Salt-Cracking Biodiesel

I've just seen this in my searches but I don't know if I'm convinced. There are several companies that claim to be able to do this, here's one, but I wouldn't know if I would trust a diesel engine to this technology. Also, of course, there's the energy balance requirement, i.e. is it cheaper in terms of initial energy to produce several kilos of salt and then use an electric blender to crack the oil or will it turn out cheaper in energy terms to use the traditional KaOH method?

I've read that the magic crystals will absorb the ionic parts (like salts and alkalis) out of the fuel but that introduces another stage that needs energy to produce, being the crystals. (And if there's a way to re-use them, that too will cost energy.)

Plus, I wonder what the effect of pouring salty fuel into an engine? Since that can happen, if the absorbent crystals are spent or you don't do a good enough job of cleaning the fuel.

My money's on making biodiesel by whatever methods you find most useful, then washing it with water and evaporating the water out, preferably using solar energy. I still haven't had a chance to play with the technology yet but it's on my list, and then I'll try a variety of methods and keep you posted on the cleanest and most economically produced diesel. This will take a while but I will do it.

Subsistence Gardens

I have a few things on the go, for the high vege prices expected soon. Let's say - if you could grow some of your own veges with minimum hassle - would you? If so I may have an answer. And as long as you have a balcony or north-facing window, you too could be reducing your food bills.

I'll try and write up these instructions and get them online in the next few weeks, as I am experimenting as I go which always makes for slow going.

At the moment I'm making up a small frame to test how well it goes, and will try and keep it going through this winter as well. (As this should be able to produce vegetables all year around, otherwise we might as well shop at Woolies and pay top dollar for poor produce...)

Yes it will be Zen and no there will be no GroLites - you're welcome but the amount of speculation you'll put yourself up for is not worth the hassle... hehehe...

Where The Bloody Hell's Yer Head At?

I love a good solution to a water crisis, I really do. But this isn't it. Look, it was enough of a worry that we are looking at smaller and smaller dam water volumes every year, to the point where we may yet have to forego our great Suburban Icon, the Green Lawn. Politicians and spokespeople for the tourism and hospitality industries quite correctly point out that if we lose the Green City image and acquire a Brown City image, we will lose a significant amount of hospitality-related income. And I agree - that way lies a slow slide into the dustbowl. Less appealing city, less people. Less people, less rates and incomes. Less money, less resources to throw at the water crisis... Repeat until ghost town status is achieved...

So why is Mr Derry's plan not the answer then? After all he's right - the Kimberley has vast reserves of groundwater. Okay then let's examine the alternatives. I have a pretty green bias as most of you will know, and it will show in the following paragraphs.

My favourite plan(s):
Yarragadee aquifer / Collie dam / Desalination.
I recently had occasion to spend an evening at a BBQ with an engineer whop has been involved with establishing whether or not the Yarragadee aquifer would be viable and ecologically sound. His (totally off the record, totally honest - he had no idea I'd blog about it) summary is that the plan calls for 45GL of water to be drawn off the Yarragadee annually, and that this would reduce the amount of overflow from the Yarragadee from somewhere between 200GL and 340GL per annum to 155GL to 295GL - in other words, the aquifer would remain overfull at all times and continue to run off excwess water into the sea.

That kind of makes a hash of all the "ecologically unsound" protests which are being touted as the reason to refuse to do this. Combining this with Mr Derry's plan to blend saltier Collie water would produce a far cheaper source of water for the urban area. That's around 90GL extra water per year, at what turns out ot be the lowest cost, and the lowest impact on the environment. In combination with desalination plant, this can actually make the desal plant idea look good too.

Desal plants.
These are not desirable, not because of direct impact on the environment, but because of the energy bill. Energy bills have to be paid for with greenhouse gas emissions, unless someone can make solar/wind energy do the entire desalination process.

And the local impact? As measured in the fairly enclosed area of Cockburn Sound where our first desal plant has been running at 105% of nameplate capacity (around 155ML per day) for the last two or three months as a shakedown run: The plant returns saline water and the extracted salt back into the sea, and from there it disperses extremely rapidly. The extra salt was undetectable at any point 50m or more from the discharge pipe, that is, within 50m all that extra salt is redistributed by even the feeble currents in the Sound.

So if you combine blended water with desalination, you have three extra sources of water for Perth, the Collie Dam, Yarragadee, and desal water which will ensure that we have a chance of water supply continuing even if some mechanical failure strikes, it will rarely disable all three sources AND the existing dams.

Kimberley Pipeline:
The Kimberley has huge reserves it is true, but the point at which the water is to be taken up, but in reality it has not that much more overflow capacity than the Yarragadee aquifer. The same issues will apply there too - putting them a few thousand kilometres away from Perth doesn't make any difference to that. Yes there may be a few less people to be affected if anything goes wrong, but then where do you draw the line? How many people's votes does it take before you shy away from a plan? Because of course that's what it all boils down to...

But. With that said, we already have a prodigious pipeline carrying water, to Kalgoorlie. We know the technology of pipes works, and hey - will you look at that - we are actually one of the biggest iron ore resources in the world! Our politicians have for decades played vote-pandering with the idea of a smelter to produce iron locally. We don't have any such value-adding because everyone can find reasons not to start doing something productive. In truth, we could have a Government-subsidised smelter in the middle of the state near Karratha or someplace, and manufacture that iron into steel pipes, and then use those steel pipes to bring water down. Right past the plant, so that it can darw process water from the pipeline eventually, and because we're producing it here, the Kimberley Pipeline can suddenly become a cheap alternative.

Once in production, the pipeline will have the least environmental impact, and the dependence on Yarragadee and Collie water can be reduced, and in fact those pipelines can then carry water in the other directions if needed due to further climate drying.

The Derry Tanker Plan:
As I said, environmental footprint is my major concern. Building and operating a fleet of supertankers and coastal loading and unloading facilities is not an environmentally sustainable plan at all, I'm sorry. Come on! Several million tons of fuel oil burned every year just to push a tanker back and forth, and remember that one direction is totally unladen as you can't in all conscience carry anything else in a tanker meant to carry drinking water back up the coast, so that immediately wastes half the fuel, and means that the plan has generated two loads of pollution per tankerload of water we receive.

Building a supertanker costs hundreds of millions and well into the billions, especially since we would need to develop the tankers specifically for carrying potable water and making sure it stays potable all the way down the coast. You conceivably need at least two of them, and probably would need a fleet eventually. You need to set up a water loading and unloading facility and harbout for the tankers. In addition to the energy bill for hauling it and hauling the empty tanker back, you also have an energy bill to load the water, and another to unload it. And I realise Mr Derry is proposing to use oil supertankers but in all seriousness can you imagine the cost of just cleaning those tanks to make the drinking water safe, let alone re-lining them? Have you ever seen or smelled crude oil? Its main component is decomposed dinosaurs and trees, remember....

And there's maintenance. Ships are notoriously hard on maintenance costs, because there's a lot to go wrong. A pipeline, be it from the Yarragadee or the Kimberley, just has pumping stations along the way, and you can power those from wind and solar energy at each station, and if we do the clever thing and make the pipe locally, we have plenty of spares - eventually one could even build a redundant line to use while maintaining existing sections.

Conclusion:
I strongly urge every one of you who reads this to consider what we want. We don't want a quick fix, and we definitely don't want to create an environmental disaster. And right now, taking water from aquifers outside our immediate region may seem a radical thing to do, but increasing our consumption of fossil fuels is the best thing to do. There's no point in establishing a new water source if we're going to ignore the reasons why we have a water shortage in the first place, and exacerbate those very causes.

For those of you who question why an ecologically-minded person would countenance a plan to build a smelter - I am also aware of how much more dearly it costs us to mine the ore here, ship it overseas, then ship the finished product back. These things all have an energy cost as well, and it is an energy cost that's more than the cost of smelting and processing locally.

Lastly, I urge everyone who reads this article to start thinking not about the dollar cost of solutions, but the energy/pollution costs instead. Once you start, you'll automatically become more economical...

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Cos Its The Season To Make Olives

Want to make your own but not sure how? Seeing as it's the season when the olive trees are bearing loads of plump little darlings, here's the lowdown:

GREEN OLIVES: Avoid them, the flavour is nice but the lye solution processing is hardly worth it. Well, okay - if you must, here are some other people's methods. Personally, I will leave green olives to the experts. Here's another page of olive recipes.

BLACK OLIVES: Two ways to prepare them that are quick and easy, the first way is more trouble and results in olives with less of the very compounds we want for a Body Friendly diet, and involves spreading the olives on a fine mesh and sun-drying them until they get wrinkled and then proceeding as for normal black olives.

To make olives that you can eat without a serious stomach-ache or worse, you need to soak the bitter compounds out for a while. For fresh ripe olives, (yep they will be the ones that have turned black) you need to soak them in plenty of brine for about 10 to 12 days, and a bit shorter for the sundried ones. Up to 14 days is acceptable but remember you're also leaching out the good compounds along with the bitter ones so only as long as necessary.

I tend to put about half a litre's worth of olives with a litre of brine, or even more brine if I have a big container. If using lots of brine like that it's okay to change the brine every second day, if you use barely enough brine to cover the olives you will have to make and change to new brine daily. Your call. I set up Google Calendar to send me an SMS on the afternoons I need a brine change, makes it too easy. Also, I tend only to use a few kilos of olives and process them in multiple small batches like that because that way if I stuff one up I still have the others. Again, your call.

Okay making the brine. People will give you "x" "blah"spoons of salt per litre/cup/ewer whatever of water but that leads to some weird brines and uneven results. The idea isn't to make the olives adjust to a different salinity level each time you change the water, as that stresses the membranes and results in olives that feel like they're soft-boiled. Once you know the measurements that make YOUR brine, stick to them for that batch.

Popular Arab and Greek wisdom says that the most useful brine of all is just barely strong enough that a raw egg will float in it. And it's easy to get to that stage. Here's what you need:

• 1 fresh raw egg (The fresher the better as gas formation will make eggs float lighter as they age.)
• Several litres (depending on your situation - I will give the quantities that are relevant, and once you've made your brine once, you will know your measurements) of fresh and preferably filtered water.
• 2 kilos of rock salt (Don't use iodised salt it will taste horrible and discolour the olives.)
• Small saucepan and large jug/bowl to mix and test in.

Okay this is the easy bit. Put about half a litre to a litre of water into the saucepan and bring to boil. Take note of how much water you used. When it's close to boiling add about six to twelve tablespoons of rock salt to the water, again take note how many spoonfuls you put in.

If all the salt dissolves, add another tablespoonful of rock salt, keep doing this until the salt can't dissolve in the water any more. There you have what is known as saturated brine solution, it can't hold any more salt no matter what.

Let it cool until you can comfortably dip a finger in it. Now measure a litre of water into the mixing vessel, or whatever amount you've decided is enough to do your batch of olives. I tend to go a bit more than I need. Carefully put the egg into it. It will sink, which is what you want.

Start adding brine and stirring it in carefully, until the egg floats up. Add just enough fresh water to just cause the egg to sink again, very slowly it will descend. That's the brine you want. Take the egg out, rinse the brine off it, and put it back where you got it from...

If you noted that you used about half a litre of saturated brine to about a litre and a bit of fresh water, that's about the right strength, and all you have to do is reproduce that again for the next batch. I.e. if you used 12 tablespoons of salt in a litre of boiling water and then added only half of that to make the egg float, you know that from now on you only need six tablespoons of salt in half a litre of boiling water per batch.

Allow that brine to cool (as water that's too hot will also fade the colour and make the olives too soft) and add it to whatever container you used to brine the olives, and make sure the olives are all submerged. The brine will make them float like crazy, and you need to make sure they are all under brine.

It's for that reason that I use a washed-out plastic cordial or milk bottle to brine the olives, and make sure it's brimful of brine, as the narrow neck stops the olives rising up out of the brine. Also, it's a waterproof seal so once or twice a day I can turn the bottle upside down and back the right way again to make sure that if a stray olive did float out of the brine, it will end up somewhere lower in the pack afterwards.

For storing the olives once they've been leached, use a clean preferably sterilised jar with a good lid and big enough to fit the olives with a bit of space left over, then make a brine as for normal, then mixing that half and half with a vinegar you like, and bring enough salt/vinegar brine to boil as you'll need for the final jar. I add two cracked garlic cloves to the brine while boiling it, and make sure they end up in the jar. Make sure the salt/vinegar brine is cooled properly before putting into the jar, and if you like you can put a thin layer of olive oil over the water. But that just ends up looking bad if you're storing the olives in the fridge, so I tend not to do it.

In the fridge these should last until the next year's crop, but if anything develops that looks nasty - stop and throw them out... Otherwise, take out the olives you want to use, rinse in fresh water, and depending if you like the pickle or not, you may want to stand the olives you're about to use in fresh water for an hour and up to a day beforehand to take the strong salt and vinegar taste off.

More Energy Thoughts

Time to start laundry days again, and get rid of energy-wasting lights and replace them with low voltage CCFL and CFL lights. I keep harping on this subject, I know. But come on - a cheap solar installation of two panels and regulator/batteries coupled with low voltage lighting will reduce your house's energy use by anywhere between 10% and 35%. Just switching to CFL globes will reduce your energy use (and associated greenhouse gas emissions and pollution) by between 5% and 10%. And either way will help rebalance our climate and environment. [note 1]

I'm still also urging city commuters to get onto their Member of Parliament about legitimising the REVA and other all-electric cars, and let's also see if we can't get a few local solar businesses to put some money into designing a "solar carport charger" for such cars. Think about it - you get a reasonably cheap little car, you get a reasonably cheap little solar installation, and you get to save the estimated $2250 a year in fuel costs as well as saving the environment! [note 2]

Oh - on the subject of electric and hybrid cars - one more snippet you may be interested in knowing: A certain well-known hybrid car that is widely perceived as very green, and in fact Ms McTiernan drives one, has a little conundrum attached to it. Because the car is produced on a production line same as all the other cars produced by that manufacturer, the basic petrol engined car costs as much in greenhouse gases and emissions as any other car to produce. That very large polution load by itself would be enough to render the relatively small advantage of the car irrelevant.

But wait - there's more! Because the car has to have batteries and electronics and electric drive motors as well as the fossil fuel components, it in fact costs far more in pollution load to produce, than it will recover over the life of the car...

One possible solution is for car manufacturers to switch their plant to environmentally friendlier power sources, use less steel and more easily produced plastics, and to stop dicking around with fossil fuelled cars and start seriously developing electric-only, biodiesel, and electric/biodiesel hybrid cars. (Electric-only cars, while the electricity still has to be produced by a power plant somewhere, at least don't use another lot of dirty fossil fuel, and thus have a lower impact on pollution load than petrol hybrids. And biodiesel is a cleaner and more "now" energy, you extract it from biomass that got the energy from sunlight in the last year or two, so there's no million-year-old energy being dug up and put back into the atmosphere, and it also burns considerably cleaner than fossil fuels.)

NOTES:
1. I'm averaging between calculated power usage for houses which have 60W filament globes, an inefficient refrigerator, a tumble dryer, and in about 45% of cases some form of air conditioning, and houses that just have a basic refrigerator, and that and the lights form almost all the power usage. I'm basing this on observations of houses around Perth, as air conditioning is pretty easy to spot, and so are things like average affluence and therefore likelihood of having the latest 4 energy star fridge versus a new 52" TV, etc.

2. I am basing this on our usage in an average six cylinder sedan, and including only the trips within the city for work and shopping that an electric car would be used for. We spend another $1000 a year on country trips and longer trips. If we had a biodiesel hybrid electric instead, we might conceivably use about a quarter of the fuel, a tenth of the cost, and only produce about a quarter of the pollution load.

Empirical Pace Setter.

I think this guy was responsible for Australia's renewable energy policies, and probably our Industrial Relations laws as well.

The Diet Is Also For Athersclerosis.

As I describe in my natural diet book, The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook (and the namesake of this blog) a variety of slow cancers and illnesses such as atherosclerosis, urinary tract infections, and more, are due to cell inflammation.

Chemical treatments can reduce these inflammations, in fact here's the article on how anti inflammatory and anti oxidant chemicals appear to be beneficial for arterial plaques, reducing them and thus the associated angina and risk of heart failure.

This is also the case for many so-called slow cancers, cell inflammation first makes the cells dysplasic (i.e. adopting characteristics of cancerous cells) and finally that triggers cancerous changes in the cells. It's a very layman's description but it suffices - inflammatory disease of the cells leads to irritation, which leads to changes, usually not good changes.

In The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook I describe how natural anti inflammatory and anti oxidant compounds found in various foods can be used to halt, reduce, and even reverse the progress of cancer, plaque, and other illnesses. A lot of it has to do with interactions between these active compounds, i.e. if you're not aware of them, you may well be taking two foods which cancel out one another's beneficial effects. Similarly, there are some combinations which increase the beneficial effects of those active compounds by up to tenfold.

The book also shows you how to avoid the things which cause cell inflammation in the first place. The recipes are redacted to include the right foods in the right combinations, and better yet, the book shows you how to apply the principles to all other meals you might normally prepare, so that you really end up with very low impact on your lifestyle.

The whole diet was chosen for this minimal impact, which is certainly less than the impact of chemotherapy or surgical intervention. Due to all these reasons, the diet is one which can be followed at any time, and which will provide benefits to you at any stage of health. It's a set of good general guidelines to follow in general, and a specific diet that you can use immediately to reduce symptoms, reduce the illness, and possibly save yourself a stressful trip to surgery. And it's always good, as in the article linked to in the second paragraph, to read more and more confirmations of what I've been urging in the diet book all along.

Of course, I don't recommend that you just self-diagnose and just go for the diet for reasons of illness - I urge every one of you to consult your doctor and go for initial advice and regular checks on the progress of any illness. We have the technology to both diet AND take medical advice, and it's always best to play safe...

Carbon Myths and Carbon Truths

You read about "carbon offsetting" and perhaps you wonder if it's all rubbish. Well, there are some figures around and some facts around and some myths around - and a LOT of predators who will bend you over for carbon credit input dollars. Here's my take so far:

To clear your carbon debt for the year, some articles claim that you'd have to replace 111 lightbulbs with CFL bulbs. They say you'd have to switch to smaller hybrid cars for X years to clear the debt for one year, and so forth.

In reality, every light bulb you replace with a CFL or CCFL bulb is immediately reducing your carbon debt. If you put the petrol-guzzler in the back of the garage and the scooter and the Prius near the front, you are immediately reducing your carbon debt. If you set your air conditioning to two degrees warmer in summer and your heating to two degrees cooler in winter, the effect is immediate, you use less fuel and create less pollution. If you put water pressure reducing discs in your shower heads and take shorter showers, that is something you can do right now which takes effect right now.

"But," I hear you say, "that only reduces the carbon debt, I want to cancel it!"

Well, you can offset all you like by adding trees or other activities like that but the sad truth is that just by living you add to the debt, it's unavoidable. And you can plant a tree to offset your carbon debt now but it won't produce any benefit for a few years, and even then it is a bit of a gamble if it will balance your carbon debt or will be way behind the curve.

Also, the carbon debt you acquire is out there and then you add an input, but the unavoidable thing is that for some period oif time, your pollution load *is* added to the atmosphere for a certain period, it's like injecting yourself with snake venom and then a shot of antivenene later - the venom will have been there for some period and killed certain nerve and muscle cells and no amount of antivenene will repair that damage.

So cast a jaundiced eye on the companies that say they will repay your carbon debt because A) they need money to survive and B) they don't generally care about global warming beyond how many dollars they can extract from you and C) they will want more than just "a little" money for their version of "saving the world..."

I'm not saying that inputs are bad, I'm saying that you will need to look carefully at what methods you should use, whom you should trust - and in the meanwhile, reduce your debt now so that there will be less to balance later.

Meat To Please You

I've neglected diet tips for a while now, but last Saturday I spotted another one of those things that make you go hmmmm and it was in relation to the meat purchases. Here are a couple of observations:

First, I buy very little meat from a chainstore supermarket. They have all the tricks down pat, how much they can inject the meat with saline, how much they can irritate it to stay red, how much they can preserve it.

That's important to you for several reasons. First - "inject with saline?" Surely no self-respecting butcher would do that? Right. No self-respecting butcher would. But these days most butchers buy their sides of beef or even bulk cuts from a meat processor/abattoir. They have no such compunctions and they want your money so they will do that.

It's done for a number of reasons, first being that thanks to Heart Smart ticks, the market prefers leaner beef. So abattoirs would prefer to buy leaner cattle rather than buy fat cattle by the kilo and then throw part of the profits away in the fat. So the meat is less marbled and bacause fat equals flavour, the meat tastes more bland. (Yes it's true bbq steaks tasted so much better when you were a kidf because the meat WAS more flavoursome.) So saline raises the flavour of the meat, and ensures YOU go back to your butcher more often, and in turn the butcher goes bak to that processor more often.

Secondly saline is a preservative, and can allow the processor to store the meat longer before needing to sell it. That increases their bottom line because they can stockpile cheaper beef against a time when beef prices are up, and make a few cents a kilo on the deal. Which adds up to hundreds of dollars in some orders.

Lastly, as a fringe benefit to the meat processor, saline increases the weight if the meat, thus making another few hundred dollars per order when the processor sells saline solution at the price of beef or chicken...

And your supermarket is generally either a meat processor or a meat processor outlet, NOT a butcher. Heck, your butcher may not even be a butcher but just handle bulk cuts and turn then into mince and saleable sized cuts. And unless they can tell you where their meat comes from precisely, assume that there's a meat processor involved.

One way to tell with beef is to put some in the freezer in a plastic bag, freeze it, then thaw it again. Beef with a lot of saline will produce a puddle of very thin and pink watery blood, whereas unsalined beef will produce slightly watery red blood.

The other thing to watch for is lovely blood red beef. It has been treated with a chemical irritant which causes the redness. It's done with minced beef particularly, but watch out for it on the steaks and other cuts, too.

Why should you care? Hello! Irritant! This stuff irriates the meat into presenting inflamed red blood cells, and then you eat that and you're made of... ummm what are we made of again? Oh yes MEAT! and then we wonder why inflammation-based diseases are on the increase. It can make sensitive people ill, cause hyperactivity in some, and can cause a range of symptoms.

How can you tell? Some butchers spray the irritant into the mince mixture, but most just spray the top of the tray, and over the tops of the trays of steaks and so forth. You can tell because meat normally goes grey after sitting for a while. So if your butcher lifts a steak out of the tray and there is a grey steak behind it, the top steak has been sprayed. If the scooped out part of the mince is grey while the surface is pink, it's been sprayed. (It was this that I saw at my local butcher and I'll be asking them a few questions next time I see the owner there, some very hard questions . . . )

Ask for the grey steak or mince. It will taste the same but be better for you.

Last thought for you. Would you eat the stuff in your rubbish bin? Well, why eat the animals that have been fed on stuff like that all their lives. Trust me the Japanese know why they will pay $1000 for a kilo of grain and red wine fed beef. The flavour comes through.

As far as I know there is only one mark that guarantees that the cow or chicken or whatever has not been fed ground-up other animal carcasses, chemical waste from other manufacturing plant, and a ton of antibiotics and steroids. That is the 100% Organic label. If you value your health, that's what to go for.

Solar Incentive #1,022,323

Best reason yet to install a solar farm on the roof!

Are you thinking of buying a new car?

Read this first...

In this article, Sam Abuelsamid lays out the reasons we won't see electric cars anytime soon, and he gives it from the established carmakers' point of view. Too hard to retool, too many years from concept to factory floor, I have heard these whinges before somewhere. Now where could that be?

Oh yes, lightbulb manufacturers. For about the last ten years they have been selling small quantities of CFL light globes and large volumes of inefficient incandescent light globes, because while they tacitly admit in their advertising how much more energy efficient and ecologiccally sound the CFLs are, they have more invested in the old production equipment and haven't squeezed the last dollar of value from the incandescent light globe yet, and to Hell with the enviromment hey?

We've heard the same things from carmakers for decades. A load of crap of course, they have so much invested in fossil fuel vehicles that they just plain won't stop before global weather change has tipped past the no return point - and then they'll be right there saying their loyal customers gave them no mandate to change technology and it's all our fault for buying FF vehicles.

The world won't go with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a bunch of greedy manufacturers all busily blaming everyone else except themselves for it. On the Last Day, there will be some advertising guy with a respirator putting up a billboard that says "XXXX autos, we made clean cars before the others ever did! So buy XXXX..."

Can I give you my readers a quick clue? The quickest way to force car manufacturers to re-evaluate their positions is to not buy the bloody things. Make your current car last for another year or two, and then buy an electric or hybrid so that your FF car can sit in the garage for maybe another two years doing very few miles, and believe me after just one year of silent treatment they would get the bloody idea! By the time you'd be ready for a new major manufacturer's car, you'd actually have some choice.

Are you in the market for a new car then? Well just imagine if you and 19,000,000 other Australians all don't buy a new vehicle for a year. All it would cost you is one more year in your old car. Go on, do it for our climate!

Another WA Source for Alternative Energy Products

I've added The Solar Shop to the address list, they seem to have a comprehensive range of alternative power products. Please support my efforts and let them know that you found them through my zencookbook site, then they may be tempted to sponsor me in my research! hehehe nothing like networking...

I've looked at the site, and the O'Connor shop apparently will be opening as a shopfront very soon now, so stay tuned. Goodies on the site include solar regulators and electric scooters, wind turbines, and - grid-connect aware hardware. That is the payoff, that you can sell your surplus back to the electric utility and actually recoup a portion of the installation cost.

The Solar Shop look like they've installed a few decent sized projects and you might do a lot worse here in Perth for your alternative power installation. And once I develop one of my ideas in particular a bit more and start producing it, you'll find that with my device installed your installation will develop even more power than quoted, and I'm betting that The Solar Shop will be one of the cutting edge who will start providing this as a standard part of their future installations, allowing you to make a smaller installation do more. This really is a killer idea, and it can be added to most installations at any stage, including installations that have been up for years.

I'm also still looking for anyone wishing to contribute to the development effort, if you know anyone who might be able to assist in any way please direct them to this page.

REVA Revs And - Creeps Away?

The Solar Shop (who are opening a shop here in Perth in March if their website holds the latest news) apparently brought a REVA electric car into Adelaide. I LOVE the idea of electric cars - after all, what better partnering than our long sunshine (and solar electricity!) filled days, a solar battery charger, and an electric vehicle?

So it's disappointing to see the stupid political pissing contests that this one little car is provoking. Come on you stupid bastards we are all going to die together if the climate destabilises, and no-one will give a pink and purple spotted shit whether you stuck to the right side or the wrong side!

I promise to vote for whoever legislates and has brough into Law that these vehicles are glorified motor scooters and thus subject to no more rigorous testing than my VMoto scooter was. Also, the 200W limit on electric scooters is totally laughable - are you afraid people are going to perform terrifying feats of annihilation on anything more powerful?

Please - if you want the law changed leave a comment, I'll bring them all to the attention of my local MP because this kind of bullshit is what's holding back the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and we can't afford for this to get much worse.

Trailerpark Girl

Check out Trailerpark Girl - very relevant info.

Addresses Section Being Added

Newly added, for your convenience, a blog which serves as a database of addresses of businesses and companies, most of them in Perth but there will be more as other cities chime in. For now, go take a look at the new section, and what a typical address card looks like.

If you know of any business, person, or company which should be registered in the list, or if you're such a body yourself, please leave a comment for me and I'll investigate and make it so...

Theory and Practice

I think every physics or chem teacher (hi Mr De Boni, Hi Mr Vujovich) has told the old saw about the only difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there should be no difference between theory and practice . . .

Well, I've found another saw that's destined to become as well used - when hunting for capitalists and sponsors for projects in renewable clean energy, one comes across a lot of renewable. clean, energy sites. You immediately notice that they are either writing about it a lot, or doing something about it. I've visited dozens of sites that write about it...

I will be collecting a list in the sidebar soon, of companies offering solar and wind and alternative energy sources and equipment, and I'll be putting them into two categories, "THEY SAY" and "THEY DO". . . With maybe a third category "DON'T" . . .

Upshot is, one person so far has gotten back to me. Maybe it's early days yet but I will give it a week or two before I start making my little lists . . . Don't get me wrong I won't list anyone that doesn't supply either equipment or expertise in alternative energy, just that you'll know which ones are eager to help...

F. U Know The Rest

Sunday Times, page 19+:

Making Water Out Of Thin Air.

I had this on the drawing board too - I have several designs there for a veryu similar gadget. Now that is what I hate, having an idea, no resources to develop it, and then watching someone else put the idea out there.

In this case I had a similar idea but using solar cells, the turbine concept is brilliant but still only functions on "windmill time" i.e. during the heat of a windstill day nothing happens. I will now make efforts to contact the people concerned and give them my ideas to add to their design. Who knows, we may have an answer to the water shortage between us.

I REALLY need someone to sponsor me!

Need Business Angel!

I have some sound ideas for generating and using alternative sources of energy which are hopefully cleaner and more renewable. These are all ideas which a lone gun working in the back shed can't hope to attain, but I am out there and trying. Every time I have a bit of spare cash it goes into materials and equipment to try and approximate what I'm trying to do. I am looking for a company or government department that will help me develop these ideas and commercialising them.

Most of these ideas consist of tweaking existing technology or using it in less conventional ways to achieve better efficiencies, get more out of less. It's still too much for one person working in bursts and starts between contracts to cope with. I'm contacting as many Government departments and businesses as I can find, but so far that's only been a handful. As I collect businesses I will add their details to the sidebar here, so that you can find them more easily. I hope they recognise my assistance with some form of assistance with my R&D, if you know any business which may be relevant (alternative energy, survivalist, small farm, biodiesel, etc) and which would like me to place their details here, or if you know any business or government department that can help, please either let me know in comments or put them in touch with me via this blog or any other means.

I am really keen to see some of these ideas hit the shelves as they WILL make a difference to the current global warming / weather disturbance / greenhouse gas situation.

So let me start by saying that this problem is political as well as technological, it's our governments' faults as much as it is our own. It's the fault of greedy multinational companies every bit as much as it's our fault for desiring the things those multinationals place within our reach.

Make no mistake about it, every time you buy a fast food meal in a disposable container set, YOU are the one directly responsible for the pollution and greenhouse gas that it cost to make those containers and process that food. When you bought your car, YOU caused the pollution of extracting the iron ore, shipping it to the smelter's, smelting, turning into steel, forming into car parts. YOU produced your share of the demand which caused the plastics, airbags, electrics, and electronics to be developed and manufactured in quantity.

Up until now it's been enough to buy your car, drive it through the drive-through, and shrug your shoulders and say "well, they caused the pollution, I am just buying the result." They can't be blamed any more, because they wouldn't bother if YOU didn't create the demand.
That's why I will not leave it to "them" to fix this mess, and that's why I will make every effort to improve on their technology, clean up their wastage, and make US responsible for the recovery of the world.

Now why is it the Government's fault then? I can safely say that much of what a manufacturer gets away with, is because the Government hasn't kept its eye on the ball. The key phrase is "gets away with" - because we know that it's morally wrong to pollute, it's ecologically unforgivable and by the laws of most lands it's illegal - but enforcement is the key, and most Governments have a history of turning a blind eye if there is tariff or excise involved.

For the rest of this article I'll use the example of the humble light bulb. A filament bulb turns perhaps 6% of the energy it consumes into light you can use. That means that if you put in a 100W globe, which consumes one unit of electricity every ten hours it's turned on, you are basking in about 6W of light. The other 94W of power is going out as heat, and then you are going to use airconditioning to suck that heat outside your house, but it will take about an extra 20W of power to achieve that. So you are sitting reading in 6W of light but have cost 120W in energy to do it...

Enter the Compact Fluorescent Lamp or CFL. It is 30% to 50% efficient, meaning that for you to sit in 6W of light you only need an 18W CFL at the worst, for the same amount of light. 12W of that will be wasted as heat, and your A/C will use maybe 3W more power to shift that outside. Your light has just cost you 21W of power instead of 120W.

Your Govenrment gets a tariff on the electricity consumed in your region. It much prefers you to use 120W than to use 21W. The Government furthermore gets excise on the coal or fuel oil used to generate that power. So they have less incentive than you or I to do anything about light bulbs, despite the fact that lighting takes up about 20% of the power consumption on average.

Why Not Leave It To Them?
So it's not enough to "leave it to them" because them is we, they be us, and greed is apparently better than altruism. We are all going to be very uncomfortable together, irrespective of whether we were users, polluters, or environmental angels. Our Government here in Australia is just recognising that Global Warming is a "nationwide concern" and they are falling way short of the mark, it is a "global universal concern." The Amazonian tribespeople are going to get every bit as dead as the worst industrial ecology destroying greedy bastard.

We need to all do something. And in order for that to happen, the bar has to come down slightly. It's all well and good to say we're all responsible and do something fer chrissakes but if what we can do costs us our income for the next five years then that's just not do-able...
I believe that leaving the technology to recover from a global crisis like this in the hands of the very same people who have already proven their capacity to ignore all human, ecological, and moral concerns in pursuit of an abstract concept of money, is sheer stupidity. Sorry, but once I've been bent over and shafted a few times I won't just bend over at your gentle touch again...

My concern is to make existing alternative energy technology as efficient as possible, to allow us to do more with less, to allow us to recover from the blow which (much as I hate to hackney) capitalistic greed has caused to fall.

Back to the humble light bulb... It's now available in such an array of sizes and shapes and finishes and materials, each apparently designed to give you the "ultimate experience." How saddeningly true that's turning out to be... How bad can it be that they have to continuously "improve" their light bulb? Light is light after all, and the alternative we face if things run their present course is going back to candles and oil lamps so why are they milking this inefficient and ancient technology?

Well, for one thing, they would have to retool. That costs money. Mind you, the original light bulb making machine is probably still in operation and hasn't cost a cent in maintenance in the last 80 years, but that all improves the company's bottom line. Setting up new production lines, that is on the wrong side of the ledger.

Then too, the manufacturers who are making CFLs are also still making filament bulbs. By making CFLs they are admitting how ecologically and economically unsound their filament bulbs are, but they won't stop making them because... YOU still buy them...

Why Should We Have To Change?
There are a number of things each homeowner or landlord can do right now to bring the consumption of energy down. These are outlined in this document at another point. For now, rest assured that we can already do a lot better than we have been doing.

For example, how many of you still buy a cheap filament globe at the shop? Shame on you! You are supporting a bunch of companies who are too cheap-ass to retool their factories, because the equipment they have had for decades is still churning out a profit for them.

You are probably justifying it by saying that filament bulbs give out a "nice natural" light but I'll tell you what, the alternative at this stage is bloody candles so you'd better bloody well rethink that hadn't you?

Some people justify that by saying that CFLs are too expensive. All I can say is that in ten years you will use about six globes in your house regularly for around three hours a day apiece, buy around 30 replacement filament globes at an average cost of $2 each, i.e. $60. Your obsession with "natural" light will also have cost you at least 6570KW/hrs of power, a dollar cost of between $900 and $2000 approximately, depending what your utility company charges you.

That is all money thrown away, because for the same amount of light using CFL lamps you might have had to buy 8 replacement CFLs at a cost averaging $5 each, or $40 for the ten years. They would have consumed 1100KW/hrs, or between $160 and $390 in the same time. One household can immediately save about $100 a year, and - more importantly - 5.5KW/hrs of electricity, just by switching to CFL lighting.

Our lifestyle will need to change voluntarily, while we still have some control - or else it will change involuntarily, in directions we may not be so happy with...

Why Mess With The Technology?
Last point for this article - why, indeed, mess with the technology? Aside from the sheer stupidity of leaving it to light bulb companies to lead a change (a change which will result in them selling less product, of a kind that they stand to profit less on because the retooling and infrastructure costs have to be recovered from the sales, and selling no more of the staple of their incomes,) there is also the reason that the technology is not tweaked. It is not yet as good as it could be, it is not yet at the point where we can affordably install it and profit by doing so.

For instance, I've been using the example of the filament bulb versus the CFL on this page - now there's another twist to the story...

If we wanted to reduce our dependence on coal or other fossil fuel based power, we could (for example) put the load on our Government to install operate and maintain alternative energy plant. This would be at a cost we'd all bear anyway in increased rates, taxes, and tariffs, and with typical Government efficiency it would cost several times (and possibly several orders of magnitude) more than it is worth. Remember, the Government doesn't make any fuel excise on wind power generators or solar plant. It's in their interests to steer you to hydrogen power that you can be billed for per litre, than it is for them to reward you for putting solar power cells on your roof.

But that's precisely my point. If you want to do your bit, you can voluntarily do it - right now - by placing a small solar panel farm on your roof and you can even contribute to the grid by feeding your excess power back into it. You can earn money from your excess power, or you can be altruistic and let it flow back for free when you have an excess, thus reducing the load on existing coal and oil fired power stations. If one or two houses return 5KW/hrs a day back to the grid, that's a drop in the ocean to a grid which talks in megawatt/hrs. But if 10,000 houses each return 5KW/hrs, that's 50,000,000W/hrs, and additionally, it means those 10,000 houses have stopped feeding from the grid and have thus saved another 100,000,000W/hrs that they would otherwise have consumed...

So - if existing technology can put a solar farm on your roof for $15,000, then that repays itself in ten to fifteen years for you personally, at today's electricity prices. And as electricity prices now climb due to the higher cost of green power generation, that ROI period will shorten to seven to ten years, then five to seven years... Worth thinking about it now, isn't it?

And - if by tweaking the technology and making it more efficient, you could make a $10,000 solar farm do the same as the $15,000 solar farm, that would be even better, yes?

And THAT is why tweaking the technology is important - once you have the best number of kilowatts for your dollar, your solar installation will recoup it's costs quicker and you'll be in the black much sooner.

Two things I'd better mention here - one is that existing solar cell technology is poorly adaptable to current building practices - either building practices will have to change, or solar cells will. I prefer both, but just making solar cell technology more suitable to use in building will do as an immediate achievable goal.

And the other is that twist to the filament/CFL example which winds its way through this summary. After all, it wouldn't be fair to just leave you hanging on this would it?
Okay - so you've gone to all the trouble of putting in a solar cell installation and you have kilowatts of power. But it's all at 12 volts (like your car) or 24 volts. In order to use your 240V appliances and equipment, you have to have a thing called an inverter, which converts the 12V to 240V. So where's the problem?

Well, anytime you convert anything, there are losses. So it is with the inverter - if you hang a 1000W refrigerator off the inverter, it will draw 1400W from your solar installation, and that is a large loss that you have there. Even when just a small amount is drawn off the inverter, it will still have power needs of its own, so for a 100W load, the inverter will still draw 300W from the solar installation.

Now think about lighting. You power all your lights off 240V so you will run 108W worth of CFL lights off that hulking inverter which is designed to be able to cope with your refrigerator (which by the way is the largest electricity consumer in the average household, except for the A/C unit which is usually worse) and draw that overhead of power whether you are running one light or the whole houseful plus the refrigerator.

A far better thing to do is to replace your house's lights with low voltage lights and power them directly from the solar installation. No losses, no inefficiencies, less wasting of the solar instalklation you invested in. When (if!) you ever need to run from mains electricity again, a simple switchmode power supply would power your lighting quite easily if it was also CFL.
And there's the rub - CFLs are currently only made for mains voltages. Yep, even though they are inherently a low voltage light, they are made for 240V or 110V. And there's a little brother to the CFL - meet the CCFL or Cold Cathode Fluorescent Light. One company makes a 12V CCFL bulb styled like a miniature CFL. One.

So there is a market for making various voltages of CFL and CCFL based bulbs. Even better, would be to make the prohibitively expensive and hard to dispose of electronics and the tube part, as separate items. You could easily run all your house on CCFLs and instead of using 2000W/hrs, use only 300W/hrs. Did you know that if you changed all your house lights over to CCFLs you could plug them into a laptop power supply and use that to run ALL of them?

And that is why I'm asking for your help in developing these ideas and many more. We desperately need better ways to do things - and while I have got the ideas, I'm sitting here unable to develop them. If you know of a business angel who would take this on, please let me know because there are several very commercialisable ideas that I have

Try this, it works for me

Do you have acid reflux? The doctor has put you on Pariet or Nexium and you've been on it a few years now? Getting nausea, diarrhoea, and acid despite the meds?

Apparently the PPI (proton pump inhibitor) drugs like Pariet and Nexium are very good at their job, but your stomach is too. Don't forget the stomach thinks it's under orders from higher up to prodcue more acid for digesting food. As efficient as any bunch of chemicals, your stomach adapts to the inhibiting effect - somehow - and you get acid, that old familiar burning burning not-quite-love, and if you let this go on for any length of time then the next thing is disgusting, and nausea follows soon afterwards, your PPI-blasted stomach will find it hard to hold down a glass of cold water let alone a flavoursome or fatty meal.

(Because lipids - fats - are a marker our bodies consider to be "flavour" in food, so tastier foods are generally higher in fats. And the wrong kinds of fats will do horrible things to you. Go read my book for info on this.)

At that stage your GP will often advise you to cut the PPIs back to once every two days or something like that. It may help you but if it doesn't then you're pretty much up Shit Creek (in more ways than one) without a paddle or a roll of paper.

Take heart, because I've found a paradoxical answer!

The right thing to do is to sip vinegar. Weird as it sounds, when the dodgy tummy sets in, I have some very special vinegar mixes that work for me every time. I have a couple because someof them are EXCELLENT salad dressings while others are for sipping down between squirming and gagging - at first, later you get used to them.

I have no idea why but I discovered this with a Turkish brand of pickled chilli. For years I'd been using pickled banana peppers to settle a hangover stomach, or bacterial gut infection - and it had always worked. But when my stomach started playing bigtime, I found that chilli at that time was not ideal. The banana peppers don't work for the acid reflux PPI miseries - but the tiny green turkish peppers did. I snacked on a few with every meal when I was feeling poorly in the internals, and they worked.

I left the peppers out and drank the pickle liquid. Very salty, medium vinegary, - and lo! - my ticky tummy settled right down.

SO the other night I made a favourite side dish of mine - red onion in salt and rice vinegar brine. I found that the onion I could take or leave, but my body was craving the salt and vinegar, badly.

So a series of experiements later and I have several recipes, they all work reaonably the same, but you may find a favourite, or at least a less detested one...

My favourite:
12/cup red wine vinegar 1/2 cup coconut vinegar, 1/2 cup red wine, 1 or two tsp salt. Stir together, leave to dissolve some more, stir again, refrigerate, sip about two to five tablespoons when the stomach starts squirming.

Another:
1/2 cup apple cider vingegar, 1/2 cup white or rice vingear, 1 to 3 tsp salt. Stir together, leave to dissolve some more, stir again, refrigerate, sip about two to five tablespoons when the stomach starts squirming.

Rice:
1/2 cup rice vinegar 1/2 cup coconut vinegar, 1 or two tsp salt. Stir together, leave to dissolve some more, stir again, refrigerate, sip about two to five tablespoons when the stomach starts squirming.

It sounds crap but it's anything but. I've spent this last week switching on and off my nausea and acid attacks, I don't know for sur ewhy this works but it does. I don't suggest swigging on this stuff all day as it can harden your liver better than alcohol does, in general I take a few tablespooons an hour or so before the times I know I'm going to get it.

Try it, you have nothing to lose but the need for medication. In my case I now take a Nexium maybe two times a week or less, and I'm eating really well. I take a sipped swig after a meal, and the worst effects are gone, I take another one the next day and it's like I never had a problem.

Check This Site!

Darren who commented on a previous post also had this link to another energy activism site. Please go there and look around...