Been Busy

Alright, so blogging isn't exactly my number one priority.

No excuse, but i promise I've been busy.

see here for proof



Now that you've had a good laugh, Hopefully that will hold you off for a while.

Time to improve

In order to improve I think it is important to understand how others are doing when it comes to efficiency?

why you ask am I doing this well, the other day I got my gas bill, and am absolutely disgusted by how much we used. I give in to comfort more then I should and therefore my bill was ridiculously high.

alright so here's what I want. Your electricity consumption in kWh, there should be a number on your bill that states how many kilowatt hours you used in a month. second number is Gas, how much gas do you use in a month in cubic meters. and third how much water do you use in cubic meters, mine says in M3, which is the same thing.

And to start off I will give my pathetic numbers for the last billing period, as much as i don't want to share my consumption I think it will be good for me and everyone to see how we are doing and motivate us.

Darren's consumption(most of Jan some of Feb) Electricity = 791 kWh, GAS = 408.673 cubic meters, Water = 26.6 M3

***********See Comments for Update*************

Not so proud to be Canadian right now :-(

I just read this article about the Tar Sands - http://www.environmentaldefence.ca/reports/pdf/TarSands_TheReport.pdf

I started to Rant.......

Then Scrapped it.........

and replaced it with this....


...................WE SUCK!...................

Wall Warts and Vampires

To answer your questions I figured I needed a whole post for this one.

First of all .......a wall wart is a physical description ...."It's something that plugs into a wall outlet that has a built in transformer and usually blocks more outlets than it uses. Look at a power bar, or your cell phone charger, I’m sure there are several examples within eye shot of where you’re sitting now.
Now talking about Wall warts, we better talk about what they do, and I don't mean just blocking an additional outlet, I mean draining unnecessary power at all times even when not being used. The best example of this is your cell phone charger, it may provide a function overnight while you charge the battery inside your cell phone, but in the morning when you disconnect the phone from the plug, it doesn’t stop...... It just keeps on sucking back the power, and dispersing it as heat, feel it next time. And yes this particular function has also been given a name, Vampire power or Phantom power.

Now vampire power and or phantom power isn't limited to wall warts, anything that goes into standby mode is also sucking back the juice while not in use. Take for instance your TV, why do you think you can use a remote to turn on a device that is turned off, well that’s because its not turned off, it's in standby, this a pretty good rule of thumb, basically anything that can be turned on by remote is not off but in standby mode. Turning off your cable box however is not the best idea unless of course you don't enjoy having the guide available at all times..... not even I am turning that one off.

Side note... did you know that in a typical situation your microwave oven will use more power displaying the time then when its actually being used (24 hr period).

Ok so what do you do, well, you can use power bars so that all those wall warts can't draw the juice. They even make some special power bars that have a master plug, that knows when you turn off the main device i.e. TV or computer, it can turn off the other color coded plugs as well.

My only advice would be to not purchase a device that requires power in order to turn off other devices; this is just displacing one problem with another.

Hope I answered your questions and didn't cause too many more.

Geothermal heating and cooling

alright Leanne here's some information about geothermal installations, Obviously like all types of alternatives it is expensive to install, but pays back over several years depending on the installation costs and the annual savings involved in the individual system. It’s impossible to predict how quickly someone’s unit will pay back, because of the variables involved in each system. And if you’re lucky a geothermal installation will cost you an upfront cost starting at $10,000.

Geothermal is used for both heating and cooling your home, by the use of a heat pump, and by tapping into the relatively constant temperature of the earth starting at 5-6 feet below ground.

Better then any unit you can install, however, is to reduce your homes use of energy in the first place by insulating walls and ceilings, installing energy efficient light bulbs and appliances, and learning energy efficiency habits like turning off lights, electronics, when not in use, and doing something about all those wall warts that suck back little bits of energy 24-7.

Here’s some things that I found that show the basics of installation, I wanted a video actually showing the installation of the vertical pipes but, the second link at least gives you an idea of the machines involved to accomplish it.

Any Questions?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5rxV3R9RbQ


http://www.palacegeothermal.com/1htms/dxresidence.htm

North Pacific Garbage Patch

Amy says I need to blog so here's something I've been interested in lately.

The "eastern garbage patch" or "Trash Vortex" it has a bunch of names, In essence what it is, is a large gathering of all the plastic and garbage that has been put into the oceans (by us) and instead of spreading out in some sort of natural dilution it is being rounded up by gyres (A gyre is any manner of swirling vortex. It is often used to describe wind or ocean currents, for example the North Pacific Gyre. - thank you wiki)

Now what is going on is that there is a bunch of people and organisations saying that this thing is the size of texas, or the size of the USA, some saying its real thick some not. It's apparently also just under the water surface which makes it unseen from satelite imagery.

Now I'm the first to jump on board for this sort of stuff, but this one has me wondering, I think that the oceans are being polluted, theres not doubt about it, and these gyres... well it makes sense theoretically.... but where then are all the pictures!!!!! I mean if I'm gonna take my boat way the crap out there to see this thing, and report on it, where are the pictures! We have cameras in cell phones, cameras that fit in pockets and could take thousands of pictures on a single media stick, cameras are everywhere and everyone owns one..... except somehow these people who spent thousands of dollars to take a trip out to see it first hand....... I'm just saying..... it seems odd.

$200 per barrel

It's no secret that the price of oil will forever increase in price, and as a direct (potentially exponential) relationship to the amount of oil left to be had.

So how are you preparing for the increase in the price/disappearance of oil and all of its related direct and indirect outcomes? (remembering that a realistic estimate to remaining oil reserves is only 40 years)

What is your vision of the next say 10 years? Do we succeed at reworking our completely petroleum based lifestyles into something more sustainable and maintain our luxurious lifestyles, or are we in total disarray from an absolute economic and social collapse. I guess you could be allowed to say some where in between, but whats the fun in that.

Sustainability Class

Just thought you might want to know what I was doing in school.




yes we really did watch this in one of my classes.

Mountain House

OK so here's the deal, a while back some couples in our ward put on a preparedness night for us, and one of the things they had introduced to us was this Mountain House food, they had opened, and prepared I would say 8 of the main entrees and they were all very very good, I mean surprisingly good for something that was freeze dried and not home made. But here's the better part, they keep on the shelf for an astronomical amount of time. What they had brought was the standard pouch which will keep on the shelf for 8 years, however I have found on there web site that they offer what is called a #10 size can, and they are said to keep for 25 years. Now that's the kind of food storage that I can keep up with. Yes they are expensive but if you break it down they are a pretty standard price for a meal, and one that keeps for a long time.

anyway check them out here they've got tons of variety to choose from.

Happy food Storaging!

Grades

Grades are in, and I'm a bit surprised by the results, I really thought I did worse when I screwed up my final exam. But I'll just consider it an early Christmas gift.

So It runs down like this A-,A,A,A-,A,A = 3.9 GPA

So there it is.

2.5 weeks from now and it's more Math, and Electric Circuits, and another Renewable energy class. New for this term is Chemistry, Physics and Sustainable Development. I'm not so sure about this sustainable development class, I met the lady who teaches it at the beginning of the year and even she is a bit crunchy for me. Chemistry and Physics however should be pretty fun, I really liked them in High School.

Nanosolar

Their "first shipment"..... well first as in, one to a history museum one on eBay and the rest going to solar farms. But it's a start and hopefully it wont be 2010 before we see these available to consumers, however that's probably the case.

..................................
After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.

We are grateful to everyone who supported us through all these years and the many occasions where there appeared to be mile-high concrete walls in our path; the unusual intensity and creativity of our team deserves all the credit for achieving this major milestone today.

Our product is defining in more ways I can enumerate here but includes:

- the world’s first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;

- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;

- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;

- the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;

- an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included.

Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:

Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.

Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.

Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.

[These are obviously not the first three we ever produced – we have produced loads for testing – but these are the first three of what we consider our commercial panels.]

..............................................

Its over

So I have just written my last test, and I think I did alright on all of them except for my alternative Energy test. I was thrown off by my bike being stolen and messed everything up on the test, I couldn't get anything right. So I am hoping that my mark going into the exam was high enough to account for my poor performance on the final, which I would know by now, except that my teacher is apparently having some difficulty getting that grade out to us like he promised.

Anyhow by the 20th of December I should know what all my final grades are and my schedule for next term.

So from now until Jan 7th, I'm free...... well..... free to finish all the work that Amy has lined up for me that is.

SOLAR getting good

Big talks have been happening in the last couple days/weeks concerning Solar Panels. A company called nanosolar has apparently perfected their process for making a photovoltaic cell, that's essentially printed, and can be manufactured almost like a large printing press. I cant find a firm number but i have seen some articles state costs at .30 cents a watt which is huge when compared to previous models at $3 a watt and Coal fired power at $1 per watt. Apparently their not the only ones in this game either another company called Ascent Solar Technologies has been keeping pace with nanosolar as far as technological advancements. they also are doing the printing method of course with some variation to the process but for some reason nanosolar is the leader in the game for now.

Nanosolar is unfortunately a private offering still, so all the big wigs like Google are getting on that boat. Ascent is a private company traded on the NASDAQ and looking like $18 a share now.

Also a professor at our school has been watching some program I cant remember which one, but has been saying that there's big things coming from the US Gov in the next day or so that will change this whole Solar game in a major way.

If you can't tell I am super excited, I wonder if this is how Amy feels when she sees pink, cause my heart started beating faster and I couldn't think straight when I first read the original article.

The Manufacturing plant is set to be sending out units by next year, I'm crossing my fingers on this one for sure.

Well gotta go read some more, I was really excited and wanted to share......

updates

Amy was giving me grief about updating my blog so here I am.

School is going pretty good, everything is gearing up to come to a finish for Christmas break, final projects and final exams is pretty well all that is left. If I do good in all my finals (projects and exams) I should come out with an overall A average, English is the only subject that will bring down my mark at this point. Math will be my highest mark by far.... My last exam I scored 110%........ since I know your gonna ask how ..... most of the class couldn't finish the test in time allotted so he made the test out of 5 marks less and offered an extra 5% bonus question that everyone could do on there own time and hand in.

Since I'm talking about school, I was reading an article on celsias.com that said that you can read any of the course ware offered at MIT for free. Here's a link to the MIT site.

Have fun - Free rice

1000 grains of rice and I am at a level 35 Vocabulary, not too bad i think. Got up to a level 37 there for a couple questions, but it didn't last long.

Give it a try, if anything it was fun for a bit. Let me know how you do.

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

Weather

So lately I have been very confused by the weather, you see, when you get up in the morning and look outside, lets take for instance the other day, it was overcast and windy and looked rather cold, well after I put on my sweater and walked outside I just about died, from heat. I have been wrong almost every day about what I should wear, I never seem to get it right. I thought I would take a snapshot of the weather outside right now cause its so stinking hot, its October 5, at 7 pm, very confusing , here's a snapshot from the weather network as we speak.

No, your eyes do not deceive you, and I did not photoshop it, trust me a couple minutes outside is all you need, to know that "FEELS LIKE 35" is no joke.

Oh and while I was there I checked Calgary's page, its was 3C ........ Sorry :-(

School is going slowly, all my professors seem to think that if the students aren't getting it, that they should slow down and spend more time trying to help the students....... I'm not sure I have ever heard of anything like it, In my opinion they should hit the first year students hard with heavy course loads so that those who cant cut it get out while they still can, you would think that you would rather change you major early rather then during your third year when your professors finally pile it on.... I mean seriously if you need the teacher to help you figure out that 10 light bulbs rated at 100 Watts equals 1000 Watts (1kW) and if you run them all for 1 hour you will use 1 kWh of electricity then times that by the rate of lets say 8 c/kWh you should be able to do it. Go ahead change out the numbers 'ooooh' add some more light bulbs, 'oh no!' I mean how long do we have to spend on this.

That feels a bit better...... anyhow still riding my bike to school, although I remember why I hated it so much on my mission, you get tired and sweaty but it does nothing for you physically.
Wheres an electric scooter when you want one?

New calling

Long time no post. Well if your like mom and dad then as soon as I say I got a calling last Sunday, you will immediately guess what it is, taking all the fun out of it. So as of last Sunday I was set apart as the Elders Quorum President, trust me when I say that when it comes to leadership roles I would gladly allow someone else the blessings. But alas, coming out East isn't the best location for those who try to hide in the back. Anyway if you would like to know more feel free to call.

Other then that we are desperately needing to close our pool down, the trees are starting to turn color and if we don't get it closed in the next couple days were gonna have one messy pool on our hands, it sad to see it get closed especially since the other day if we had a pool blanket (current one is disintegrating ) we could have gone swimming, the pool water is still getting up to 70 F. which for those who don't understand what that means, we were swimming quite happily at 78F just a couple weeks ago. It was just that one week where it dipped down to frost over night that ruined it all, and now that the temp is back up again, its still too late, the leaves have
started to turn.

For those wondering how school is going, It is starting to settle in to a groove now, as we make our way past the first couple weeks where it seemed that everything was seriously dumbed down. I have had a couple Labs now in electrical circuits, nothing interesting there, and 1 lab in my renewable energy class. It was not to bad but still coming in at a basic level where the labs are just supposed to get you familiar with the different technologies out there and the principles behind them. Next term I see getting much better as the classes get harder and more is expected out of settled in students.

Tired

So the day of possession was awkward, we waited around all day with our furniture and stuff sitting out in the yard cause the brick dropped it off. we didn't get possession until 5pm and by then it was to late to move in so we stayed another night at Nicolas house and moved in yesterday, had a couple swims in the pool its really nice. Nicolas family and then the young men all used the pool so it got it real work out yesterday, learned a lot about the pool too, starting to make more sense now.

The house stinks like smoke more then we thought, during the walk through they had all the windows open which did the trick for them cause we didn't think it was that bad, hopefully that was a lesson learned, cause now we've got a lot of cleaning and kilzin to do. cable guy is coming today hope it goes well, i miss TV, thankfully its not mid season for anything except for Big Brother and we have been catching it online.

School is good, Math class is easy English is easy, had my electrical circuits course today witched is overwhelming so let hope it gets better, and of course the Alternative energy courses are cool, however of course even the professors have differing opinions on stuff so it is quite interesting to listen to them talk about different subjects, anyway just eating my lunch and have one more class so gotta go before my battery dies out here.

Back to School

It's finally here!

Time to go back to school, 12 hours from writing this post I will be in the middle of my first school day. not sure if I'm excited or scared, I want to be in school, just wish I could skip the first week and be all settled in. Either way it's happening tomorrow, so wish we luck, and lets hope I don't do anything foolish, or fall off my bike :-(

Also tomorrow we will be moving into our new place, can't wait, should make for a very busy day. probably wont be getting possession till noon'ish so there should be lots left for me to do still. and then end the day with a dip in my new pool, because you just have to. So give us a couple weeks then feel free to start coming this way!

Privatization of all the worlds Water!

OK now, seriously people. This is getting bad, If you have ever watched the movie, "The Corporation" you would see that a company in the past tried to do this, ownership that allowed them to own all water contained in Bolivia, which meant water in the ground, rivers and that fell from the sky. Caught catching it in rain barrels meant you would be charged a fee. The country fought back in a Battle that took them to the streets and cost many a life, they won, however, apparently now looking back, maybe this was just the way corporations tested the waters, and now they must think the time is better, and apparently so, since according to this article already 5% of the worlds water is now privately owned.

Quote from the article: (from Celsias)

"The antidote to water commodification is its decommodification. Water must be declared and understood for all time to be the common property of all. In a world where everything is being privatized, citizens must establish clear perimeters around those areas that are sacred to life and necessary for the survival of the planet. Simply, governments must declare that water belongs to the earth and all species and is a fundamental human right. No one has the right to appropriate it for profit. Water must be declared a public trust, and all governments must enact legislation to protect the freshwater resources in their territory. An international legal framework is also desperately needed"

The world is running low on it's resources, as the population grows it will only get worse, we must act now to use these valuable resources in a way that allows every human the right to fresh water. (from the article) "For the fact is, we know how to save the world’s water: reclamation of despoiled water systems, drip irrigation over flood irrigation, infrastructure repairs, water conservation, radical changes in production methods and watershed management, just to name a few. Wealthy industrialized countries could supply every person on earth with clean water if they canceled the Third World debt, increased foreign aid payments and placed a tax on financial speculation."

Why are we not doing anything real about these problems, what do you think? are we complacent to these issues? is it a lack of exposure to the problems? or is there a lack of knowledge for the general public to understand whats wrong and how to fix it? or maybe like some you think this is the Lords plan and not only is there nothing we can do to stop it, but should we?