Empowering the Environmentalist Within

Projects for the New Year

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 04:10:02 +0000

Ok this year things should settle down a bit and I can get back to some of the projects I have always wanted to do:

Build a HAWT for the back garden
Build a desk with some modual battery holders (So you can charge a car battery outside and bring it inside to the desk and plug it in for power.
Build some ’smart switches’ - Binary logical gates that work off 12 volts that you can plug and play.
And the Pipe Dream: Start a small Green Company

What are your projects for the next year? Any other cool ones that I should try?

Testing Bridfeeder

admin — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:54:34 +0000

I just installed birdfeeder and I want to see if it will work!

Tis the Season to Consume

admin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:24:18 +0000

Well Christmas has just finished and I have a fairly green family so alot of our gifts we tech-ie little green toys so I thought I’d share some with you:

Eco-Kettle: Boils only the water you need to use. You don’t to buy one of these to do this but this did make it easy to do it. The idea is that raising 1 litre of water by 100 degrees takes a set ammount of energy (more or less). Raising the temperature of 2 litlres takes double. You get the point the more water you boil the more energy it takes. Now most of the time, and I did it too you boil a full jug and pour out only the cup you need. If you had just boiled that one cup then you would have saved a large ammount of power. The Ecokettle makes it a bit easier by giving you a water resiourie that doesn’t boil, so you don’t have to fill it up constantly.

USBCell Battery: I’m not sure if these qualify as green, but rechargable batteries are better than disposable and these definately make it very easy to charge batteries where you are so I think it does. You simple take the cap off the battery and plug it into any USB socket and it charges it. Very cool. Unfortunately for us here in Australia, they are a UK company and not out here yet so I had to jump on amazon and get them sent over.

Starting Out!

admin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 06:11:11 +0000

I’m a pretty average Australian guy and I have a large interest in Greening my world. I live in the city in a small place a work 9-5 (or a few more hours a week as most do these days). I’ve always found it a bit of a challange to find what I should be doning in my small section of the world and what large pieces I can do it the world. Not everyone (or at least my friends) likes me babbling on about it and I thought I’d share my thoughts and experience on the web and soliciate your ideas and suggestions too. So I’ll try to add in all the little and big ideas I have up here and hopefuly get some feedback and suggestions and have a few good chats with the wider comunity that might share my interests. I’ve got some big goals and some small ones and a huge ammount of curiousity.