We have all heard of Solar power, but what is it, how does it work, and why use it?
Solar is defined as; derived from or related to the sun or utilizing the energies of the sun. Therefore, anything that manages to harness the power of the sun may be called Solar Power.
Read the rest of this article onsolar power from http://friendlyhouse.blogspot.com.
[tags]solar-power,DIY,blogs,blogging,daily,current events[/tags]
Harttman & Forbes, maker of handmade window shades from natural and organic materials, has announced a take-back program aimed at closing the loop on the lifecycle of their products. Based in Portland, Oregon, Harttman & Forbes has designed their artisan products after traditional methods using materials such as bamboos, grasses, jutes, and river reeds, from well-managed eco-systems, and treated with natural methods.
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No one was on-site working today, so we decided to take some pictures of our house from the street. This shot was taken while standing on the sidewalk in-front of our future house. The white blocks are the insulated concrete forms (ICF) which have been filled with concrete. The framers will be putting the flooring down for the first floor this Monday and more ICF blocks will extend up from there.
This picture also shows how we are developing our house into the hill-side to take advantage of both our unique location and to have less of an impact on our neighbors view of Calgary.
There are more pictures of how the Ramsay House Project looked on January 20th, 2006
[tags]building, construction, sustainable, house, concrete, icf[/tags]
Since we started dreaming about the Ramsay House Project, the idea of a home computer network has always provided food for thought. What if one system could enable you to be able to listen to any music in any room, display family photos on the television (as well as providing safe storage) and use the internet for phone service?
Finding great guides and resources on how to wire your house for a home-network is no problem, but how does a single family justify having a computer always-on that only gets sporadic usage during a typical day? We were definitely not the only ones thinking about this, as it’s actually a pretty hot topic. In December of 2005, a Google engineer warned that if the performance per watt of today’s computers doesn’t improve, the electrical costs of running them could end up far greater than the initial hardware price tag .
Sun Microsystems just launched a new line of servers called Sun Fire. Sun claims that they are the most eco-responsible servers available and consume just slightly more wattage than a household light bulb. Sun lists their Sun Fire Server systems as using about 180W of power. That’s not bad for a server system, as most run at 3 or 4 times that amount. A typical radio uses about 100W of power but the real energy hogs in a standard home are items such as an electric hot-water tank (3000W), electric stove (4,500W), clothes dryer (4,800W) and the worst offender an air-conditioning system (5,000W) .
If a goal of the Ramsay House Project was to specifically not have a hot-water tank, an electric stove or an air-conditioner, why would we have a computer system always-on? We are determined though to find a way to build or find a system that meets all our needs but with the minimum amount of power.
There is a surprisingly few number of stories on-line on building or purchasing a low-power, eco-friendly home server. Although Sun is aiming their new eco-friendly products at large corporations, I’m sure that others would be interested in their system as a home-server if it was bundled with the right software. The question of how to build a low-wattage home-server system has appeared several times on popular tech related websites such as Slashdot.org, but no clear solutions have been presented by anyone.
We will post and share all the information we gather and collect here on our website.
[tags]eco-friendly, smart-homes, servers, computer, networks, media, environment[/tags]
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