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Good Afternoon Guys,

After seeing a few of your posts about a solar dehydrator, I thought I would send you a photo of mine I built with a friend!

- 100% re-used wood from old palets
- Metal sheet painted black to absorb the heat and warm the air is the back panel of a boiler
- The shelves are from old fridges, the railings they sit on found in a skip.
- Chrome handles from an old ikea cupboard someone had thrown in a skip


In fact the only thing that was bought was the paint!
Can't wait for some decent sun to give it its first test drive.
For more info, check out: http://greenerliving-bath.blogspot.com/



Good luck to all of you building your own. If you want to see my friend and I building ours, be sure to watch the "It's not easy being green" special, tonight (wednesday 20th june), 8pm, BBC2

Duncan

duncang wrote:If you want to see my friend and I building ours, be sure to watch the "It's not easy being green" special, tonight (wednesday 20th june), 8pm, BBC2

I happened to see some of that program tonight - the solar dehydrator looked a lot more plausible than the solar kettle thing you had going there (Nev will tell you how to make a better go of that). Did your tomatoes dry well?

And I gotta ask - that wind turbine on the camp site - was it really that noisy, or was that sound 'enhanced' for the sake of comic effect?

Nope Muddy that's wind turbines for you!.

We have two bloody git huge ones at work....still on their sides for over a year now, killing the grass.(I think they cos £250K each ...second hand!)

Why I hear you cry!.

Because about 15 years ago the company dug a small pond for the sports and social fishing club, next to the on site nature reserve.

And lo and behold we got great crested newts in it . But the Environment agency wont let you put up a wind turbine within 500 m's of a great crested newt collony due to the noise they make.Upsets them 'parently

P.S nice slot on the program Graham, however being a lottie holder m'sel I couldn't help wonder if your time'd better spent diggin' to get a nice surplus of crops, prior to building the drier!
Still I always like the program. An' if you an said mate fancy coming up North, I 've got a few projects I could do help with, which never get done, mainly due to diggin' at lottie!

those are a bit rowdy! - you can silence them a lot with some minor blade alterations, or invest in a set of "low noise" blades!
I would say, there ARE incredibly quiet turbines out there, one of those turbines without tweaked blades are not a good advert for windnoise! (I know, I've got an identical one!)

My Granny's old clothes horse. I've just estimated that over my protracted student days (6 years) it saved me £975. Since then I've lived in a flat so it's continued to save electricity (and thus £'s) by freeing me from the tumble dryer. I love the creaky old thing with its 20 year old clingfilm on the runners.

Oh, and my trusty bycycle.

We have a saw horse to which the chain saw clamps and is then used as a chop saw. It saves hours of work and saves your back from the constant cutting of logs on the ground. It also make the chain saw safe as it cannt get to you anymore.

The saw also runs for less time saving fuel and money.

guy

Cheezy wrote: And lo and behold we got great crested newts in it

Sounds like a girl I used to go out with.........

Nev

I know I've already had my 5 but can I add another one, please?

I was cleaning my bathroom the other day and thinking that the shower head needed descaling. It's not that bad but probably needs doing sometime soon. That was when I realised I hadn't done for at least a year

Now Swindon is in a very hard water area. It's so bad that water comes out the taps pure brilliant white. All my friends use filter jugs and have to replace the filters each week. I haven't needed to do that since I fitted an H2flow from ecoflow http://www.ecomagnets.com/h2flow.htm

I was really sceptical at first as I couldn't see how it would work but work it does. It doesn't need any electricity or salt and it just sits there doing its thing and saving my kettle, my washing machine and my hair!

Zoe

Interesting topic!

Been racking my head trying to think of some that haven't been mentioned yet... I've read about so many interesting things that have been created - some even here in SA, but unfortunately, I live in a tiny little matchbox in urban suburbia, and therefore haven't tried many of them myself yet... maybe one day when I grow up!!!
Here's my top 5 list - interestingly (and unfortunately, sadly!) the average South African thinks of 'Eco-Friendly' as buying organic veg from Woollies, and have no idea of what's happening right under their noses !!! Here goes!

Eco Bricks - 'collapsible' cloth (...of some sort ) bricks. The idea is that instead of having to cart away all the soil that gets dug up for the foundation (using loads of fossil fuels!), you fill the bags with them - instant brick!!! They're soundproof, waterproof and fire-resistant. After plastering, you can't tell the difference - and you save substantially on manpower! I think they're a 'Proudly SA' product manufactured by a company called Eco Beams.
Aquaponics - a pure and simple marriage of aquaponics and hydroponics. There's a guy in Durban who has mastered and simplified this great way of feeding loads of people with tilapia and fresh organic veg using minimal land space - in so doing, he recycles practically the same water continuously through the veg strata and fish tanks - all the nutrients needed for the veg come from the fish tanks!
Mohamed's Egyptian rooftop patio/gardens! You gotta love that concept !!!
That guy who recently figured out how to harness more solar power from a tiny little panel by using mirrors - although, I can't help but wonder if all these mirrors reflecting at different angles aren't somehow going to wreak an eco disaster on their own... imagine, 'blinded' pilots and birds! I'm hoping we don't hear in a few years time that we're scorching more holes in the ozone with all these mirrors - so my vote on this one isn't quite 100% yet !
Water recycling units - there's a company here called Water Rhapsody who's created incredible (considering the pleb I am, I think they're incredible!) water recycling units. I'm sure they're not like a major new thing - but I'm seriously impressed with their unit that recycles all the used water in the household and uses it to flush the toilet - I really think that's cool!
...and last, but definitely not least (yes, I know this is #6, but it has to be mentioned!) this new trend in some countries to utilise methane gas for cooking - that's it's utilisation in it's simplest form, but considering how hectic methane is for our atmosphere, I think it's seriously awesome! We used to have a similar system at our previous home where we used methane to braai (barbecue) with during summer - it worked like a bomb!!!
If I had my way (please, somebody, vote for me at the next election - I need political power !!!) I would enforce a ruling that all homes being bought/sold in the 21st century would have to be installed with solar panels, water-recycling units and methane friendly methods of energy utilisation!!! ...and that's just for starters!
AH! The perfect world !

So yeah, I know my 'top 5 (...6)' sound incredibly complicated in comparison to what's been mentioned - but the beauty is that's it's 'modern technology' in its most user-friendly eco-format... and it's all do-able right now! It makes me delerious with the possibilities if we could force the rest of the world to think like us !!!

COOL!

1. My Mooncup ('cos it's great)
2. My Bycycle ('cos I don't know how to drive)
3. My clothes horse ('cos I estimate it's saves me thousands of pounds in laundy fees)
4. The internet (where would I be without 'Ish')
5. Jamsy my teddy ('cos I love him)

1. Mooncup (wish I'd found this when I was 12!..)
2. Solar powered torch (really bright and lasts for hours!!!)
3. SquirtECO (Ecover stuff smells lovely!)
4. Internet...(seriously how did they ever live before the internet was born??)
5. Green & Black's chocolate!!!!!! (gotta be one of the YUMMY-est choccies in the world!!)

also, not really marketed as an "eco" product but it saves loads of electricity plugging in amplifiers and sounds sooo pretty... my acoustic guitars! :D

Hello. Just to add my two-pennuth:

1. White vinegar, use it as the base for all my cleaning products plus a million uses besides (or 101, maybe?)
2. Mooncup AND Wee Notions towels - couldn't use Mooncup during my miscarriages so used the washable towels instead and they are just fab. Weird thing to get excited about but that's the Sish mind for you
3. Yoghurt maker. Three children can get through gallons of the stuff, and making it this way it contains no sugar and is available (more or less) on demand, oh and it's live of course. I know it can be done with a thermos but this really works for us and so far has saved us a fortune.
4. Bread maker. Similar reasons to pp's, you can control what goes in it and again can't run out. I buy sacks of flour from the wholefood warehouse, economical and we have useful sacks to reuse when I eventually empty them. For that and yog maker we obviously avoid all the packaging which i'm particularly tickled about.
5. Clothes horses/overhead drying rack/washing lines etc, brilliant :)

*solar power system
*12 volts fridge (especially designed for solar power systems)
*windmills
*internet (indeed)
*uhm.. there must be more... damn...

oh, of course there's more! How could I forget?

*the EV! (Electrical Vehicle)

that one really could make an enormous difference.

(for anyone who has not seen it yet, 'Who killed the Electric Car' is a documentary very much worth your time i.m.h.o.)