Selfsufficientish.com

Hi Forum, Back in late November, wood gas expert Johan Linell visited me from Sweden. Johan is perhaps best known for his wood gas conversion of a 1968 Volvo 140 which he and his pals drove around Sweden last summer. www.vedbil.se Johan is also a keen amateur film-maker, and so while staying with me...

Dennis & list, I have been slowly reducing my requirements over the last year. The biggest saving I made was when I de-frosted the freezer, saving nearly 1kWh per day. Other tips include only doing machine washine on sunny/breezy days when you know it will dry outside. In October I used 60% of t...

Smoothound & Forum, As gas and oil prices rise, many people in the UK are going to be looking for cheaper alternatives. There are not many renewable fuels available except for firewood, wood waste, charcoal, agricultural waste and vegetable oil. Whilst most of these can be used for heating, only...

Muddy, CHP is combined heat and power, sometimes known as co-generation. With gas and electricity prices rising so quickly it is now becoming an attractive alternative and an efficient use of renewable fuels. Typically, a diesel engine running on waste vegetable oil drives a generator to produce ele...

Mike, Further to my last post. HM C & R take a very serious view of people running their diesel fuelled vehicles on waste vegetable oil. WVO is not recognised as a legitimate motor fuel, but a fuel substitute. Under current taxation, it carries a 47p per litre duty. I am not concerned with runni...

Mike & List, It is a step forward in that we are not going to be further taxed by the Government's agencies for using renewable fuel. Fossil fuels are rising in price rapidly, whilst waste vegetable oils will not see the same rate of rise. As the price gap widens between fossil fuels and biofuel...

Welcome WGA Just read your blog - nice brambles! I thought Mr. C was part of "The Shamen" - no wonder he's not around very much (E's R Good and all that !). Having spent 3 years of my mis-spent late teens in Bangor, and exposed to the intricacies of the Welsh language - may I say Croeso Y ...

Cheyenne, Digiveg & Co Thanks for the appreciative words about the Blog. Unfortunately I don't get a lot of time to regularly update it - normally only when I make significant progress with my homepower system. Last week we had interest in the Lister engine generator sets, that we displayed at t...

Hi All, Nice to meet some of you at the Great Dorset Steam Fair last week. Yesterday I telephoned the HM Customs and Revenue advice line to get clarification about whether there was any duty to be paid on biofuel, specifically veg oil (SVO, WVO) when used to fuel a domestic CHP system. The advisor s...

Excellent Point Martin, What did Margaret Thatcher say "Insulation, Insulation, Insulation....." Insulation is vitally important BEFORE you consider anything more interesting. Most of the eco insulation products are still made in the UK, and then there's Kingspan, Cellotex etc that will re...

Hi Red & Co, We once rented a cottage that had a gas fired Aga. It was great in winter, but by May we couldn't get far enough away from it. We turned it off in desperation and then had to buy a 2nd hand Baby Belling cooker so that we had something to cook on. It's probably in your rights to ask ...

Martin, We have the same problem in North east Surrey. I wrote to the Surrey Mirror (local rag) a few years ago. It is a fact that we are rapidly running out of holes in the ground to dump last years possessions. I spoke to the foreman at the local recycling depot in Earlswood. On a bank holiday the...

Tracey, Will try to catch you next week - saw your plug too late , but have the internet service playing now. Only Two Hours a week! - that's slightly less than R2's Mark Radcliffe (joke). Did you know that you have an electric car manufacturer in Hatch Beauchamp, Nr. Taunton and there's always Tink...

Cheezy & Co. I saw something similar on the 10 o'clock news. British Airways asking for a voluntary carbon surcharge on their transatlantic tickets of about £48, that would then be re-invested in the developing world to minimise their carbon emissions by an equal amount. Has the world gone ch...

Everybody likes to chat online, even though you can waste half your life doing it. :shock: Has anybody thought about a Chat Area for this forum? With Googletalk, Skype and all the rest it would even be possible to have video and voice conferencing. Online communication saves travelling, so that must...