Category — WATER

Pieter Hoff

Forget geo-engineering and multi-lateral political accords. Could the answer to global warming –not to mention the impending global water and food crises, be found in a device that mimics the effects of bird droppings and is little more complicated than a bucket?

Earlier this year, after seven years and six million Euros in development, Dutch horticulturalist and inventor Pieter Hoff unveiled a gadget he calls the Groasis Waterboxx. It’s an incubator that works without power or irrigation and Hoff reckons it can help save the planet.

“Yes it is a bucket, but an intelligent bucket,” says Hoff. “My ambition is to use it to reforest five billion hectares of poor quality land, reducing levels of carbon in the atmosphere, increasing global food production and rebuilding depleted water tables around the world.” (more…)

Biomimic Nick Brown

In early 1990 Nick Brown, the British entrepreneur behind the Paramo clothing brand, was struggling with the problem of how to make waterproof, outdoor activity clothing last longer. Sweat and condensation tends to rot conventional gear at the seams and once that happens the jacket usually has to be scrapped. As he already sold a water-repellent wax for clothing, he was particularly interested in the idea that more could be done to prolong the life of outdoor clothing using  water-repellency.

He grappled with the problem for three years before turning to nature for the answer. But he didn’t have a team of physicist and biologists on hand. He had no expensive analytical equipment to help him. He finally found it with the help of a wet dog. And it cost him nothing. (more…)

Rousson and friend

A low tech, man-powered  yellow submarine may not be high on the list of requirements for la vie off-grid, but French adventurer Stephane Rousson and designer Minh-Lôc Truong have gone ahead and made one anyway. In Rousson’s garage.

The Scubster  is the world’s first pedal powered submarine and it has recently successfully finished its first test in the Mediterranean off Nice. (more…)

After the rain-a rare colored sunset in the high desert mountains

Living in the high desert means having to deal with long periods of dry weather punctuated by periods of mega-rains. We got one of those yesterday. I was not at the skycastle when this occurred, I was at a friend’s house. My drive home was a bit tricky, our roads are dirt, some gravel, some boulders and several places are clay. The clay is the problem, when it gets wet, soaked, it becomes a car eating muck pit. There are several places I have to cross that have lots of clay, one place in particular is a S-curve just before my place, I avoid it when it’s wet. That means going over an even steeper,  higher, rougher road, but it’s worth it to miss the mucky S-curve. As I was going over the alternate path, I noticed a couple of cars that were abandoned on the road, not a pleasant thing to see where I live. That usually means a long, rough walk for the occupants, unless they are lucky enough to find someone else driving though or are close enough to walk to a friend’s house, that usually means at least a half mile or more walking either up or down steep hills. Did I mention that cell phones don’t work out here? (more…)

Cynthia Berger

They are piloting their solar-powered hybrid canal boat around “The Great Loop” — the system of waterways circling eastern North America. The first leg of their journey took them east on the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario. Berger filed this report: (more…)

The cost for water and sewerage in Brisbane for the average household is now AU$2.59 a day. If you lived off the grid getting water trucked in could cost $2.23 to $2.30 a day.

Residents in the Moreton Bay Regional Council area were facing a rise of between 27 and 66 per cent from July 1 until the local council stepped in to subsidise it. (more…)

Leary, his bike-powered-water-pump and friends

A British engineering student has invented a bicycle-powered water pump that could enable huge areas of ‘off-grid’ land to be irrigated for the first time.

Jon Leary, 24, a masters student at Sheffield Department of Mechanical Engineering was tasked to ‘make something useful out of rubbish’ for his dissertation. He came up with the idea of a ‘bicicomba movil’ –an inexpensive mobile bicycle powered water pump made from salvaged materials that can be used for irrigation and general water distribution almost anywhere in the world. (more…)