Looks like electric cars are getting closer and closer. Mitsubishi has announced plans to test it's new EV in the states this fall.
Presently max speed is 80 and range is about 80 miles between recharges which will take about 10 hours on 110v house power. And while this will most likely improve over time, this is more than enough for almost all second cars, and for most first cars to boot.
And if you want EVs sooner than later, check out Subaru's R1e and then let them know what you think about it at the bottom of the page.
Stay tuned.
Live Sustainably
Dave
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Mitsubishi to test i MiEV in the US
You know times they are a changing.....
....when energy companies are touting their abilities to supply electricity for your cars. Very cool.
Live Sustainably
Dave
Eat Well....easily!
Here's a cool website I came across recently. The Eat Well Guide is an online resource where you type in your zip code and they come up with a list of different companies in your area that serve healthy organic foods. A quick type of my zip came up with 1 Baker, 1 Farmer, 49 Stores, 1 Co-Op, 21 Restaurants, and 1 Organization all within 20 miles of me. And they even have ratings like a water droplet to indicate establishments that are water conscious. Very cool and anything that makes it easier to make informed choices is, in my book, a good thing. Of course, you should check into the establishments yourself as well, but from what I saw of the places I know, this is a pretty good dealio.
Live Sustainably
Dave
Peanuts! Get Yer Red Hot Packing Peanuts!
Packing peanuts. If you are anything like me you hate these things, but somewhere deep in the recess of a closet, you have a large bag of them waiting to be sent off to some unknown destination. Come on, you know who you are.
Well fear not, friendly peanut hater. While they may keep coming at ya whether you like it or not, there are now options. For starters, stop buying so much stuff online (kidding, well, not really, but....anyway). Check out the Plastic Loose Fill Council which believe it or not actually offers a hotline and online resource to find places to return these things where they will actually get re-used. Get that, re-used, not recycled or re- whatevered, but re-used for the purpose they were originally made for. Cool huh? I wish they'd stop making these things in the first place but if they are going to, at least they can get re-used so less of them need to be made.
And if you're looking to gripe on the subject, check out this I Hate Packing Peanuts website.
Live Sustainably (and stop buying so much stuff on the Internet)
Dave
Free Bikes To Cut Down On Cars? Whodathunkit?
What an absolutely fantastic idea this is. Ripon College in Wisconsin is offering incoming freshman free Trek bicycles if they pledge to not drive to campus for the first year. The school is giving away 200 bikes, helmets and locks in exchange for a no car promise.
How cool is this. Everyone wins (except of course for the poor kid who has to bicycle to school in a blizzard, but I digress). The school doesn't need to come up with new parking, the kids get more excercise, the bike lock and helmet companies get free advertising and product recognition, and a significant amount of CO2 is taken out of the equation. I love this!
A similar thought occurred to me the other day as I was riding the bus. How great would it be for the gov. to lower bus fairs as gas prices rise? Right off the bat, it would help the poor who make up the largest numbers of bus riders, but slowly over time, I think it would encourage others to start taking the bus rather than driving.
Bottom line is I think that incentives to ride bikes or use mass transit are in order to help get us off of oil and onto the next level.
My two cents and huzzah to Ripon.
Live Sustainably
Dave
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Bottled Water
My buddy Duane sent this to me. Thought it was kind of cool. Enjoy.
Live Sustainably
Dave
Monday, March 10, 2008
Notes from a Homebrewer
My buddy Duane in England is a biodiesel homebrewer, something which i know very little about. I asked him to write something up and he sent along this little biodiesel homebrewing primer. It's by no means a tutorial, but a really good overview on what it takes to brew your own fuel and what the pros and cons are.
Live Sustainably
Dave
I bought a FuelMeister 40gallon machine from Biodiesel Solutions just before moving to the UK in 2005. Once in the UK, the trick was sourcing waste oil as it is a big business here and virtually all of it is assiduously collected from pubs and the usual suspect sources and sent to Germany where the biodiesel industry is huge. I'll spare the boring details of sourcing oil which will be different depending where you live and jump right to the immutable particulars:
COST
I bought my machine three years ago for about $4000. Waste oil costs will vary - I pay about £0.28 per liter ($2.35/gal). In the UK, a 55gal drum of Methanol costs about $240; 8gal of Methanol are required for every 40gal batch of biodiesel. Costs for NaOH (caustic soda, aka drain opener) are nominal. Each 40gal batch uses about 600grams of NaOH, depending on the acidity of the waste oil. Another big cost, not necessary in warmer climates, was $1500 for a blanket to heat the oil stock in its 1000 liter container.
TIME
Once you get the hang of it, the actual hands-on time to make a batch is minimal - less than half an hour. You have to: (1) pump 40gal of stock oil into the processing tank, (2) test the acidity of the oil (kinda like testing your pool water's pH), (3) pump 8gal of Methanol into its premix tank while adding in an amount of NaOH determined by the acidity test, (4) draw the Methanol/NaOH mix in with the oil (this is the catalyst that separates out the glycerin). That's it. You then can come back about 12hrs later to draw off the glycerin that has settled out. Here's the bitch though, both in terms of technique and time:
WASHING THE BIODIESEL
I have found that I must dedicate almost another full day to the washing - returning to drain the wash water every 2-4 hours. The FuelMeister has a hookup for your garden hose and creates a gentle mist that filters down through the biodiesel, washing out any remaining impurities and neutralizing the pH. In England, this process is a pain (esp in winter) because the water is very cold and tends to promote the creation of a lot of soapy foam. The process is much easier in the summer. I can only assume that if my machine were in a heated environment and the water were warmer, this would all be a lot simpler.
LEARNING CURVE
The basics are very simple; when I first started, I had flashbacks to being a pimply 9th grader in science class. I only had one wasted batch - my first. And had I followed the instructions and done only a half batch on the first try as suggested, I would have cut my losses by 50%! The second batch went into the car and there's been no looking back.
TRICKY BITS
You've got to be sure that you open and close the various valves in the right order! If you don't, oil can get sucked into places it's not meant to go and all sorts of gooey, plasticy weirdness gets created that is a big pain to clean out. I've actually gotten pretty good at disassembling the valves to give them a good cleaning every 1000 liters or so - and I'm not terribly mechanical. Another acquired technique is the art of pouring the NaOH into the Methanol at a rate such that it all dissolves evenly. The tendency is to pour too much too quickly. You end up with cakey caustic residue at the bottom of the premix tank and not enough NaOH in the catalyst mixture to properly draw out all the glycerin.
PERFORMANCE
I run both my cars on my homebrew: a little Audi A2 and a much larger Audi A6 wagon. There has been no discernable decrease in power or performance of either car. However, when temperatures hover around freezing, both cars seem to suffer about a 15% decrease in mileage over what they got on petrodiesel. They operate at about a 10% decrease in temperatures around 45-55 Fahrenheit. In the summer months, there's maybe a 5% decrease in mileage. Even at its worst, though, the A2 gets about 53-55mpg and the A6 about 30mpg. In summer, the A2 gets almost 65mpg and the A6 closer to 35mpg. I get great pleasure knowing that I'm driving carbon neutral; even the electricity I use to warm the oil and run the machine's pump is green-sourced! Also, with petrodiesel costing £1.13/litre and climbing (over $8/gal!!), I'm only paying about £0.52 - closer to US prices. But my cars get twice the mileage that their US counterparts got when I was living there, so I rationalize my way into believing I'm driving at 1/2 price in both places...
Happy brewing! ~Duane
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