, wildlife and human beings in the area. It is designed to suit the climate of the area and uses alternative forms of energy for it’s running and maintenance relying on sun, wind and biomass instead of the grid supply.”Ecological homes reuse and recycle most waste and used materials that are available very close to the site/area. It encourages local handicraft or art and harvests rain water and reuses most water that the building consumes. It is a home that takes the least from earth’s natural resources to build. (more…)

Agric- our man with a garden plan

Agric Hadron has spent the past few months working at the Utopia Project in Scotland, Dylan Evans’ project to simulate life after a major social collapse. Agric has been responsible for planting, and over the next few weeks he’ll be writing a regular series of articles on how to have the very best self-sufficient vegetable garden in the world, plus a few tips on meat-rearing for those who are so inclined. You’ll be able to check it out in the self-sufficiency section.

Here’s his first article:
(more…)

Sunrise industry

While the solar industry as a whole remains small–less than 1% of electricity in the U.S.–it’s exploding — growing an average of 42% annually since 2002. Industry leaders, most based in Japan and Germany, are ramping up production, as are Chinese manufacturers like Suntech, whose founder and CEO, Dr. Zhengrong Shi, is one of China’s richest men. Big companies, including BP, General Electric, Mitsubishi, Sanyo, Sharp, and Shell, all want to grow their solar businesses. In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, venture capital investors like John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, entrepreneur Bill Gross, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are backing startups that claim they will revolutionize the industry. (more…)

Spare battery is more reliable

Fortune magazine are going off-grid crazy as it slowly dawns on them that you don’t have to live in a yurt to be off-grid. Their busy, important readers are off-grid too, each time they step out of the cocoon of their air-conditioned offices.

Their latest is a reader review of solar powered briefcases. The negative results also apply to all the solar powered bags we’ve seen so far.

Can a sun-powered briefcase keep you connected off the grid, asked Forbes. A reader writes: “Like many entrepreneurs, I spend most waking hours surgically attached to my phone, a T-Mobile Dash that I use mainly for voice calls and calendar tracking. I’m lost if it runs out of juice, so I was excited when Forbes asked me to test solar-powered bags (more…)

Better than a Solio

There’s nothing worse than your mobile phone running out of juice when you need to make an important call and when there’s nowhere to power it up. Get the BOOST Emergency Phone Charger £5.95 in the UK Just click here to buy it. This simple little charger is powered by a regular AA battery – you just plug it into your phone and it will give it a good charge. More pricey but good quality is the Freeloader solar-powered charger (pictured) which competes with the Solio, but is cheaper and better.

Sealed Lead acid batteries are not recommended for off-grid use, according to a recent thread on the Yahoo group, offgridlivingandhomesteading . There’s no way to make up the water lost during heavy charging. The valve regulated units are usually done after 2 years max. (more…)

Heil Solar

Germany is the world leader in installed solar power, just ahead of Japan. And the Germans are installing solar way faster than anyone else in the world on a per capita basis. The full figures are at the end of this story.

Germany has 200 times as much solar energy as Britain. It generates 12% of its electricity from various renewables, compared with 4.6% in Britain and 2% in the United States. It has created a quarter of a million jobs in renewables – a number that is growing fast. Britain has only 25,000, a number that represents the amount of jobs created in the industry in Germany in the past year alone. (more…)

We’ll be hearing more about this

A member of the royal family may be pumping to work on a bicycle every day according to media reports. The bike is a Strida. And the rider is Viscount Linley who has had his sanity questioned for allowing his four-year old daughter to hang off the back of the luggage rack .

A spokesman for Linley, son of Princess Margaret, said: “David feels its better to cycle than clog up roads with a gas-guzzler.”

Viscount Linley, said to be worth £27m, owns an up-to-date Strida, having previously owned one of the original designs.

Viscount Linley has a British-made Pashley Sovereign bicycle on order. This will be fitted with a children’s bicycle seat. (more…)