Daily Tip: Make Solar Powered Tea

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Daily Tip: Make Solar Powered Tea

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Sun Tea is easily made - just get a large jar, fill with water, put in tea bags, place in the sun. It's an example of solar cooking, and is a way to make teas that don't require being cooked.

Air conditioned comfort cuts you off from the world

Air Head is an interesting article contrasting different responses to air conditioning, and one persons struggles with moral issues on energy use and modern comfort. The writer lives in New York, and received an offer from his in-laws (who live in Texas) for the money to buy an air conditioner. His response? He doesn't want it, even if it's free.

There's the moral type issue, namely air conditioners are a large energy cost which directly contributes to global warming. But, he says, that wasn't the real reason he's turning it down, the real reason is much more personal.

As he puts it: I grew up on the shores of Connecticut. To me, summer has always been a time of heat, the sun baking the paint on the bottom of old wood dinghies, small waves breaking, blackberry ice cream dripping down your forearm, and some lucky kid five years your senior fooling around with a kit-built remote control car.

In other words, living with heat is part of living. It's part of the cycle of life, it's one of the seasons of the year, and our bodies evolved over kerjillions of years to be able to handle this climactic condition.

And then, extrapolating on the idea, he goes on to say: Shutting out summer with an air conditioner is like ripping the second hand off life's mortal clock. .... hmm ...

I think this is a widespread part of modern society, this separation from nature. Modern cities have very little naturalness to them, and the mainstream media presents the gleaming metropolis as if it were the absolutest of sheer beauty, and marvelous beyond dreams. But, I ask you, where are the trees, the birds, snakes, field mice, and more? The typical city has none of these things, but aren't they part of natural life?

Air conditioning is an insidious comfort. You turn it on, and suddenly you don't want to leave it, and you begin to believe life is impossible without it. That idea traps you within the bubbles of air conditioning, keeping you from enjoying the natural world. And, yes, I'm speaking from personal experience of spending lots of time in air conditioned buildings.

There's one idea in this guys article I strongly disagree with. Living in Texas without air conditioning is probably impossible. Anyone who grew up there grew up with air conditioning, as sure as they grew up with refrigerators and other modern conveniences. In Texas, you grow up with AC the way you grow up with religion.

While I don't doubt that Texas has zillions of air conditioners, and that modern Texans probably feel that way about these gizmos, this is hardly the traditional way of life in Texas with hundreds of years behind it. Air conditioning is probably less than 100 years old, meaning this particular gizmo is barely an infant in terms of human history. Humans have been dealing with the heat for millenia, and we modern humans are ignoring the wisdom of those millenia of our ancestors, wisdom we could be using to avoid the global warming crisis.

In Texas I'm sure the ancestors used adobe or similar building techniques. While a modern person might not want to live in a plaster house, the main attribute of adobe is extreme insulation. There are many ways to achieve extreme insulation, and modern materials techniques have made it so we can get glass windows with any insulation factor you desire. It's possible to build a house, using modern techniques, with the same insulating capability of an adobe house, and with as many windows as you want.

Adobe buildings stay cool inside, even during the heat of the day. Without air conditioning.

Why aren't we doing that? Why are we ignoring the wisdom our ancestors brought us?

Evaporative Coolers, and making your own cool air

Last year there was a popular posting about making your own air conditioner. The idea was to run pipes through a bowl of cold water (perhaps with ice), and weave the pipes inside a normal house fan. Turn on the fan and it blows across the pipes exchanging heat and cold, cooling the air, and voila your house is cool. I started to try the idea myself, wasn't able to get it to work, and I even tried a different version with hanging a cloth in a bowl of water.

A similar idea is the swamp cooler, or evaporative cooler. This is something which does work, in certain climates, and is quite popular in desert areas. It's the same idea, evaporation of water cools air and you can harness that to cool a house.

I live in Silicon Valley, and have bought a low end evaporative cooler, and found that it works fairly well.

I want to go over the principles and resources available on the Internet.

Evaporative cooler (Wikipedia): Gives a good overview of the several types of evaporative coolers. They clearly say the system works best in dry climates, and only so-so in moderately dry climates.

Evaporative Coolers: Whole-house cooling in arid regions at a low first cost Has another in-depth survey of this cooling technique. An advantage they mention is the ability to cool without using refrigerants such as chlorofluorcarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), that can harm the ozone layer. They have another page on two stage evaporative coolers. In the first stage of a two-stage cooler, warm air is pre-cooled indirectly without adding humidity ... In the direct stage, the precooled air passes through a water-soaked pad and picks up humidity as it cools. Because the air supply to the second stage evaporator is pre-cooled, less humidity is added to the air

The Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Consumers Guide has another good overview of evaporative cooling. As does the Phoenix city government.

Home Energy Magazine has a more technical article, that includes a U.S. map showing the likely areas where evaporative cooling would be best. And there's another at lbl.gov.

Report: US Ethanol Production Will Cause Long-Term Rise in Crop Prices

A new report from the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University projects that ethanol demand will cause a long-term increase in crop prices. What's been growing in awareness is that the growing demand for Ethanol is causing a growing demand for Corn. In the U.S. anyway we equate Ethanol production with Corn, even though Corn is one of the most inefficient ways to generate Ethanol. A few months ago there were food riots in Mexico because the peasants could no longer afford to buy tortillas, because the price of corn has risen so high.

There are other ways to generate biofuels besides diverting food to create fuel. There is all sorts of agricultural wastes which can be processed, there are promising experiments with algae and other organisms, and there are specific crops that can be grown on marginal land and which are not normally food crops.

There are other ways than trying to do political gamesmanship. In the U.S. the corn lobby is powerful so politicians wishing to gain favor with that lobby will every so often throw some kind of corn subsidy their way. But if that doesn't solve any problem, then why do it?

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Report: US Ethanol Production Will Cause Long-Term Rise in Crop Prices

Solar Power at Half the Cost

Soliant Energy, Inc. has developed a solar panel system using a simple concentrator to increase the amount of light hitting the solar panel. This is said to increase the efficiency of the overall system.

The innovation here is called the 'heliotube.' It's a tube of glass that concentrates the sun's rays onto a very thin strip of silicon solar panels at the base of the tube. The tube is then connected to a frame in blocks, and the frame uses the power coming off the panel to tilt the tubes to track the sun. These panels use 88% less photovoltaic material, but are almost as efficient per square foot as traditional solar panels.

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Solar Power at Half the Cost

Soliant Energy, Inc.

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Soliant Energy, Inc.

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Designs and manufactures concentrating photovoltaic modules for commercial and later residential applications. Our goal is to dramatically reduce the price of solar electricity for consumers and enhance the performance of photovoltaic systems. We do this not by seeking to bring high-risk technologies to market, but by effectively engineering the solar technologies that are available today into a practical solution that allows consumers to begin saving money now.

We are a talented group of engineers, including a core team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and executives who are dedicated to delivering the full promise of solar energy.

Gravitational Vortex Power Plant is Safe for Fish

If you think hydroelectric power only comes in valley dominating sizes, think again. There are various kinds of small scale hydro-electric power systems. The typical such installation is a homeowner in the woods who has a permanent stream running across their land. If they can capture the water the right way, they can run it through a small generator and get some power.

This gravitational vortex thing is a similarly sized idea. But it's very high efficiency, does not create a danger to fish, and improves water quality by adding oxygen (aerating the water). Very interesting.

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Gravitational Vortex Power Plant is Safe for Fish