Green Trust, a renewable energy research center, powers their facilities with waste vegetable oil. Their 12.5 kw Detroit Diesel 2-71 generator (the VeggieGen) happily slurps used fryer grease instead of diesel fuel. It’s clean burning, renewable, and a recycled product that normally gets landfilled. See the details at www.green-trust.org…
Greenbuild International Conference and Expo 2004 in Portland, Oregon on 10th to 12th November – 3 days of workshops, talks and exhibitions for anyone involved in green building. There’ll also be tours of green buildings.
Fees vary depending on how many events you want to attend.
For more information and registration see the website…
10 easy steps to start a vegetable garden
– Select a good spot for your garden: make sure the soil’s well drained, not too shallow, not too rocky and avoid shady areas. Remember vegetables can be grown on terraces too.
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There’s something incredibly exciting about getting into an abandoned building — a huge, disused factory. It gets you right there, you’re scared and a bit disgusted because it’s dirty, but the size of it is just overwhelming. Never mind the dirt, the dust, the pigeon shit and the graffiti on the walls, we’ve just got into 4 storeys of free, empty, hundreds of square meters of space! …
You could make use of your swimming pool (or small lake) for much longer with a solar pool heating system.
Pool solar heaters are just a set of solar panels, or ‘collectors’, through which water pumped out of the swimming pool is circulated before being poured back into the pool. …
Self-build geodesic domes course on Dec 10th to 12th at the Low-Impact Living Initiative, Redfield Community, Winslow, Bucks, UK.
Build your own low-impact dwelling / storage / tent / spare room / retreat / kids hideaway ……
Green roofs are designed to support the growth of plants. They consist of a special waterproof and root repellant membrane, a drainage system, filter cloth, a lightweight growing medium and plants installed on top of human-built buildings.
Research into the advantages of planted roofs is being carried out in universities around the world, like Sussex university in the UK, and Penn State university in the US.…
UK planners James Woudhuysen and Ian Abley look forward optimistically to 2016 in Blueprint magazine :
Forget the 0.12 million new dwellings that deputy prime minister John Prescott conceded should be added to London Gateway’s 1.6 million inhabitants in 2004. In their best case scenario, after freeing up the planning process, a
whopping 1.2 million homes have been put in over a decade 10 times the initial intention.…
From Clare Morgan
Here is one self-build home that got around the planning laws! A CLASSIC BUS that had been converted into a UK home sold at auction for 132,500. The 1920s bus had been parked on clifftops at Porthtowan, Cornwall, by a miner in the 1930s. Over the years it was added to and turned into a one bedroom property with a balcony and sea views.
Only two people bid for the home at the auction, which was held at the Penventon Hotel, Redruth. The successful bidder was George Kinsella, originally from London, who had sold up and moved to Cornwall.…
Known as the Type 2, or “bay window” van (its predecessor had a beaky nose and split windscreen), it fell off the twig in Europe in 1979, but factories in South America kept churning them out. Two Gloucestershire-based brothers, Chris and Jason Jones, have been quietly importing the vehicles from Brazil since the late 1990s and have developed a lucrative sideline converting them into caravans, although minibuses and bog standard vans are also sold.…
How a couple lost everything they owned and still found happiness — off-grid…
The makers bill the Seascooter as a Personal underwater transporter, but that’s going a bit too far.
The Seascooter is just a small, safe hand-held propeller – driven by an electric motor, which gives you an hour’s water transport at the push of a button.…
