Alternative Fuel Choice

Posts Tagged ‘sustainable’

In the past greenhouses were used for small gardens and caring for individual horticulturalists prized flowers but commercial greenhouses are in the focus more lately with all of the attention given to green and sustainable living choices.

To explain, many universities naturally have their commercial greenhouses, for their agricultural studies. However, many elementary and pre-schools are also building greenhouses as this is a key factor in raising the generations to come. Not only are the children learning about growing and life, but they are also learning about our earth, importance of organic growing, eating habits and self worth.

As our land becomes more obsolete many have sought to build greenhouses with the use of hydroponics so the soil is preserved and the vegetation grows healthier by transporting the nutrients directly to the root of the plants.

Acreage can no longer go out so we must consider going up. With a large greenhouse structure, growing up, or “eco-building” is the idea of planting in large glass towers and keeping the glass greenhouse structures growing year round and in places that would normally be unavailable. This would create crop for countries in places where land is not available, either because of climate or because of space. It would also allow growing year round and quite possibly put a stop to much of the hunger crisis. Supplying healthy food through greenhouse structures or supplying crops that would help our oil crisis would be a complete sustainable process.

Organic fertilizing has been an issue we have struggled with over the years. We know chemicals placed on our plants is bad for you and we know that harmones injected into our livestock is also harmful. With organic living we can control the insects by allowing the good insects to kill off the bad and growing indoors allows this cleaner “greener” living. Our world has always had some faction carrying the mantra of “getting back to nature” but now is the time to take action and do this.

I think we can definitely make good use of what we are learning about the economy, about the earth, and about “green” living by simply following what we believe in. Building greenhouses are unquestionably here to stay.

If you want to Build YOUR Southern Greenhouse go to http://www.SouthernGreenhouses.com.

categories: economy,green living,sustainable,off the grid,horticulture,growing your own produce,helping the poor,country,economics,horticultural,environment,agriculture,future

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When it comes to converting your home into a solar home, there are several alternatives, because not all homes have the same problems, the same requirements or the same potential sustainable power sources. Therefore, if you are going to try a total conversion or even get off the grid completely, you will either need to do some do research or call in an expert to make a survey for you.

If you call in an expert, try to get an independent one, so that you can work out the costs of satisfying your energy requirements yourself. You will have to pay for such a survey, naturally, but you could carry out a report yourself with a bit of work on your part. In order to create a solar home, you may find the rest of this piece interesting.

There are fundamentally two types of solar design: passive and active solar energy. Passive solar energy can be used to supply heating, cooling and natural light for your home. Active solar energy is used for powering home appliances, tools and lighting. It is the perfect blend of these two kinds of solar energy that you will attempt to accomplish, if you are attempting to convert your home into a solar home.

You can make use of passive solar energy methods in many ways, although they are more easily built in during the actual construction phase of a new home. The largest area of glass should face south or be within 30 degrees of due south. This will catch the maximum amount of heat. This heat can then be distributed around the house by stone floors and stone walls.

The central heating ducting and furnace fan can be utilized to assist, if necessary. If the house becomes too hot in the summer, awnings or even solar panels could be dropped down in order to put the windows in shade. When thinking of passive solar energy, you should try to think of ways of providing warmth and coolness without using electricity. For instance, a skylight at the top of the stairs will permit the warmest air in the house to escape, since hot air rises. This will result in cooler air to be sucked into the house at lower levels.

The other feature of a solar house is the generation of electricity by the deployment of solar panels grouped into solar arrays. Solar panels make use of photovoltaic cells to convert light into energy. This energy can then be used to power ordinary electrical appliances of all kinds or some or all of it can be stored in batteries for later use. Conversion from AC (alternating current) to DC (direct current) and back again, if necessary, is a simple matter.

Solar energy can also be used to warm up water for the pool or for the home. The most usual sort of system uses pipes filled with a kind of anti-freeze to collect the sun’s heat and pass it on to tanks of water by means of a heat exchanger.

A solar home uses energy efficiency to reduce the necessity for heating, cooling and electricity. The use of higher grade insulation, more energy efficient windows, kitchen appliances and lighting than those used in traditional homes, will save you a lot of money and energy. As you can see, some of these alterations, particularly the passive ones are structural, so hard to implement in many homes, but there is always something you can do to reduce your energy bills and gradually convert your home into a solar home.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with a favourite topic – alternative power sources. If you are interested in Sustainable Energy At Home, please click through to our site.

categories: energy,global warming,climate change,alternative,sustainable,solar power,wind power,home and family,health,technology,science,other,uncategorised,fuel

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It is almost high noon on the energy front. Oil, the substance that is used to create most of the world’s electricity is becoming too dear to use to produce electricity for home consumption. Even if you believe that there are lakes of oil left, which might be true, the main reason they have not been exploited yet is because it is too expensive to get out. The only thing that makes it a going concern is the high price of oil on the market.

Therefore, it stands to reason that oil prices cannot go down in the long term, which means that our electricity and petrol prices will stay high and will almost certainly keep rising. Add to that the fact that manufacturing is moving to the Far East and the fact that immigration is rising and the result is lower wages in the West. The probability is that the average national wage will not rise as rapidly as the cost of energy.

So what can you do about it? Well, while commodity prices are certain to keep increasing, one thing has always kept falling and that is the cost of new technology. Or to be more accurate, slightly old technology. Cutting edge technology is always expensive, but after a few years the price tumbles, as we saw with desktop computers and as we are seeing with laptop computers now.

The same phenomenon is at work with solar panels. They are far less expensive now than they were a few years ago and they are far more responsive too. And did you know that the bits and pieces that are used to make solar panels can be purchased from plastic bins at most DIY and hobbyist stores like Radio Shack? If you knew what to buy you could literally go out and bring back enough bits and pieces to make a few solar panels the next time you go out for a loaf of bread.

So why are we not doing it? We did not know that was feasible? Nobody told us? We are not technologically minded? We do not have the skill?

OK, all those reasons sound valid. Nobody has been telling us, but the fact is that it is easy to construct solar panels and not that dear any more. Professional installations are still dreadfully expensive – about $45,000 -, but you can do it yourself. There are two approaches you can take.

You can either get a schematic diagram, a plan, from a hobbyist shop or the Internet, purchase the parts and build your panel or you can buy a self-assembly kit. Sincerely, there are kits about that teenagers can assemble as easily as they do a plastic model airplane. ‘Locate and insert part number 44 into the main board number 3′ – that sort of simple.

If you are new to the world of solar energy, then you may be asking yourself how solar energy panels work? Solar energy panels are also known as photovoltaic panels; photovoltaic meaning electricity from light. Solar energy panels work by collecting protons from the sun, which displace neutrons, and thereby create a flow of electrons or electricity. This electricity can either be stored in batteries for later use or used immediately.

You can utilize solar panels to heat your pool, run your workshop tools, power the greenhouse lights and fans or if your system is large enough, replace grid electricity in your whole home or business. Most solar energy panels are designed to last upwards of 20 years but involve little to no upkeep.

There is a drop-off of the power supply after about 10 years of about 10%, but over the life-time of the solar panels, the energy savings made are enough to recover the original cost of the system and more. Furthermore, costs are tumbling while energy prices are increasing. It already makes financial sense to switch to solar energy power.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with a favourite topic, types of renewable energy. If you are interested in Sustainable Energy At Home, please click through to our site.

categories: energy,global warming,climate change,alternative,sustainable,solar power,wind power,home and family,health,technology,science,other,uncategorised,fuel

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Free energy … What a dream, eh? One of the biggest household burdens is the cost of energy. The cost of energy is frequently 40% of total household bills. So, free energy would assist every family that is not rich a great deal. However, free energy is a pipe dream, is it not? There is alternative energy, that is non fossil fuel based energy, like nuclear energy, but that is not cheap either.

Other alternative sources of energy include wind-driven turbines and solar power. In this piece, I want to talk about harnessing the power of the sun to create solar electricity. Creating solar power is nothing new and most people are acquainted with the general theory of how the scheme works. In deed, most of us have owned a solar powered pocket calculator or solar powered clock at one time or another.

Solar electricity is just as good and just as powerful as traditionally generated electricity and they can be utilized for exactly the same purposes. However, solar energy has one huge benefit, it is not ‘dirty’.

Electricity produced from the sun’s energy has not been made creating any greenhouse gases whatsoever. Furthermore, because there are no moving parts in a solar panel, there is no wear and tear and so less repairs.

Solar panel systems are more flexible too. For instance, if you have a small home with couple of appliances, you still have to have the same method of delivering grid electricity as a huge house and you still have to have a metering system and a means of paying for the electricity used.

However, if you take the same small house as an example, you might find that ten solar panels will power it. Therefore, for a one-off expense, you are free of electricity pylons and their cables, the meter box and the monthly bills. A huge house would just have to fit more panels, say one hundred, to achieve the same freedom.

This freedom from the means of supplying electricity is a very real advantage if you live in a far-flung place, where you are expected to pay for the electricity pylons and their cables all on your own. The down side of using solar power is the cost of setting it up. A professionally fitted solar energy system can cost about $30,000.

If you save $200 per month on electricity, then you will recoup your expenditure in about 300 months, which is 12.5 years. However, if you could get the system fitted more economically, you would recoup your costs more rapidly.

This is possible, by assembling the solar panels yourself and installing them yourself. No matter what sort of a klutz you think you are, you can assemble and install the average solar panel kit. In fact, most teenagers can do the job. If you decide to buy solar panel kits to assemble yourself, you can save about half of the above costs, but if you were to make the panels from parts that are easily available in DIY shops, you could be harnessing the power of the sun to make solar energy for up to 75% of the cost of a professional installation.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with a favourite topic, types of renewable energy. If you are interested in Sustainable Energy At Home, please click through to our site.

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The very life of every living thing on Earth is dependent on the Sun. Without the Sun, we would not have animal or plant life, which provides us with food and companionship. Without the Sun, we would have died out in earlier days, without the Sun these days, we may last a while, but it would not be much of a life.

The Sun offers us much more too. What we now refer to as ‘alternative, sustainable energy’ was the only form of energy available to the world for thousands of years. Really, nuclear and even oil generated energy should be called alternative, but we have forgotten a lot. Especially in the West.

It is not essential to go back to the habits of our farming ancestors and get up and go to bed with the Sun, although it is still the way of life of the majority of the world’s population. No, we have technology and we should use it. At the moment, we use sophisticated technology to find more lakes of oil and dig ever deeper in more and more unreachable places to remove it from the Earth. Or worse still, we go to war to steal or guarantee supplies resulting in the death of thousands of young soldiers and the desolation of millions of ordinary, innocent citizens.

We have to use our fantastic advances in technology to produce electricity out of thin air. Literally. We already have the technology to produce solar panels and wind turbines in order to create millions of kilowatts of electricity from the Sun and the wind. There is other technology that can make use of the movement of the seas and the natural high temperature of the Earth itself, although some of these are only accessible in some areas. For example, wave power can only be taken advantage of, if you live on the shoreline.

However, solar and wind power can be utilized in any part of the world with differing levels of success. A permutation of the two varieties of power generators is perhaps best for most regions. These technologies have been developed more or less chaotically. What if we had spent our war chests of billions of dollars on advancing these technologies, instead of using them to level cities and kill people?

However, the technology is there to produce enough electricity to power a household. It is clear that we cannot wait for our governments to do much more for us. Their viewpoint is different, they do not want to harm big business. And the big electrical providers would be damaged if a significant number of people generated their own electricity and came off the grid.

The rich guys in government are stuck between a rock and a very hard place. They recognize that oil is running out; they know that much more electricity will have to be generated from the wind and the Sun, but they do not want to harm the share value of big industry.

Imagine, what a hard time the energy producers would have explaining why the cost of electricity had to go up because he Sun or the wind had increased its charges. Whereas it is easy to defend when they say that OPEC has increased the price of oil. But, we are in OPEC, aren’t we?

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with a favourite subject – alternative power sources. If you are interested in Sustainable Energy At Home, please click through to our site.

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Electricity created from wind powered turbines is one of the most prevalent forms of energy from alternative sources and it is the fastest-growing variety too. Wind turbines are turned by the natural strength of the wind, so make electricity without ‘burning up’ any fossil fuels in the procedure. The faster (harder) the wind gusts, the more electricity is produced.

Therefore, wind turbines are best placed where there are prolonged periods of high wind. The coast line is often a good place to site wind turbines. In fact many coastal towns and cities are supplementing their existing conventional electricity supply with electricity created from wind turbines.

You can still produce energy from wind, even if the wind does not blow very hard where you live, but the return will be less. It may still be adequate, but maybe you should check out solar panels too. For example, it may suit your location to have a wind turbine for the winter and a couple of solar panels for the summer and winter back up.

Making a wind turbine is not rocket science, most people who are good with their hands can assemble a wind turbine with the aid of a good set of DIY plans. The real trick is to get all the components that the plans say you will need before you start. That way, you can focus on following the plans without having to nip off every now and again to get a part.

One valid point is that you should not be worried about creating too much electricity, because many the energy companies in many countries are required to buy your surplus electricity back off you nowadays. This is not a difficult process, you just have to stay plugged into the grid and your surplus electricity will flow back into the grid changing the numbers on the meter automatically.

In this instance your meter is read monthly or quarterly as usual, but you will be given a refund rather that a bill. The more wind turbines and solar panels you set up, the bigger a reimbursement you are likely to receive. In some cases, the units of electricity that you sell back are worth up to twice the units you use from the same electricity company.

Apart from the fact that you will not be receiving an electricity bill every month or that your bill will be hugely reduced, a very important point is that you will be one of the very, very few people who is not badly affecting our planet. You will not be so accountable for the greenhouse gases that are created by making standard electricity.

You have nothing to lose by learning more about creating your own electricity, coming off the grid and doing your bit for the natural world. The very least that can take place is that you read the information and become wiser on the subject and you may not implement you knowledge that you have learned. This would be a real pity, but not a big financial loss.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with a favourite topic – alternative power sources. If you are interested in Sustainable Energy At Home, please click through to our site.

categories: energy,global warming,climate change,alternative,sustainable,solar power,wind power,home,health,technology,science,other,uncategorised,fuel

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