Recent Posts Tagged With 'environment'

• Installing our Photovoltaic system, part III

  Posted on Monday December 21st, 2009 at 18:12 in yard, environment, electrical, solar, solar energy

  Constructing the mounting frame. I had my one “oops” moment in the project already, hopefully there will not be another one. It seems that when I laid out the position of the mounting frame, I was a little too close to the property line...

• Installing our Photovoltiac system, Part II

  Posted on Saturday November 21st, 2009 at 13:14 in yard, environment, electrical, solar, solar energy

  Laying out the support frame.  As mentioned before, the south facing roof on our house is taken up with the solar hot water system.  The only mounting option for the photovoltaic system was to build a sun shade type support frame in the yard. The f...

• Installing our Photovoltaic Solar System, Part I

  Posted on Wednesday November 11th, 2009 at 19:08 in yard, environment, electrical, solar, solar energy

  I have had a pretty good year with the solar business thus far.  Therefore, I decided to roll some of this year’s profits into our own Photovoltaic (PV) system.  This idea has been batted about before, including as a battery back up for the s...

• Degradable plastic bags

  Posted on Saturday June 13th, 2009 at 14:35 in environment, General

  I was reading something this morning about how the City of Philadelphia is considering baning plastic bags completely. It seems that those thin plastic bags you get from the grocery store are public enemy number 1 when it comes to the battle over t...

• Smart outlet strip

  Posted on Friday January 16th, 2009 at 10:00 in environment, electrical, conservation

  I did some research a while back on the standby loads around Casa de Catskill. The findings are in the post titled  “Kill-A-Watt meter results.“  The worst offender seemed to be the laptop charger and associated accessories.  The TV ...

• Clean burning woodstove

  Posted on Tuesday January 13th, 2009 at 07:36 in environment, heat, heating, woodstove

  I took this picture of our wood stove chimney. Once the little Jotul F100 wood stove gets hot  this is the way it looks: Clear.  According to the US EPA certification sheet, (large .pdf file) the Jotul F100 Nordic QT puts out less than 3 grams of...

• Where does your electricity come from?

  Posted on Saturday January 10th, 2009 at 08:04 in environment, electrical, electricity, power plants

  I posted about this once before. The US EPA has a web site called “How clean is the electricity I use,” complete with a place to fill in your zip code and find out. We pay a lot for electric, it peaked at ¢17.8 per kWh last summer, now ...

• Happy New Year, enjoy your renewable energy incentives

  Posted on Monday December 29th, 2008 at 09:45 in environment, solar, solar energy, alternate energy, solar hot water

  Let me be the first to proclaim “HAPPY NEW YEAR!”  And good riddance to 2008! Of course, not all of 2008 was doom and gloom.  One of the bright spots is congress extended (to 2016) and improved the federal tax rebates for renewable ener...

• Solar Hot Water Energy Savings

  Posted on Sunday October 26th, 2008 at 13:22 in environment, alternate energy, heating, solar hot water

  My Solar Hot Water System has been on line for one year now.  I thought I'd post some results on the energy savings thus far: Before the solar hot water system was installed, we used on average 32 kWh/day.  This is a three year average and it was p...

• DIY solar panels, Part II

  Posted on Wednesday October 8th, 2008 at 18:16 in environment, solar, solar energy, alternate energy, heating

  This is part II of how to make your own solar thermal collector to help offset heating costs this winter.  You will need a good south facing wall to mount this collector on.  In order to be most effective, the wall should be unshaded between 9 am t...

• DIY solar panels, Part I

  Posted on Saturday October 4th, 2008 at 11:37 in environment, solar, solar energy, alternate energy, heating

  I have been working on this for most of the summer.  The problem with solar energy systems is that they are expensive.  There is no doubt that a photovoltaic (solar electric) panel will save energy and pay for itself in time, however, the initial o...