Build your own solar-​​powered scooter

It seems hybrid power and bio­fuels aren’t the only options for those look­ing to travel green. The DIY moped seen here is the work of the intrepid Don Dunklees in Min­nesota, who uses it for his daily five-​​mile commute.

We were a little wor­ried that the scooter’s wing-​​like solar array might col­lect the odd passer-​​by, but appar­ently the PV cells fold away when the it’s on the go. Once Don’s at work, the panels fold out again and soak up enough sun to charge the bat­tery for the jour­ney home.

If you’re up for a bit of DIY and you like the idea of a moped without the angry wasp noises, you can down­load instruc­tions here. Don says that the scooter is still going strong in its third year.

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2007-​​06-​​14 22:41:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Business, Energy, Minnesota, Moped, Photovoltaic array, Renewable, Solar, Solar cell
Posted in Motorbikes | View Comments

Win an eco-​​eye energy monitor and save energy in your home

THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED
Win an energy monitor!

We’d like lots more people to save energy, so we’re giving away ten eco-​​eye mini energy mon­it­ors – the handy little gad­gets we’ve been using on the Low Carbon House­holds pro­ject, which let you see just how much elec­tri­city your home is using, in real time.

Fit­ting them is easy (they clip on to your power supply cable near the fuse­box) and the res­ults are guar­an­teed to raise eye­brows from every­one in your household.

To be in with a chance of win­ning, simply take a look around the energy sec­tion of the site and leave a com­ment on any post in that cat­egory before 12 midday on 28 Octo­ber (making sure you’ve given us a valid email address – which will not be pub­lished on the site).We will then enter you into our free prize draw.

Then we’ll select the win­ners at random – and if you’re one of them we’ll send you your very own eco-​​eye mini.

That’s it. No catch [see our full terms and con­di­tions]. Although if you’d care to let us know how you get on with your new gadget, we’d love to hear from you.

Light­ning image by

Flickr user idarknight

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​10-​​20 23:14:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Cemeteries, Death, Energy, Flickr, Image Galleries, Outdoors, Recreation, Urban Exploration
Posted in Energy | View Comments

Socks away! End of the central heating challenge

As part of our series of energy chal­lenges, guest blog­ger Lee Col­gate agreed to give up cent­ral heat­ing at a time when most of us are turn­ing it on.

In his last post, Lee told us all about the hard­ships endured while avoid­ing frost­bite on hol­i­day in Spain. In this, his final post, he updates us on central-​​heating-​​free life in Novem­ber, back in Blighty.

Well, it’s finally over. Just in time and thank god. We take so many things for gran­ted these days, but still I under­es­tim­ated what it would be like to actu­ally live without cent­ral heat­ing at the back end of the year in the UK.

As you may have read, we ran away to Spain for a couple of weeks, a little way into the chal­lenge. Some very clever edit­ing by the tal­en­ted Living team (I ranted about orange women wear­ing yellow on cut price air­lines; I don’t know why; wait, yes I do – read on) on that par­tic­u­lar report man­aged to con­ceal the fact that I was slightly the worse for alco­holic wear at the time of writ­ing. It won’t have hidden in any way what­so­ever that I was feel­ing deeply smug and having a thor­oughly lovely time.

Post-​​smugness reality

To fulfil the chal­lenge and make the whole thing worth­while, we com­mit­ted to leav­ing the heat­ing off into Novem­ber on our return. To be honest, the weather at the begin­ning of the chal­lenge really wasn’t that severe, but it had all taken a turn for the worse by the time we got back. And, you know, it was actu­ally not all that nice with the heat­ing off. Who’d have thought?

<!– The two of us didn’t actu­ally suffer all that much. I bought Colin a pair of the rather fetch­ing socks I was sport­ing in the photo that accom­pan­ied my first post. In a dif­fer­ent colour, obvi­ously. It’s not like we have match­ing anor­aks or any­thing like that. We wore rather more than is cus­tom­ary when indoors (or indeed out­doors in, ooooh, let’s say Fin­land) and added more if it got colder.

But our poor cat had a slightly harder time of it. Our floor­ing, apart from the bed­room and living room, is basic­ally a lino­leum bon­anza, the sofa is leather and the…no, I can’t think of another word right now…poofs are (deep breath) ‘leather-​​look’. Not at all cosy for the poor little mite, who con­sequently fol­lowed us round like a puppy and launched him­self into the nearest lap as soon as we sat down. Bless ‘im.

After a few days of our being back, present in the house, not dead (I’m fairly cer­tain corpses don’t do much to raise the ambi­ent tem­per­at­ure, at least not for long) and doing the usual things like cook­ing, iron­ing, shower­ing, etc. the tem­per­at­ure indoors actu­ally settled down to a fairly con­stant 19 degrees.

What never went away, though, and this was the most uncom­fort­able thing, was the damp. Without any strong loc­al­ised heat sources get­ting much hotter than the ambi­ent tem­per­at­ure it was almost, and allow me to exag­ger­ate here for a minute to get my point across, like living in a cave. It’s not that there was damp run­ning down the walls, it was just very uncom­fort­able and you could almost ima­gine things were going mouldy all around you. Given that we don’t have a tumble dryer, there was the added com­plic­a­tion with laun­dry that almost led to things going mouldy all over you. But we don’t need to dwell on that. Why on Earth the TV has to go on about pess­ar­ies while I’m eating every even­ing I’ll never under­stand, so I’ll spare you.

Turn­ing up the heat

We have turned the heat­ing back on now, with the kind per­mis­sion of our Living mas­ters, and hal­le­lu­jah! I’m just get­ting over a rather nasty cold I picked up while doing a half mara­thon in the weather-​​warning weather a couple of week­ends back and I’m sure the lack of heat­ing in the house didn’t help much in the early part of my recov­ery. It’s only set to 20, as opposed to our usual 21. I guess that’s partly because we got along OK(ish) for a while at 19 and partly because we’ve got so used to wear­ing out­door clothes indoors that we just don’t need it any higher. Walk­ing on the car­pets no longer feels like walk­ing on a bed of moss. Our clothes are dry again. And the cat’s happy.

Paper­less quarterly billing means we won’t really have an idea of any sav­ings we might have made until some time in Decem­ber, but if it’s at all inter­est­ing when we see the res­ults, I’ll be cer­tain to come back and com­ment here to let you know.

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• It’s the little things: set­ting the ther­mo­stat (sfgate​.com)

Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​11-​​18 09:19:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Central heating, Earth, Energy, Frostbite, Living room, Room temperature, Spain, Television
Posted in Energy | View Comments

Will a new fridge-​​freezer save electricity, money?

So, a quick flick through my past posts reveals that, accord­ing to me, roofs are rub­bish, rain is rub­bish, fest­ivals are rub­bish, digital cam­eras are rub­bish, mobile phones are rub­bish, broad­band is rub­bish, cars are rub­bish and even rub­bish is rub­bish.

In short, modern life is rub­bish, except when it comes to fridges. Fridges are ace.

I won’t bore you again with the trials of living without one for a month, but my energy-​​saving chal­lenge was made easier by the fact that the old fridge broke at the start. I’d had half a mind to replace it, though, ever since I hooked it up to one of our power meters and dis­covered that it was using an incred­ible 15 kilowatt-​​hours (kWh) of elec­tri­city each week: enough to run my kettle for more than seven hours.

That had never seemed right to me, and I wanted to see whether a new replace­ment would really be that much better, or whether makers’ energy-​​saving claims are all just hot air.

Before I could find out, the old item had to be car­ried down the three flights of stairs from my flat, and a newer, unin­ten­tion­ally bigger ver­sion man­handled back up. This required the street-​​level removal of all of the replacement’s pack­aging, the sign­ing of a damage dis­claimer, and an almost super­hu­man effort not to upbraid the deliv­ery man for his insist­ence that it wasn’t going to fit until it already had.

If the first thing I learned from my new fridge-​​freezer was that it is chief among the things you don’t want to carry into a third-​​floor flat, the second was that modern examples are very, very good. After a quick wipe down, I hooked it up to the energy meter and set about load­ing it up with all the things I’d missed so much in my fridge­less month. Chiefly beer.

Fridge over troubled water

After the first day – much of which would have been spent work­ing hard to get everything down to tem­per­at­ure – it had used 1.45kWh, which seemed a prom­ising start. And des­pite extra demands from freez­ing bucket-​​loads of ice cubes, and left-​​over chilli and pasta sauces, at the end of the first week the meter was show­ing just 6.34kWh – less than half the elec­tri­city my old fridge would have used in the same time.

In the second week it only got through 5.05kWh, while in week three con­sump­tion was down to just 4.89kWh – less than a third that of my old fridge.

I’m impressed, frankly. New Fridge is bigger, colder and better than the old one, and yet it uses just a third of the power: It’s likely to save me more than ?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​11-​​05 05:22:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Business, Electricity, Energy, Energy conservation, Kilowatt hour, Refrigerator, Temperature, Utilities
Posted in Energy | View Comments

Discovering how to balance energy efficiency and style in a Victorian house

In part two of his invest­ig­a­tions into how to make his Vic­torian ter­raced house more energy-​​efficient without com­prom­ising its fea­tures and char­ac­ter, our guest blog­ger, Simon Mustoe, finds a few sur­prises cour­tesy of the Energy Saving Trust (EST).

Last week, I went public with a homeowner dilemma: I whole­heartedly sub­scribe to energy-​​saving prin­ciples but am not really pre­pared to do any­thing that com­prom­ises the char­ac­ter of my Victorian-​​era house. I lit­er­ally couldn’t bear to watch someone rip­ping out the ori­ginal wooden sash win­dows in favour of double-​​glazing, or cov­er­ing up a beau­ti­ful ori­ginal wooden floor with carpet. In fact, I think I had uncon­sciously decided that there really wasn’t much I could do to con­serve energy in a house that was built over 100 years too early to bene­fit from environmentally-​​conscious build­ing prin­ciples. Appar­ently, the first step in beat­ing a prob­lem is to admit that one exists, so I’m facing up to my pre­vi­ous assump­tion and put­ting it to the test.

Given that the Energy Saving Trust is host­ing Energy Saving Week I made it my first port of call. A little dig­ging around its web­site led me to a list of ways to insu­late the walls and floors of a house. I was pleas­antly sur­prised by what I found. For instance, I hadn’t real­ised that I could actu­ally insu­late solid walls, a fea­ture typ­ical of Victorian-​​era houses. Appar­ently I can – both inside and out, although doing both would count as excess­ive. What’s more, each option would save in the region of two tonnes of carbon diox­ide (CO2) emis­sions each year, which equates to around ?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​10-​​22 01:51:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Energy, Energy conservation, Energy Saving Trust, Environment, Insulated glazing, Sash window, Terraced house, Victorian architecture
Posted in Home | View Comments

Energy saving project: confessions of an overnight energy geekLow Carbon Households

Some snip­pets of con­ver­sa­tion from our house late yes­ter­day evening:

“Look what hap­pens when I switch on the kettle!”

“Right, I’m going to try turn­ing off the lights in the kitchen!”

“Oh my god, did you see what just happened when the wash­ing machine came on?”

I know – it’s sad but true. With less time and energy than is con­tained in one kilowatt-​​hour, we had trans­formed into elec­tri­city meas­ure­ment geeks.

I’d just got back from the launch of the Low Carbon House­holds pro­ject, which is being run by Lewes Dis­trict Coun­cil. Fellow Living con­ti­b­utor Jeremy and I will be mon­it­or­ing our home elec­tri­city use for a year, as will more than 30 other house­holds in the district.

An eco-​​eye out

We’ve all been equipped with an eco-​​eye mini, a neat little device that reveals what’s going on behind the scenes.

The idea of mon­it­or­ing energy use may not push everyone’s button, but when you get one of these bad boys clamped onto your supply you can’t help but get involved with it.

It’s very simple. You plug the sensor into the mains or insert a couple of bat­ter­ies (they came sup­plied with proper ones, Dur­a­cell AAs – when does that ever happen?). Then you lock it on to one of the wires going into your fuse­box – no cut­ting or rewir­ing required.

Next you put bat­ter­ies in the sep­ar­ate mon­itor screen, and set the time and the cost per unit of elec­tri­city (accord­ing to your last bill). And that’s it. You’re record­ing real-​​time use of power in kilowatt-​​hours, and can see how much your cur­rent use would cost over a week, month or year – as well as the likely CO2 emissions.

Within seconds, you’re won­der­ing why the level is so low, or so high, and why it’s chan­ging all the time. It’s a bit of a jolt.

We’d been told at the meet­ing by Cli­mate South East’s Mat­thew Bird that the kettle would be a shocker, and he was right. Making a cup of tea sent our low, mid-​​evening read­ing shoot­ing up five-​​fold. You quickly real­ise why the National Grid struggles to cope with the surge in demand during half-​​time in cup finals.

And…?

So, this is all very well. But will it actu­ally change the way we behave?

Well, the early signs are: yes. Our kettle doesn’t have a water gauge, so it’s easy to over­fill. I did exactly that this morn­ing, and felt so unable to waste the hot water that I made a full cafetiere (which could be reheated later, for rather less power, in the microwave) and a Ther­mos flask of tea for my train jour­ney later in the day.

I’ve eased off the monitor-​​watching a bit this even­ing, but it’s sat there, watch­ing, wait­ing, and ready to reveal the true energy impact the next time we hoover, or dry the kids’ hair or leave the TV on standby.

And as they say, know­ledge is power.

Anyone else out there got an eco-​​eye mini or sim­ilar smart meter plugged in to their home? Let us know your exper­i­ences of whether it’s help­ing you to save energy.

IMAGES by me

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​03-​​04 11:08:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Business, Electricity, Electricity meter, Energy, Kilowatt hour, National Grid, Television, Washing machine
Posted in Energy | View Comments

All power to the shower: Paul pulls the plug on his no-​​bath energy saving challenge

Guest blog­ger Paul Pritchard is UK head of cor­por­ate respons­ib­il­ity for MORE TH>N’s parent com­pany, RSA. He agreed to give up his beloved baths as part of our energy-​​saving pro­ject, and share the highs and lows with us on Living.

Having steeped him­self in lit­er­at­ure for the com­fort denied him by the shower, his month of abstin­ence is now at an end. But has it changed his habits for good?

It’s over. I man­aged to com­plete my month.

OK, so it doesn’t really com­pare to a month without a fridge but I reckon it has taught me some­thing and I will def­in­itely change my beha­viour going for­ward. It ended with a bit of a whim­per as I had pretty much got used to the occa­sional shower routine, but still really nice to know I can now enjoy the odd indul­gence again. I don’t think I will be doing the five-​​minute mid­week baths though – a quick shower serves equally well (I never thought I woud say that. Also I do actu­ally wonder if maybe we wash and shower too much – as a kid I used to wash my hands and face before I went to bed and that seemed fine.)

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​11-​​10 08:15:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Bathroom, Corporate social responsibility, Energy, Energy conservation, Home and Garden, Paul Pritchard, Shopping, Technology
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Greenbird breaks the wind powered car speed world record

Brit­ish engin­eer Richard Jen­kins has become the fast­est driver ever to use only the power of the wind – smash­ing the pre­vi­ous record in the process.

And the all-​​British Green­bird carbon fibre land yacht needed winds of only 30mph to reach its top speed of 126.1mph, best­ing pre­vi­ous record holder, Amer­ican Bob Schu­macher by almost 10mph.

The record-​​breaking run took place at the dried-​​out bed of Lake Ivan­pah on the border between Nevada and Cali­for­nia.

Ori­gin­ally the Wind­jet pro­ject, the craft can oper­ate on both dry land and on frozen water – and is designed to break the record on both surfaces.

It was renamed to cap­ture the spirit of the Blue­bird – the legendary series of craft headed by Donald Camp­bell in the 1950s and 60s before his death at more than 300mph on Con­is­ton Water.

The Eco­tri­city–sponsored Green­bird is billed as being “part aero­plane, part sail­boat, part For­mula One car” and it used some clever, but rel­at­ively simple prin­ciples to speed itself to glory.

Power is pro­duced in a sim­ilar way to how an aero­plane gen­er­ates ‘lift’ to climb in the air; using wind moving over the ’sail’, which is essen­tially a ver­tical wing.

?

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2009-​​04-​​01 17:32:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

Tags: Coniston Water, Donald Campbell, Ecotricity, Energy, Greenbird, Nevada, Renewable, Richard Jenkins
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