Category — ENERGY

Better than the grid - walk it home

In this picture a woman from China’s Shandong Province carries a five-metre long balloon full of natural gas which she siphoned from an oil plant in order to heat her home.

One member of staff said: ‘We warned them that it is like a hidden bomb at home, but they wouldn’t listen’.
According to people in the area, the gas lasts for around five days. (more…)

By Dustin Talley

As a heating and air installer by trade, I go to a lot of condos/apartments/rental houses. With the ever increasing price of electricity and heating fuel, I inevitably have “The Energy Talk” a lot. It can get tricky talking to others about energy usage and savings, because some people just want to save a few dollars on their heating and cooling bills while others are adamantly against the energy companies and what they stand for.

One thing that all of these people have in common is the fact that they are simply renting so when it comes to putting in a new heat pump or the desire to add solar panels or wind generators, they feel that they have no flexibility and are essentially stuck in their current situation.

My family and I are also stuck in the same situation, but have made some changes that add up to a large difference and perhaps if you are a renter that yearns to get off of the grid (or at least a little less dependent on it) then maybe some of what we have done can help: (more…)

These days, with so many builders touting themselves as green, the whole idea of a green home can seem like a marketing ploy.  Instead of stepping into someone else’s business plan,  your home can be your own financial survival tool – that is what you can learn from looking at the off-grid way of life.

When a builder markets his homes as environmentally friendly because they feature water-saving toilets and high-efficiency gas furnaces, that’s a problem: You’d be hard-pressed to find a new home without these features. But here’s the thing:  the relative improvements in resource consumption compared to the wasteful old ways are still way out of whack with the way you live if you are harvesting your own power and water, off the grid.   You can live a comfortable off-grid life on 25% of the water and electricity that people regard as normal.  But LEED standards are more like 50% or more – ie half what is “normal” but double what off-gridders would consume. (more…)

Obama praises Nellis - unaware of flaws

Off-Grid.net has written many stories over the years about the US military’s early-adoption of off-grid energy strategies.  But some army and USAF bases are stymied by the big energy companies when it comes to readying themselves for a big outage caused by anything from solar storms to terrorist attacks.

A recent report from Nevada by Greenwire focuses on a base that carries out some of the Air Force’s most advanced work, including testing and flying drones.The 140 acres of solar panels at Nellis Air Force Base’s 14.2 megawatt array are useless when commercial power is out, thanks to a provision in the agreement with the local utility that lets NV Energy turn off the array if the grid power goes down.

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There are a lot of things you or a professional handyman can do around your home to help cut back on energy use.  That’s something that will benefit both your budget and the environment.  

Small Do-It-Yourself Jobs

Not all green projects are major undertakings. There are simple ways for you or a professional handyman to make your home more energy efficient. Switch out light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs throughout the house. Install occupancy sensors so lighting will come on when people are in the room and automatically turn off when they leave the room. Clean or replace furnace filters once a month. Clean the air conditioner filter regularly. Add insulation to hot water pipes. Install a water filter and quit buying bottled water. Replace your showerhead and faucets with low-flow versions. This won’t reduce water pressure but water consumption and energy costs can be reduced by up to 50%. Insulate the water heater and turn it down to 48 degrees and cut your water-heating bill in half. Install ceiling fans. Weatherize your windows and doors with caulk, weather-stripping and sealants. The average home can lose 30% of its heat or air-conditioning though the windows. Replace the thermostat with a programmable one with a timer.

Watch “the Online carpenter” Mitchell Dillman as he shows off this “green” home improvement project located at 1011 E. Yampa in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (more…)

While US stalls, they're eating our lunch

Beijing  - After a rash of wind turbine malfunctions, China is to “revise” (ie raise) its standards for wind turbine production.

China’s wind power capacity surpassed that of the U.S. in 2009 and the country is planning to further raise the proportion of renewables in the nation’s fast-growing energy consumption, according to Shi Lishan, deputy director of the New and Renewable Energy Department of the National Energy Administration (NEA).

Chinese wind power has long been half the price of Western competitors, but also less reliable.  However, even the best Western small turbines are relatively unreliable, so if China raises its standards, it will become competitive.

China currently has more than 2 billion kilowatts of inland wind power resources and more than 500 million kilowatts offshore.

However “a rising trend of wind turbine breakdowns has been witnessed since 2010,” says a State report.  There were 193  accidents in wind farms in the first 8 months of 2011, according to the report released last week by the State Electricity Regulatory Commission (SERC). It also announced decision to double the solar subsidy forthwith. (more…)

LaMar's off grid cabin

I just love learning how other people live off grid, especially when they are doing it in a very similar way to how I live. LaMar Alexander has done all of this and more, we may be in different places, but we both started out with small and simple systems, cobbling together this and that, building an independent life one piece at a time.
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Solar newbies beware

Don’t believe the awful ads which promise you “free power for $200″, or “build your own solar panel for $200″. Several of them appear on this site from time to time, despite that we are doing everything we can to stop them.  Many are from Chinese spammers, and a particular bunch of conmen called energy4free, or earth4energy or Get-Cheap-Solar-Panels.com, amongst many other aliases. These slimebags ask you to pay for an e-book which directs you to some other sites and offers to sell you components for a solar panel that will never work. Of course it would be quite wrong and immoral to suggest you should click repeatedly on their ads whenever you see the Earth4energy logo. We do not recommend that. (more…)

Time to wrap up warm and get hands dirty

Its time to start culling woodland,scavenging fuel from dumpsters and wearing warmer clothes

Start foraging in Granny’s closet — if forecasts by Deutsche Bank are true, we are heading for =higher energy prices very soon. The bank’s researcher estimates that prices will rise a further 25% by 2015, meaning that the average  household will be spending more than 4% of their disposable income on fuel bills, back to the levels seen following the oil shocks of the1970s. (more…)